Czy idąc prosto przed siebie, nie można zajść daleko?

Is It True that “If You Run Ahead of Yourself, You Cannot Go Very Far”? Image Schemata and Aphorisms The author uses a cognitive tool called image schemata to analyse aphorisms. The schemata originate from early bodily experience and are enable to ground the phenomenon of linguistic meaning there. The aphorism is defined not only as a linguistic fact but as a conceptual structure based on an axiological clash. The clash results from profiling opposite values in the used schemata. Considering the language-values relationship, the article adopts a cognitive linguistics approach which claims that valuation is an immanent part of symbolic language units and it mustn’t be relegated to the area of pragmatics. Following Krzeszowski’s concept, the author assumes that preconceptual schemata interact with the SCALE schema. The hearer/reader of the self-contradictory expression must reinterpret it using metaphorical meanings. These are easily available thanks to conceptual metaphors which include image schemata in their source domains.

From SPEAKING to SEMIOSIS

This paper explores the quest for an account of the ‘total linguistic fact’. Speech act theory, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and social semiotics have all attempted, in various ways and at various times, to find a way to describe as much as possible that is going on around any speech event. While this search for the total linguistic fact will always be a chimerical goal, this paper proposes a framework based on the acronym SEMIOSIS as one way of grasping the complexity of what is at play, comprising social relations, emotional and sensorial engagement, mobility, Iterative activity, objects and assemblages, socio- and translingual practices, interactivity, and spatial repertoires. Looking at data from a small Bangladeshi-run store in Tokyo, the paper shows how bringing in this wider set of concerns at least allows for a more comprehensive account of sociolinguistic moments.

Les équivalences discursives et les suites préconstruites

A given predicate is defined by a set of properties which combine and which automatically generate all the sentences it allows. Among them, we note the number and the semantic class of the arguments which characterize it, the adjectival and adverbial modifiers which can be added tothe scheme of arguments as well as all the transformations which affect each of these units. The speaker is responsible for attributing to sentences the set of all the forms that language allows him to generate. What has just been said can be considered as a definition of syntax.But this situation is far from exhausting the description of a language. J. Dubois and especially Maurice Gross have devoted large-scale work to fixed expressions, that is to say, to the restrictions relating to the combinatorics usually observed around a given predicate. These studies have focused on the limitations of grammar rules as they are generally described. These two authors have drawn up lists of tens of thousands of “fixed” verbs and have highlighted the limits of this fixing. However, they made an observation without highlighting the causes of the fixing, which is a much more complex linguistic fact than this work suggests. The purpose of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it emphasizes what can be called discursive equivalences: in a given situation, the same idea can be translated by expressions which have no obvious link between them, as in: con comme la lune, con comme un balai, con comme une baleine, con comme une bite, con comme une valise. Another example: voici belle lurette, voici longtemps, voici un temps fou, voici une paille, voici une paye. It goes without saying that the speaker is not master of these expressions, because they are written in the language. This article shows that these equivalences are very numerous. On the other hand, I. Mel’čuk initiated important work on pragmatemes. Again the “regular” syntax is defective. All these cases are in fact examples of pre-constructed sequences, of which this article attempts to make a first classification. These sequences are explained by specific communication conditions as seen with these examples:a) Doubt or reluctance in the face of information that one can hardly believe:à d’autres !, à d’autres mais pas à moi !, à d’autres mais pas à nous ! b) Criticism of a work that is considered null and uninteresting:c’est de la bouillie pour les chats, c’est de la bricole, c’est de la briquette, c’est de la couille,c’est de la merde, c’est de la piquette, c’est du flan, c’est du pipeau, c’est du vent.This is long-term work, which allows us to renew certain theoretical perspectives.

Improving Sentence Representations via Component Focusing

The efficiency of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as text classification and information retrieval, can be significantly improved with proper sentence representations. Neural networks such as convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) are gradually applied to learn the representations of sentences and are suitable for processing sequences. Recently, bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) has attracted much attention because it achieves state-of-the-art performance on various NLP tasks. However, these standard models do not adequately address a general linguistic fact, that is, different sentence components serve diverse roles in the meaning of a sentence. In general, the subject, predicate, and object serve the most crucial roles as they represent the primary meaning of a sentence. Additionally, words in a sentence are also related to each other by syntactic relations. To emphasize on these issues, we propose a sentence representation model, a modification of the pre-trained bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) network via component focusing (CF-BERT). The sentence representation consists of a basic part which refers to the complete sentence, and a component-enhanced part, which focuses on subject, predicate, object, and their relations. For the best performance, a weight factor is introduced to adjust the ratio of both parts. We evaluate CF-BERT on two different tasks: semantic textual similarity and entailment classification. Results show that CF-BERT yields a significant performance gain compared to other sentence representation methods.

