Interspeaker variation in the negated perfective aspect of Zamboanga Chavacano

Framed from four perspectives, (1) Schütze & Curbach (2019), grammaticality judgment and linguistic methodology; (2) Mcwhorter’s (2011), description of the complexity of creoles as flourishing over time from an original state; (3) Steinkruger (2013), explanation of negated sentences in the perfective aspect; and (4) Lee (2005), delineation of native speakers of a language, this research paper looked into the combination of the negator nohay and the perfective aspect markers ya and yan (ya man) in the sentence. A negated sentence with a perfective aspect is a structure that seems to be accepted by some native speakers of Chavacano (or Chabacano) but rejected by others. In the literature, only Steinkruger (2013), describes the permissibility of the forenamed combination in the syntactic structure of Chavacano. It was hypothesized that such a combination is acceptable in Chavacano and that there is an interspeaker variation pertinent to its acceptability. To confirm these hypotheses, data were collected via grammaticality judgment from 105 native Chavacano speakers and another set of data were collected via interview from 10 native speakers of Chavacano for corroborative purposes.

Book Review

The significance of Patterson's work Understanding Metaphor Through Corpora: A Case Study of Metaphors in Nineteenth Century Writing is that only through corpus linguistics have we been able to apply real empirical evidence to our arguments of what metaphor is. By demonstrating that metaphor is supposed to be approached from a linguistic perspective along with a psycholinguistic one, Patterson succeeds in drawing readers' attention to the efficacy and the benefits of combining corpus linguistic methodology with the theory of lexical priming. Thus, the volume is an essential reader for students and researchers in corpus linguistics, metaphor studies, lexicography, semantics, and pragmatics.

The event semantics of conjuncts in ‘The Sun Also Rises’

The present paper explores the semantics of Hemingway’s ‘plain style’ in The Sun Also Rises by combining corpus linguistic methodology with event semantics theory. The focus of the study is on how the narrator of the novel segments experienced situations in terms of semantic events. Corpus linguistic analysis shows that the ‘plain style’ of the narrative section of the novel is realized by means of coordinated clauses and that the narrator’s event segmentation is associated with a small set of preferred lexical items. These results are interpreted in terms of event semantics to show that preferred lexical items are indicative of event types typical of the narrative section. The semantic analysis of relations between coordinated clauses indicates that these relations are not simply about the juxtaposition of disjoined events. Finally, the study demonstrates that an approach combining corpus linguistic methodology with insights from event semantics can offer new understanding of the propositional meaning of literary texts, and the way narrators encode experienced situations.

Analyzing the Concept “Team of Host Country” in German, English, and Russian: a Contrastive Study of Expressive Means in Media Reports on the 2019 Ice Hockey World Championship

This paper aims to describe linguistic units expressing the concept team of host country in German, English, and Russian ice hockey language in relation to syntagmatic types and the associative series these units are based on. The research rests on Saussure’s notion of linguistic units, which should be included in a particular syntagmatic and associative class. The study uses corpus linguistic methodology to extract and analyze respective linguistic units from German, English, and Russian comparable sub-corpora comprising utterances from different media reports devoted to the same sporting event. The authors follow a structuralist approach and discover syntagmatic types, including constant and variable elements, and generalizing regularities in the composition of particular syntagmas. Moreover, the authors build associative series serving as bases for different syntagmatic types and indicating semantic opposition of certain linguistic units. The research also establishes various paradigms reflecting relations between the elements within linguistic units and demonstrating the interaction of syntagmatic and associative elements in the production of the means of expression. From the contrastive perspective, the authors compare linguistic units from different languages and focus on similarities they have in relation to the composition of associative series reflecting the speaker’s range of choices of verbalizations. The data was collected from articles published on web pages of German (sportschau.de, spiegel.de), English (bbc.com, ctvnews.ca), and Russian (tass.ru, rg. ru) mass media.

In search of cognitive and linguistic methodology for discourse studies

This work is devoted to the study of theoretical and methodological problems of modern discourse open for discussion. Being an object of interdisciplinary interests, discourse studies profess various methodological principles and theoretical categories. Taking into account the positions of different humanities using the discourse category, the authors of the article consider the methodological primary basis of discourse-analysis to be the identification of communicative-cognitive correlation of a literary text’s speech meaning and discourse forming concepts as the basis of author’s and reader’s thought code. The category “discursive activity” introduced and interpreted by the authors correlates with linguistic activity: the four-element model of cognition and communication. It is proved that discursive activity is built not on the traditional three “whales”, but four. A communicative event is projected by: 1) object realities; 2) sensual perception of realities in the form of objective and previously stored in memory phonetic representations; 3) a discursive model of the future (supposed) text, which is constructed by ideal phenomena — concepts; 4) such ideal units as “internal words”. This allows for the interpretation of discourse as a schematic means of mentally constructing a communicative situation in the aggregate of its verbal/non-verbal elements. The developed discourse analysis in the work is based on the interpretation of a system of concepts, which are a cognitive substrate of a discursive situation and serve as the pre-text model of the event experienced by communicants as a real fact. An adequate interpretation of semantic relations between keywords and basic concepts is important in the developed cognitive-linguistic methodology of discourse analysis. The contextual interpretation method and discourse analysis were used in the work.

