The appositional construction in Bulgarian – Issues, opinions, solutions

The article discusses several solutions that aim to reveal the direction of the dependence between the components of the appositional construction. An emphasis is placed on the analysis of the most amorphous and debatable structural type: common noun + proper noun. One of these solutions concerns the choice of a basic research approach and its consistent and logically sound application, which would aid the correct “distribution” of the syntactic functions of the components in constructions of this structural type. The article draws special attention to the autonymic use of proper nouns. It is based on the premise that the two components of this type of appositional construction can have a common reference, which is a function of their different referential features and that these components contribute – to a varying degree – to the realization of these features.

Dr. Frankestein and the Birth of Horror

In the spring of 1818, a novel was published in England, which became the starting point of a new literary genre. The name of the discovered type of literature is sci-fi horror. The creator of sci-fi horror – Mary Shelley – was at that time only 21 years old. Even the title of the novel became today the common noun is “Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus”. “Archetype of horror”– this is how literary critics say about this work. The article attempts to prove and show that the entire plot of the novel is based on discoveries made at that time in the science of electrical phenomena. The article also tells about experiments with electricity, conducted by scientists in the 18th – early 19th centuries, and their perception by contemporaries. Thewhole structure, narrative of the novel, its rhetoric and even expressive artistic means are all works on the idea of bringing the natural-scientific basis under the absolutely seemingly fantastic plan. But, moreover, the novel can be viewed as a work of genius, foreseeing the emergence of what will be called molecular biology and genetic engineering.

Japanese -tati and generalized associative plurals

This chapter presents descriptive generalizations of plural marking in Japanese with the morpheme -tati and proposes an account for its distributional and interpretive properties that are puzzling in many ways. The semantic peculiarities of -tati plurals, such as their tendency to be definite and the lack of generic and kind interpretations, result from the use of -tati as an associative plural marker. When -tati attaches to an individual-denoting expression, it denotes a plurality that consists of the referent of the expression and entities associated with. It is argued that -tati maintains this associative meaning even when it combines with a common noun. The extended notion of associativity allows X-tati, where X is a common noun, to include non-Xs in its denotation as long as such entities are closely associated with X, yielding similative plurals. This potential heterogeneity can solve most, if not all, of the puzzles posed by -tati plurals.

Bare Nouns and Number

Bare nouns are noun phrases with a common noun lacking an overt determiner. Depending on the theoretical framework at hand, and the syntax–semantics interface adopted, they are analysed as NPs, NumPs, or DPs with an empty (null) D. No information on singular/plural, mass/count, definite/indefinite reference can be derived from the determiner if there is none (in overt syntax, at least), so bare nouns raise challenges to syntactic theory as well as compositional semantics. Much of the literature zooms in on the implications of a missing/covert D, but this chapter places special emphasis on syntactic and semantic number in bare nouns.

Lexical-semantic characteristics of the common noun háj (‘grove’) and the proper names Háj in relation to archaeological sites. (The archaeological site and motivation of its name from the aspects of history and linguistics)

The article is an attempt to employ the lexical-semantic reconstruction by Professor Vincent Blanár, whose 100th birthday the authors commemorate, to help us understand the cultural legacy of the past. The core of the text is a retrospective view of the names of areas with occurrence of Pre-Slavic material culture and an attempt to identify the motivating lexical units of the oronyms Háj and their derivatives from the territory of today’s Slovakia by means of interconnected knowledge from the fields of linguistics and archaeology. Proper names such as Háj/Háje occurred as late as in Slavic cultural and linguistic environment; however, material evidence at places with such names suggests presence of an older culture, i. e., settlement by population of a different cultural, social or linguistic provenance. In this study, the lexical-semantic reconstruction of the common noun háj in its original meaning as the motivating linguistic unit for oronyms such as Háj and their derivatives is reflected in the mirror of archaeological research. In connection with the sites named Háj/Háje in the regions of Gemer, Malohont, Novohrad or Hont in the south of Central Slovakia, the authors state that from the aspect of archaeology, they are at least remarkable places of the cultural landscape in which we can expect finds from various stages of prehistory and protohistory. The authors also emphasize that in the studied cases, this is not an absolute rule; it is rather a distinct signal of occurrence of archaeological finds.

Errors of Machine Translation of terminology in the patent text from English into Chinese

This paper summarizes eight types of error of terminology in the patent text in the output of Machine Translation from English into Chinese, including term being mistranslated as a verb, term being mistranslated as a common noun, term being redundantly translated, term being mistranslated as a homophone, term being mistranslated as a wrong term, term being mistranslated due to Chinese expression, term being mistranslated without initial, and term being mistranslated due to wrong acronym. These errors can be solved by the translator before Machine Translation and the translator can identify and correct these errors by pre-editing of the source text.