Talemål i Sør-Østfold

I artikkelen presenterer vi en språkantropologisk analyse av språk­situasjonen i sørøstlige deler av Østfold. Analysen tar utgangspunkt i Silversteins (1985) ‘total linguistic fact’ for å beskrive sammenhengen mellom (språk)ideologi, språklig form eller struktur og (språklig) inter­aksjon/praksis i området. Artikkelen går inn i alle disse og diskuterer dem basert på samtaledata fra Nordisk dialektkorpus, tekster av lærerstudenter og egne erfaringer som tilflyttere til området. Vi argumenterer også for at Østfolds historie spiller en sentral rolle i det ideologiske klimaet som omgir østfoldmål. Området ble tidlig og mye industrialisert, noe som førte til en klassedelt sosial struktur (Svendsen 2004:465). Vi hevder at denne strukturen kan ses som en videreføring av en klassedelt samfunnsstruktur som også eksisterte før området ble industrialisert. Industrialiseringa førte også med seg innvandring og urbanisering. Disse samfunnsforholdene er utgangspunktet for en språkutvikling prega av mye språkkontakt, og også det som ser ut til å være en deling mellom lokalt og mer ikke-lokalt mål. Vi tolker dette i lys av det Woolard (2016) skriver om to konkurrerende språkideologiske retninger i vestlige samfunn, som hun kaller en ‘ideology of authenticity’, en autentisitetsideologi, og en ‘ideology of anonymity’, en nøytralitetsideologi. Vi presenterer også en modell for en firedeling av det språklige landskapet i Østfold, og vi tolker en samtale fra 2009 med to unge østfoldinger inn i denne modellen.

Zapożyczenia niemieckie w XIX-wiecznym Dykcjonarzu Michała Amszejewicza (przyczynek do badań nad słownictwem obcego pochodzenia w polszczyźnie)

Michał Amszejewicz in Dykcjonarz, which was a record of vocabulary of foreign origin used in the Polish language in the middle of the 19th century, recorded more than eight hundred lexical units (838 in 633 entries, which comprise 511 monosemes and 122 polysemes with two or more meanings) present in the lexis as a result of interference between the Polish and the German languages. Their functional allocation is diversified, with specialist lexis being dominant. Analysed vocabulary in the middle of the 19th century was functionally allocated to various areas of activity, firstly to crafts – 155 lexical units (18.5%), next to military and its organisation – 93 lexical units (11.1%), merchant’s profession and its specifics, commercial and financial aspects – 72 lexical units (8.6%). The remaining 518 lexical units (61.8%) are scattered in the lexicon of another several dozens of specialties, such as rafting, mining, metallurgy, forestry, meteorology, gardening, fine arts and others. Until the beginning of the 21st century, out of 838 analysed lexical units a diversified life cycle was preserved by 321 (38.3%), and 517 (61.7%) were transferred to linguistic archives of the Polish Language. In analysed vocabulary of German origin, actively used in the most recent Polish Language, biased lexis is dominant – in terms of terminology and style; less frequently these are words with a neutral character, regarded as basic vocabulary. Analysed Germanisms have also undergone semantic changes, i.e. specialisation, generalisation, metaphorisation and partial transformations. Germanisms in the Polish Language of the 19th century are a cultural and linguistic fact, which is characterised by certain specific conditions, also in terms of the time of their use and functionality, which has been emphasised on numerous occasions by their researcher – Bogusław Nowowiejski.

The Problem of Identity of an Informatized Person by the Viewpoint of Intertextualism

The Object of the Study. Identity of an informatized personThe Subject of the Study. Communicative identity in communicative environment based on principles of intertextuality.The Purpose of the Study is demonstrating the impossibility of communicative identity in the situation of totally informatized public being in accordance with the principles of intertextuality.The Main Provisions of the Article. Swift evolution and dissemination of the information technology have led to radical changes in human`s public being. The identity of a human being as a being who communicates with one`s own kind become questionable. Philosophical basis of information society can be found in the poststructuralism. Hiperawareness, fragmentation and reduced interaction can be pointed out as the most important parameters of informatized society. In that regard, an identity of informatized human being is considered from the point of view of the poststructuralistic conception of intertextuality. The last one serves as a kind of ideology of informatized society. The consciousness that since Rene Descartes had been the main identifier of a West European individual, became in the 20th century the linguistic consciousness. Semiotics has shown the subject is merely a fixed place in the sistem of language. In the sixties poststructuralists deleted that fixation. They demonstrated that a language is an open system, not a closed one. From the viewpoint of the poststructuralistic conception of intertextuality a human being is a merely mobile fragment of a constantly reproducting hypertext. While a text that represents itself in the system of telecommunications as objectified communicative environment marks individual`s alienation and clearly has fetish nature. The encounter of linguistic consciousness with a linguistic fact actually reveals the dialogic nature of meaning. The meaning of any textual object is defined as a function of interaction with the past, present and future text semantic blocks, the representative of which is consciousness interacting with this object. Communication act draws the subject into the process of dialogical formation, in which the semantic unity is dispersed. Under these conditions a message as the basis of communicaton and identity has become problematic. Even a creative act of forming a message is unable to overcome the gap between alienated atomized individual and autonomous information environment. Communication in information society tends to become barren message: «Look! I do exist!» with not an answer come back.

