Functional and stylistic types of special vocabulary in scientific and technical texts (based on English and German aviation vocabulary)

The article is devoted to the consideration of the typology of special vocabulary in the modern language of technology and the study of the proportion of functional and stylistic types of special lexical units (terms, nomens, pragmonyms, terminoids, professionalisms) in scientific and technical texts of various genres. To study the ratio of the types of special vocabulary, popular scientific articles from aviation electronic journals, individual chapters of Ph.D. theses as well as fragments of aviation textbooks in English and German were analyzed. The total volume of the studied texts is 180, 000 characters (30,000 characters for each genre in one language). Based on this material, 2,426 English special lexical units and 2,465 German special lexical units were identified and distributed into separate categories. As a result of the study, it was found that the proportion of types of special vocabulary in scientific and technical texts of the corresponding genres in English and German is approximately the same. In all analyzed popular science, scientific and educational texts, the proportion of terms considerably prevails. The largest number of terms is used in educational texts. In popular science texts, nomens are used more often than in texts of other genres. Terminoids and professionalisms are very rarely used in the studied texts.

The specificity of Russian media neoderivatives reflecting social realia

The involvement of media speech in the society activities determines the relevance of studying the media text components in the extralinguistic aspect. The social conditionality of media neoderivatives contributes to their research in linguopragmatic and socio-cultural aspects. The purpose of the article is to identify the specifics of Russian neoderivatives reflecting current social realities. The research material include lexical and word-formation innovations in the texts of printed and electronic media of the beginning of the 21st century. In the course of the study, the methods of structural and semantic analysis of neoderivatives, word-formation analysis, content analysis, contextual analysis, descriptive and classification methods were used. As a result of the research, thematic groups of neoderivatives reflecting current Russian realities were identified (neoderivatives on pandemic topics; neoderivatives reflecting digital reality, Internet realities, business realities, etc.); the actual word-formation means and methods of creating the considered neoderivatives are determined (the usual methods of suffixation, prefixation, prefixoidation, addition of agglutinative type; the non-usual method of contamination, as well as the non-usual methods of creating polycode neoderivatives, in particular hyphenation, parenthesis, quotation, the use of ideograms and numbers, font and color selections); as a result of contextual analysis of media texts, the main functions of neoderivatives are characterized (nominative, expressive-evaluative, ludic). The conducted research is characterized by the novelty of the speech and language material and identifies the specifics of the socio-cultural and linguocognitive perception of reality in the modern language consciousness of the representatives of Russian society. The results of the research contribute to the solution of practical problems of journalism.

Consonant Change in Cognates Shared by Indonesian and Palembang Malay

This article describes the phenomena of sound changes, i.e., changes of single segmental sound of consonants, found in cognates shared by Indonesian and Palembang Malay. A list containing 2,535 cognates shared by Indonesian and Palembang Malay becomes the corpus. Since Indonesian is a modern language derived from Standard Malay, it becomes the reference language in the efforts of descriptions. Consonant strengthening, fortition, consonant weakening, lenition, and glottalization become the phenomena found in the consonant changes. Various syllabic structures in which the consonants distributed are also described. The differences of productivity of certain consonant-changes compared to others are found. The productivity shows that, compared to Indonesian, the occurrences of weaker consonants lenis consonants are more productive in Palembang Malay. AbstrakArtikel ini membahas gejala penggantian bunyi, yakni penggantian bunyi-segmental konsonan tunggal, yang didapati dalam kognat atau kata seasal yang dimiliki bersama oleh bahasa Indonesia dan bahasa Melayu Palembang. Sebuah daftar yang memuat 2.535 kognat dalam bahasa Indonesia dan bahasa Melayu Palembang menjadi korpus. Karena merupakan bahasa modern yang terderivasi dari bahasa Melayu Baku, bahasa Indonesia menjadi bahasa acuan dalam pembahasan. Penguatan konsonan, fortisi, pelemahan konsonan, lenisi, dan glotalisasi menjadi gejala yang didapati dalam penggantian konsonan. Struktur suku kata yang di dalamnya konsonan tersebut di atas terdistribusi juga dibahas. Didapati perbedaan produktivitas gejala penggantian konsonan tertentu dibandingkan dengan gejala yang lain. Produktivitas itu menunjukkan bahwa jika dibandingkan dengan bahasa Indonesia, kehadiran konsonan lemah atau konsonan lenis lebih produktif dalam bahasa Melayu Palembang.

Scientific Foundations of the Chuvash Language Textbook for 10-11 Grades

The purpose of the article is to familiarize the reader with the content, structure and scientific foundations of the presentation of topics in the manuscript of the future textbook on the Chuvash language for students of grades 10-11 of schools with their native language of instruction. The research material is the manuscript of the textbook "Chuvash language" for grades 10-11 of schools with a native (Chuvash) language of instruction. The comparative-analytical method of research is used in the work. The manuscript was prepared in accordance with the program approved by the resolution of the Federal Educational and Methodological Association (Protocol No. 3/20 of September 17, 2020). This program is aimed at repeating and fixing the material of grades 5-9. In this regard, the manuscript includes relevant material for this purpose. The new topic is mainly the topic of "Language and speech economy". All topics are presented in accordance with the achievements of modern language theory. The author, as well as professor I.A. Andreev, believes that the study of the topic "Phraseology" is inappropriate. Studying a word out of connection with syntax does not reveal the essence of the use of certain affixes. For example, syntactic affixes can take both individual words and phrases. Therefore, morphemics and morphology should be presented in school taking into account syntax.