Common names and proper nouns: Morphosyntactic evidence of a complete nominal paradigm

The terms "common noun" and "proper name" encode two dichotomies that are often conflated. This paper explores the possibility of the other combinations—"common name" and "proper noun"—and concludes that both exist on the basis of their morphosyntactic behavior. In support of common names, inflectional regularization is determined to result from a "name" layer in the structure, meaning that common nouns that regularize are, in fact, common names (computer mouses, tailor’s gooses). In support of proper nouns, there are bare singular count nouns in English that receive definite interpretations and seem to be licensed as arguments by the same null determiner as proper names (I left town, she works at home). Not only does a four-way distinction between nouns, names, proper nouns, and proper names achieve greater empirical coverage, but it also captures the independent morphosyntactic effects of [PROPER] and [NAME] as features on D and N, respectively.

Les techniques de traduction des urbanonymes sur l’exemple des romans policiers polonais et leurs traductions en français

There is a common belief that proper names are not to be translated. The author traced the transfer of urbanonyms in French translations of two Polish crime novels set in contemporary Warsaw. The analysis has been based on the techniques of translating proper names by K. Hejwowski (2004, 2015). The dominant techniques used in various categories of urbanonyms have been distinguished (simple transfer, transfer with spelling modification, translation). In the case of street names, avenues and squares derived from surnames, translators use inflectional neutralization. Another frequent technique is to add the qualifiers rue (‘street’) and quartier (‘district’) to the names of streets and neighbourhoods. In Polish, they are often omitted, which, in the case of street names, is unacceptable in French. Moreover, several techniques allowing removing a proper name or to replace it with a common noun have also been detected. All in all, the techniques applied for translating urbanonyms make it easier for the French recipient to follow the threads of the novel and to read foreign names. However, they deprive him/her of contact with some features of foreign names’ strangeness that characterize a different cultural area.

Christian religious constructions and their folk and colloquial naming (in the texts by E.V. Chestnyakov and current patois of the Unzha area)

We consider the peculiarities of ecclesionyms functioning in Unzha patois from the point of their form, semantic structure and speech usage. The research is based on the texts of the local writer E.V. Chestnyakov, as well as field materials collected in Kologriv and its environs. We analyze a number of religious constructions names and identify their connection with the topography of the area. We pay special attention to identify the sacred elements of the interior decoration of the chapel closest to the writer's house, where in the texts of E.V. Chestnyakov adjoins Church Slavonic and folk and colloquial vocabulary, as well as the status in the patois of the lexeme chapel, which can be considered as a transform of a common noun into a proper name, which is typical for small territories. We note that a specific feature of the ecclesionims, the names of the Unzha churches, which act as local topographic signs, are such types of metonymy as the transfer of one of the side-altars to the entire temple name – the temple name to the village, and the village name to the temple. We conclude that the live folk speech re-codes complex official names into short, and often different, variants. Often, the transformed names of religious constructions reflect dialectal phenomena and the local topography features.

Ways of adapting Greekisms in the Slavic-Russian version of the Euchologion of the Great Church

The Slavic-Russian translation of the Euchologion of the Great Church, made at the end of the 14th century by scribes from the circle of Metropolitan Cyprian, contains a large layer of exotic vocabulary. The purpose of this article is to describe the specifics of the adaptation of Greek vocabulary, borrowings, in this translation within the framework of Greek influence, which are known from the South Slavic translations of the 14th century. The article describes the differences concerning the degree of their morphological development, the relationship with their Slavic equivalent and with each other. Different ways of adapting the exoticisms are associated with their semantic heterogeneity in translation. The least ordered is the use of common noun vocabulary, denoting mainly objects of church use: each word that occurs repeatedly has its own set of declination variants. Proper names (or common nouns in the function of proper ones), as well as the names of heretical movements, were more consistently adapted. The frequency of such vocabulary in the Euchologion contributed to the development of typified means of its transmission. Along with techniques traditional for the 14th century for the Slavic tradition (glossing, deliberate use of unadapted foreign words), the translator also uses some new ways of adaptation, which can be considered as signs of the new wave of Greek influence. The new methods include cases of semantization of a variant of Greekism that differs from the traditional one, as well as methods of morphological and morphophonological adaptation of borrowings not known in the previous tradition.