“One Must Remember Towards Tomorrow”*: A Pragmatic Study of the Expression of Memory in the Poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez

Starting from temporality as the organizing principle of any communicative situation, the present study investigates the use of verbal paradigms in Spanish when expressing memory and forgetfulness in a fictional speech act, such as poetry. Every text, including poetic, is a pragmatic unit of interaction in which an enunciator transmits a linguistic fact in order to awaken certain effects in the addressee. Nevertheless, successful communication depends not only on what is actually said, but also and above all, on what a reader or listener can deduce from what is said. Linguistic communication is not only an encoding-decoding process, but mainly the complementary process of ostension and inference, as Sperber and Wilson (1986) show within the theory of relevance. The explicit and implicit meanings of statements can always be understood only through the context, which is constantly changing as the presumption in the process of communication. Subsequently, the presumption that poetic language provokes a specific implicit meaning in the reader enables the establishment of complex relations between the significance and plurality of contexts within the lyrical discourses.The study focuses on two collections of poems, Eternidades (1918) and Piedra y Cielo (1919), written by the great Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and explores the possibilities of explicit and implicit meanings of time and memory that are incited by the verbal paradigms. Both collections, which represent the beginning of a new era in the poet’s creation, are characterized by intense self-reflection. Time, forgetfulness and memory are, similar to the poetic word itself, the essential means that enable the poet to establish individual moments of eternity within the implications of lyrical communication.

“One Must Remember Towards Tomorrow”*: A Pragmatic Study of the Expression of Memory in the Poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez

Starting from temporality as the organizing principle of any communicative situation, the present study investigates the use of verbal paradigms in Spanish when expressing memory and forgetfulness in a fictional speech act, such as poetry. Every text, including poetic, is a pragmatic unit of interaction in which an enunciator transmits a linguistic fact in order to awaken certain effects in the addressee. Nevertheless, successful communication depends not only on what is actually said, but also and above all, on what a reader or listener can deduce from what is said. Linguistic communication is not only an encoding-decoding process, but mainly the complementary process of ostension and inference, as Sperber and Wilson (1986) show within the theory of relevance. The explicit and implicit meanings of statements can always be understood only through the context, which is constantly changing as the presumption in the process of communication. Subsequently, the presumption that poetic language provokes a specific implicit meaning in the reader enables the establishment of complex relations between the significance and plurality of contexts within the lyrical discourses.The study focuses on two collections of poems, Eternidades (1918) and Piedra y Cielo (1919), written by the great Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and explores the possibilities of explicit and implicit meanings of time and memory that are incited by the verbal paradigms. Both collections, which represent the beginning of a new era in the poet’s creation, are characterized by intense self-reflection. Time, forgetfulness and memory are, similar to the poetic word itself, the essential means that enable the poet to establish individual moments of eternity within the implications of lyrical communication.

“Irregular” -ě- after hushing sibilants in verbal suffixes in Middle Russian writing

The paper attempts to identify the causes of the phonetically irregular -ě- after hushing sibilants in verbal suffixes in Middle Russian writing. The author suggests treating this linguistic fact as a systemic one, not connected with the spelling tradition of the southern Slavs, since most of these verbs occur in vernacular sources. With the use of the material from the Dictionary of the Russian language of the XI‒XVII centuries, 13 verbs with the suffix -ě- after hushing sibilants could be found. Prefixed verbs have resultative meaning, unprefixed ones denote telic processes. The analogical distribution of the suffix -ě- is probably caused by two factors. Firstly, the suffix -a-1, the allomorph of the suffix -ѣ- with the meaning of process, and the suffix -a-2, the imperfectivization marker, were homonymous; secondly, it was necessary to form decausative verbs in the period when reflexiveness has not yet become the main way of decausation.