Valerijus Čekmonas: kalbų kontaktai ir sociolingvistika. Sudarė Laima Kalėdienė. Vilnius: Lietuvių kalbos institutas, 2017. 1110 p. ISBN 978-609-411-201-0.

The book under review is dedicated to the work of an outstanding linguist Prof. Valerijus Čekmonas (1937–2004). The purpose of compiling this publication was to reveal an original methodo­logy for studying the interaction of the Baltic and Slavic languages developed by Čekmonas, who was the first in the history of linguistics to consistently substanti­ate explanations of concrete linguistic phenomena not only using diachronic, but also synchronic data by applying a diachronic re­search programme he developed. Alongside the methodology for interpreting diachronic facts, Čekmonas created a methodology for selection, grouping and stor­age of synchronic facts – to be called a socio-linguistic methodology – which doubled his scientific merits. The first part of the book includes twenty five the most significant articles of V. Čekmonas on the interaction of the Lithuanian, Belarusian and Polish lan­guages. Some articles were drawn up together with co-authors, this perfectly reflects Čekmonas’ ambition to focus on solving the problem in the joint work of co-workers and to force them to take responsibility for the continuation of the work. In the second part of the book V. Čekmonas’ School is presented, there are twelve articles prepared of his followers and colleagues.

Concept of “Cultural Identity” of Komi-Permyak Student Bilingual Personality in the Focus of Linguistic Methodology

The attention is paid to the concept of ‘bilingual personality’ in relation to national Russian bilingual in the article. The concept of ‘cultural identity’ of Komi-Permyak student bilingual personality in conditions of higher pedagogical education is specified. Foundations for Komi-Permyak student bilingual cultural identity defining are determined in the system of ethno- and social coordinates and its results are described. The aim of the research is to concretize the concept of ‘bilingual personality’ of a Komi-Permyak student. Indicators of his cultural identity in the system of ethno- and socio-coordinates are defined. This is the basis for modeling the teaching and forming the personality of the future teacher of the Russian language at the university from the perspective of modern approaches developed in linguistic and methodical teaching of the Russian language in the context of national-Russian bilingualism. The methods of the research are cultural identity of a Komi-Permyak student defining based on the included observation, questioning, interviewing of future teachers of the Russian language in conditions of higher pedagogical education, method of the results scaling in the process of statistical data processing. The results of the research indicate that bilingual personality cultural identity defining of a KomiPermyak student reveals his identification peculiarities, determines how he is integrated in the Russian culture, how harmonious the Russian language is for his communication, that undoubtedly should be taken into account in teaching. Future teacher forming on the basis of his cultural identity is determined by the goals and objectives of preparing for training students in bilingual and bicultural Komi-PermyakRussian environment. This undoubtedly requires organization of work in line with modern linguistic and methodological approaches, cognitive orientation strengthening in the development of the Russian language as science. Komi-Permyak bilingual communicative results forming in speech professional communication in Russian is impossible without cognitive processes development.

AUGUST AHLQVIST’S “CULTURAL WORDS”: EXCERPTS ON THE HISTORY OF FINNO-UGRIC LANGUAGE STUDY DURING THE 1860S-1880S

Karl August Engelbrekt Ahlqvist (literary pseudonym A. Oksanen) was a Finnish scholar, philologist and patriot who worked hard to create the Finnish standard language. The authors of the paper turn to some milestone facts from A. Ahlqvist’s academic biography. His meetings with some outstanding scholars, scientific expeditions to the kindred Finno-Ugric peoples, gathering of the unique field data as well as his educational activity were among those events. So-called “cultural words” became the main research topic of the paper. A. Ahlqvist classified “cultural words” according to human endeavors, locating genuine Finnish words among the loanwords. Having come to the conclusion that proper Finnish vocabulary comprised words which defined historically early, not specialized kinds of labour, A. Ahlqvist got firmly convinced that this fact witnessed the people’s historic youth period rather than its backwardness. Doing his research the scholar came to another important conclusion that the most part of the linguistic methodology was outdated then and needed updating. Thus A. Ahlqvist can be called a forerunner of the Neogrammarian turn. A. Ahlqvist became a pioneer in the Finno-Ugric language etymology study as well as in interdisciplinary approach in science, using the opportunities of “cultural words” analysis in the framework of the comparative historical method and as a means to reconstruct the Finnish ethnic history and culture.