Likeness-making and the evolution of cognition

Paleontological evidence suggests that human artefacts with intentional markings might have originated already in the Lower Paleolithic, up to 500.000 years ago and well before the advent of ‘behavioural modernity’. These markings apparently did not serve instrumental, tool-like functions, nor do they appear to be forms of figurative art. Instead, they display abstract geometric patterns that potentially testify to an emerging ability of symbol use. In a variation on Ian Hacking’s speculative account of the possible role of “likeness-making” in the evolution of human cognition and language, this essay explores the central role that the embodied processes of making and the collective practices of using such artefacts might have played in early human cognitive evolution. Two paradigmatic findings of Lower Paleolithic artefacts are discussed as tentative evidence of likenesses acting as material scaffolds in the emergence of symbolic reference-making. They might provide the link between basic abilities of mimesis and imitation and the development of modern language and thought.

“Flemish Legends” by Charles de Coster. The Peculiarities of the Traslations into Dutch

Introduction. Charles de Coster's “Flemish Legends” were published in 1858 in French. With the growth of the national consciousness of the Flemings, this book, having particular artistic and cultural meaning, had to be translated, anyhow, into the Flemish variant of Dutch. There have been several translations, which differ significantly. To understand the specifics and success of a particular translation, it is necessary to analyze the cultural-linguistic and socio-political circumstances of its creation, to study the personalities of the translators, their artistic biographies, and also to assess the impact of the culture-forming factors.Methodology and sources. The research methodology is based on the descriptive method. At that we take into account a lot of linguistic, historical, social and cultural variables. As a study material two translations of “Flemish Legends” into Dutch (1917 and 1998) are chosen, as well as several sources describing the history of Belgium after 1830. For collating the translations the comparative method is used, taking into account the lexical, grammatical and stylistic features of the analyzed texts.Results and discussion. Charles De Coster, being a bilingual, preferred the French language. This can be explained by his desire to make folklore an asset of the upper social class, mainly bilinguals and francophones, upon these legends being already known among the Flemings. In addition, for the proper resonance, it was more profitable to publish the book in French. It can also be assumed that the legends were collected throughout Flanders; therefore, there were significant dialectal differences and problems for choosing a unified version of the Flemish language. To convey the medieval flavor, Charles de Coster used a deliberately archaized language. At the beginning of the 20th century S. Streuvels created a specific translation, more reminiscent of calque from French and preserving the features of the original text. At the end of the 20th century, W. Spillebeen translated the French text into a modern language, which was not the Belgian Dutch, but the standard Dutch.Conclusion. The translations discussed are quite different. S. Streuvels retained the style and structure of the original text, so his work was difficult for perception even by his contemporaries, and today the translation has become practically unreadable. W. Spillebeen tried to translate the legends into a modern language, bringing the structural components in line with the modern norm and preserving only the most necessary archaisms. Nevertheless, the text of the “Flemish legends” in the Belgian Dutch does not exist: they are written either in dialects, or in the “Frenchified” Dutch, or in the standard Dutch.

The Rediscovery Hypothesis: Language Models Need to Meet Linguistics

There is an ongoing debate in the NLP community whether modern language models contain linguistic knowledge, recovered through so-called probes. In this paper, we study whether linguistic knowledge is a necessary condition for the good performance of modern language models, which we call the rediscovery hypothesis. In the first place, we show that language models that are significantly compressed but perform well on their pretraining objectives retain good scores when probed for linguistic structures. This result supports the rediscovery hypothesis and leads to the second contribution of our paper: an information-theoretic framework that relates language modeling objectives with linguistic information. This framework also provides a metric to measure the impact of linguistic information on the word prediction task. We reinforce our analytical results with various experiments, both on synthetic and on real NLP tasks in English.

Semantica ed etimologia dell’armeno hnjan ‘vasca in cui si preme l’uva’

The article deals with the Armenian substantive hnjan, which in the modern language denotes the ‘wine-press’ or a ‘rural hut located on the fields’. An exam of its use in the texts of classical age where it is attested (the translation of the Bible and the History of Armenians of Agathangelos) allows to recognize an original meaning of ‘hole dug for the squeezing and the fermentation of the grapes’. The etymology proposed connects the word with Sanskrit paṅka- ‘mud, mire, dirt, clay; ointment; moral impurity’, and a German cognate represented by Old High German fūhti, fūht, Anglo-Saxon fūht ‘damp, moist’, the German source of the Romance loanwords Italian, fango, French fange, Catalan fanc ‘mud, mire’.