Arabic Lexical Phrases

The Arabic traditional grammar as well as Chomsky’s mainstream theory may not be able to provide a good analysis of some fixed Arabic phrases. The challenge of such data directly stems from the fact that the general syntactic rules assumed by the two opposing theories cannot explain the syntactic and the semantic aspects of the fixed Arabic data. I argue that the Construction Grammar provides an adequate account that does not rely on syntactic structure alone, as assumed by the mainstream theory or the Arabic traditional grammar, but rather it links phonological, syntactic, and semantic information together in one basic construction by means of some correspondence rules. The Arabic data proves that there is a strong need for a linguistic theory that takes into consideration all data of different range of productivity.

LEXICAL AND SEMANTIC SYSTEM OF THE UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE IN CURRENT DYNAMIC USAGE

The article analyses the latest changes in the lexical-semantic system of the Ukrainian language within clearly defined period – the year of 2020. It has been proved that the appearance of a new lexeme is associated with some intra- and extra-lingual factors. These lexical units are the carriers of information about what is happening in the society, and how the representatives of various social strata are involved in a particular event. It has been established that the most used words in the defined are connected with medicine; the dominant position occupies such nouns as covid, coronavirus. The article underlines that the spread of the COVID-19 in Ukraine influenced the formation of the phraseological system, e.g. folk poetic rhymes, which are usually variants of widely used paremic constructions. The motivational basis of lexical coinages has been analysed. This refers to the lexical units based on the surname of the current president; the dynamics of this process has been traced for the period 2004–2020. The author determined the mechanism of coining new lexemes based on the surnames of the prominent Ukrainian politicians close to President. The article clarifies the onomasiological basis of new lexical units of proprietary and non-proprietary origins of previously coined and newly coined or renamed political forces. An important way to expand the lexicon is to change the meaning of words. This is due to the fact that the lexical unit enters the innovative linguistic sphere determined by extra-lingual factors, when it acquires a new meaning or becomes a creative resource for other lexemes. The nouns vodomor (water starving) and Velur (the name of the restaurant notorious for breaking quarantine restrictions) have been carefully analysed, the constitutive possibilities of the latter, which relate to its lexical-semantic, syntagmatic nature, have been clarified. Exceptional attention is paid to the precedent expression “what is the difference” in the focus of its semantization (acquisition of ambiguity), grammaticalization (existence in the role of noun-adjective phrase or its functional equivalent – a complex occasional word), phraseological, semantic, syntax, axiology (attributive, object, subjective functions), word-forming possibilities (becoming on its basis a way of composing and suffixing nouns “kakaiaraznik” (What-is-the-differenter), “kakayaraznitstvo” (What-is-the-differentment)). The subject of the study was also the innovative structures that were formed on the model of lexical phrases with social meaning which are on the stage of forming.

Lexical phrases with anthroponymic components in medical terminology

This article analyzes anthroponymic component language chunks in medical terminology. The research focuses on a large group of medical fixed phrases containing anthroponyms in their component composition. The main attention is paid to structural, semantic and etymological analysis. The basic lexical sets of anthroponymic component language chunks have been distinguished. The main sources and models of lexical phrases used in the formation of medical terms have been defined. The collected material allows us to state that the words syndrome, symptom and disease, being the structural core of medical phraseological units, are often distinguished in the phraseological units analyzed. The dependent component in a noun phrase is represented by an anthroponym. As a rule, this is the name of the scientist who made important discoveries in the medical field. Much attention is paid to the proper name semantics as part of a phraseological unit. Based on the etymological analysis of the material under study, the classification of medical phraseological units with a proper name component has been developed. The analysis showed that the origin of phraseological units with a proper name is based on real personalities, scientists, ancient and biblical mythology, literary works associated with the names of characters. Phraseological combinations associated with national and cultural specifics are of outstanding interest for linguistic analysis. The study showed that a proper name is a special linguistic sign that involves ethnic culture. The article discusses lexical chunks formed by metaphorical transfer in detail. The metaphorical transfer of names in the terminological system is noticed regularly, which is due to the constant development of medical terms’ new names and meanings formation through the scientific rethinking of common words.

Lexical Phrases: An Essential Brain-Adaptive Requisite for Second Language Acquisition

In the incessant attempts to overcome second language (L2) acquisition difficulties and to improve second language proficiency, most of the proposed methodological approaches which address this issue place high value on individual vocabulary and grammar of a second language and fall short of integrating lexical phrases/multi-unit expressions into the teaching approaches. This, if does not exacerbate acquisition difficulties, does not by any means improve it. On this view, the ubiquitous interest in lexical phrases gave rise to their investigation in language acquisition. This paper reviews the importance of lexical phrases in language acquisition by providing further insight into their peripheral role in first language and second language acquisition alike. Also, Evidence from neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic studies are provided to account for lexical phrases representation and brain-adaptability. Further, this paper suggests the implementation of lexical phrases, in general, and the Lexical Approach, in particular, in second language acquisition. Finally, further pedagogical implications as well as self-paced ones are proposed.

