LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL SPECIFICITY OF EPISTOLARY ADDRESS (ON THE MATERIAL OF “LETTERS TO OLES GONCHAR” COMPILED BY M. STEPANENKO)

The article is devoted to the study of lexical and grammatical features of epistolary addresses (on the material of “Letters to Oles Honchar” compiled by M. Stepanenko). The address is interpreted as one of the manifestations of human communication needs which serves to establish and maintain speech contact, as well as to express the emotional and evaluative characteristics of the interlocutor. An epistolary address is a word or phrase by which the author of a letter nominates his addressee in the text of a written message to establish contact with him. We processed 895 letters to Oles Honchar, in which 1185 addresses in Ukrainian and about 200 units in other languages had been recorded. Lexical features of addresses represent their belonging to the following semantic groups: addresses-anthroponyms (name, patronymic and surname); traditional etiquette forms (пан, товариш); general addresses (names of persons by generic or gender feature; names of persons by kinship in the indirect sense; names of persons by friendly relations); special addresses (names by profession, type of activity, position, academic titles); occasional addresses. Most often, senders address Oles Honchar by patronymic or by name, using it in full or in short form, and sometimes by surname. The lexical and semantic content of addresses depends on the intention of the speaker, his politeness, knowledge of language etiquette and the peculiarities of the relationship with the writer. In order to strengthen the address, attributive distributors expressed by honorific and emotional-evaluative adjectives аre used. Honorific adjectives (шановний, високошановний, найшанованіший, глибокошановний, вельмишановний, високоповажний, etc.) convey a polite attitude and perform etiquette function. Emotional-evaluative adjectives (дорогий, славний, щирий, незабутній, рідний, любий, коханий, etc.) denote sincerity, friendliness, friendly affection and perform an evaluative function. We reveal a significant proportion of constructions in which adjectives of both groups are used. This causes a change in the tonality of the communicative situation and reduces interpersonal distance. Possessive pronouns мій, наш, which have partially lost the meaning of possessiveness, strengthen the intimacy, cordiality and sincerity of the relationship. Addresses in Russian, Belarusian, Polish and English are described. It is found that the grammatical differentiation of addresses directly depends on lexical and grammatical features (proper or common names and substantivized parts of speech) and morphological means of their expression. It is confirmed that the typical morphological form of addresses is the vocative case of the noun, as well as the homonymous nominative case in letters written during the Soviet period. Violations of morphological norms (different case forms of lexical phrase components, a non-normative form Олесе) and orthographic mistakes in spelling of the writer’s patronymic are revealed. The non-normative form of the nominative case as a means of expressing the address in letters dated 1990–1995 is substantiated. The results of the research show that the most frequent lexeme is Олесю Терентійовичу. Forms Олесь Терентійович and Олесю are less used. Quantitative indicators of addressing forms are summarized in the table. We see the prospect of further scientific research in deepening other vectors of analysis of addresses, in particular in the study of their functional and stylistic potential.

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

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.

Construction grammars

Constructions are the central unit of grammatical analysis in cognitive linguistics. In formal linguistics ‘construction’ referred to forms that were projected from lexical items rather than from an autonomous syntax. Thus, an expression, ‘I danced the night away’ requires an intransitive verb in a transitive construction provided ‘away’ is present. In cognitive linguistics, constructions comprise any grouping of words or morphemes that in combination possess meanings that cannot be predicted from the parts in isolation. This meaning belongs to the construction itself and is not necessarily dependent upon the presence of a given item of lexis. If this definition is accepted by second language teachers the fundamental interest is that language learning is about learning lexis, constructions, and the text types by which constructions are combined. This article first distills a concept of a construction useful to a pedagogical grammar and considers the relationship of this concept of form to better known language content ‘packets’ such as the structure and the lexical phrase. Last, it discusses how a CL concept of construction does and does not propose different pedagogical methods.

Why Norwegian Right-Dislocated Phrases are not Afterthoughts

A right-dislocated phrase in Norwegian is either a full lexical phrase of the canonical sort, which is richer in semantic content than its coreferential intraclausal partner, or it is a pronoun which adds no semantic content that was not already present in the coreferential intraclausal phrase. A frequently occurring subcategory of right dislocation in Norwegian involves a lexical phrasein situand a coreferential dislocated pronoun. While an afterthought analysis of pronominal right-dislocated items may easily be dismissed offhand, an afterthought account of the canonical type of Norwegian right dislocation may seem initially plausible. However, on the basis of prosodic, syntactic and pragmatic criteria it is argued that there is no viable afterthought analysis of any subtype of right dislocation in Norwegian.