Dating correlated microlayers in oxalate accretions from rock art shelters: New archives of paleoenvironments and human activity

Oxalate-rich mineral accretions, often found in rock shelters around the world, offer important opportunities for radiocarbon dating of associated rock art. Here, sample characterization and chemical pretreatment techniques are used to characterize the accretions, prescreen for evidence of open-system behavior, and address potential contamination. The results provide stratigraphically consistent sequences of radiocarbon dates in millimeter-scale laminated accretions, demonstrating their reliability for dating rock art, particularly symbolic markings commonly engraved into these relatively soft deposits. The age sequences are also consistent with correlations between distinctive patterns in the layer sequences visible in shelters up to 90 km apart in the Kimberley region of northwestern Australia, suggesting their synchronized formation is not entirely shelter specific but broadly controlled by variations in regional environmental conditions. Consequently, these accretions also offer potential as paleoenvironmental archives, with radiocarbon dating of layers in nine accretions indicating four, approximately synchronous growth intervals covering the past 43 ka.

PROSODY OF NEGATIVE MODALITY IN TRANSLATION

The work is devoted to the research of the ways that reflect the prosody characteristics of the English utterances containing negative semantics in the Ukrainian oral translation. The difficulty of achieving this goal when treating prosody is in its multifunctionallity and multicomponential nature. Prosody is the main means of signifying the communicative types of sentences and the pragmaticsof the communicative process. Correlation of prosody with pragmatic andsemantic components of communication is carried out through the prism of the emotional sphere of human speech behavior. The analysis of the experimental material provided an opportunity to find both distinctive and typologically common for Ukrainian and English characteristics of negative modality at the level of negative connotative meanings prosody, such as of objections, condemnation, reproach, and specific correlates of negative modality in either of the two languages under analysis. Typologically similar characteristics include the following: the register of melody, the range of dynamic parameter andtimbre components of prosody, the state of the vocal cords and larynx and their combinations. The mechanism of realization of prosody of negative connotations is typologically similar in two languages: the most frequent combinations of interaction of prosody parameters in English and Ukrainian languages are the increase in intensity and the synchronous growth of melody – 24,7% and 25,3%, respectively, in the amount of the experimental phrases. The functional significance of the temporal component at the segmental level in the English language and the absence of such a characteristic in the Ukrainian language expands the possibility of applying the time parameter at the suprasegmental level in the Ukrainian language. Knowledge of the laws of prosodic variability in two languages helps to interpret correctly and produce the semantics of a foreign language in translation.