Gebruiksaspecten van het uitroeppartikel wat in het Nederlands en Fries

Both Dutch and (West) Frisian make use of the exclamative particle wat (‘how’), that adds an element of surprise about a high degree of something to the semantics of the sentence. In this paper I will first show the similarities between the use of the particle in the two languages. I will demonstrate that, in Dutch, its use is largely confined to constructions that are semantically scalable, whereas in Frisian this restriction is far less strict. I will explain the difference by showing that Dutch wat is a syntactic amplifier of lexical phrases, whereas Frisian wat has developed into a pragmatic amplifier of the core predicate. I will try to account for that difference by showing how homophonous words absent in Dutch are likely to have influenced the use of Frisian wat, and how Dutch prosody strengthens the connection between wat and the amplified lexical phrase, whereas Frisian prosody weakens it. Finally, I will show that the system described as ‘Frisian’ is occasionally found in varieties of Dutch too

"Aesthetics of Contrast in Al-Rafei's book Wahi Al-Qalam"

Mustafa Sadiq Al-Rafei is one of the renaissance writers and a famous essay writer who defends his poor people with his essays. This paper (Systematic Contradiction in Al-Rafei Essays) is a study of Al-Rafei’s book Wahi Al-Qalam which consists of three chapters with more than a thousand pages. It demonstrates his ingenuity of using systematic contradiction along with his artistic ability in adapting intellectual heritage and language in his essays, as well as showing a vast knowledge in his mother language and his people’s heritage which make him to be creative rhetorically through adding some aesthetics and rhythm to his texts for grabbing reader’s attention and making them aware of the author’s intentions. This study consists of an introduction and three chapters, while the introduction is about arrangement and contradiction. The first chapter studies contrast (Complementary and multiple antonym) and negative statements. Second chapter is dealing with contradiction in which two or more combined words are opposite to another two or combined more words while the individual words are opposite too, and it demonstrates both aspects, complementary and contextual. The third chapter studies another type which scientists and pioneers have not tried, and that can be called textual opposites that go beyond lexical, phrases, or clauses to focus on text to text contradiction throughout its conflicts and contradiction of characters. And finally, the study is provided with an abstract in both Kurdish and English languages along with the reference list.

Statistics based Evaluation of English Multi-Word Expressions

The linguistic and statistical information extraction is an important aspect of text processing. The extraction of Multi Word Expression (MWEs) plays a key role in text processing as these are used to find correct meaning of a text phrase. MWEs are the lexical phrases consisting of two or more words conveying some different meaning together other than its constituent words. The linguistics in MWEs extraction is mainly related to the text information including the Part of Speech (POS) tags, grammar rules, related literature, and so on. It is important to extract the correct MWEs for a particular language as there exists variety and veracity in languages. The selection of MWEs are based on the statistical analysis of the MWEs extraction process. In the proposed work, the MWEs extraction is done for English dataset. Along with the existing statistical measures, i.e. Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI), Dice Coefficient (DC) and Modified Dice Coefficient (MDC), the additional measures, Lexical Fixedness (LF), Syntactic Fixedness (SF) and Relevance Measure (RM) are also been evaluated. The results are compared with the other existing approaches applied for English MWEs. The results shows that the proposed measures LF, SF and RM are more significant than existing measures to find the best statistics for the MWEs extraction process. The process model is generic in nature and not adhered to a particular language. It can also be applied for other languages by selecting POS tags for that particular language.

The Syntax of Mainland Scandinavian

The term Mainland Scandinavian covers the North Germanic languages spoken in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and parts of Finland. There is a continuum of mutually intelligible standard languages, regional varieties, and dialects stretching from southern Jutland to Eastern Finland. Linguistically, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are thus to be considered one language. Most syntactic patterns and features are shared among the national and regional varieties, but there are also interesting differences. This book presents the main syntactic structures of this language, with the focus on the standard languages, but some widespread or typologically interesting non-standard phenomena are included. This is mainly a descriptive work, with a minimum of technical formalities and theoretical discussion. The theoretical background and descriptive framework is generative grammar in its current version, known as ‘minimalism’. The minimalist architecture partly determines the ‘bottom-up’ organization of the book, with separate chapters or subchapters dealing with each of the phrase types, starting with the lexical phrases. After an introductory chapter, chapter 2 deals with the noun phrase and the determiner phrase. Chapters 3–5 deal with lexical phrase types with adjectives, prepositions. and verbs as their heads. Chapter 6 deals with the TP domain, and chapter 7 with the CP domain. The last three chapters deal with more specific topics, subordination, anaphor binding, and conjunction, and ellipsis.

THE WEB AS CORPUS AND ONLINE CORPORA FOR LEGAL TRANSLATIONS

Legal language is hallmarked by a pedantic and user-unfriendly jargon whose constructs are all but intuitive, not to mention the legal system specificity which makes it unique in every country. Second language (L2) learners or scholars, hence, may find it difficult to understand the language of the law; whereas translators may consider legal lexical phrases and patterns rather intricate to deal with. The literature claims that a practical way to deepen language knowledge can be found in the Web considered as corpus and in online corpora. This paper is aimed at exploring whether commercial search engines, Web concordancers and online specialised corpora can tackle the issues revolving around legal language. In particular, it will investigate whether Google advanced search and the Leeds Web concordancer can be used to meet the requirements of legal language learners, scholars and translators. Furthermore, it will address legal language queries (and results) in an online specialised corpus: the COCA. This paper will provide instances of the soundness of the above-mentioned online resources, especially when used jointly as cross-analysis tools. The shortcomings of one can, in fact, be compensated for by the other(s).