“Stelele și lalelele”: saggio di micromonografia storico descrittiva di una classe flessiva della lingua romena (II)

“Stelele și lalelele”: Micromonography of an Inflectional Class in the Romanian Language (II). This article is part of a series aimed at reconstructing the history, and discussing the current state of what has been considered, from a Romance perspective, a peculiarity of Romanian language: the existence of an inflectional class of feminine nouns ending in tonic vowel (in short: F√V́ Ø), which form the plural with the addition of the le morpheme. The present paper, the second in the series, discusses some morphological traits of F√V́ Ø on the basis of a lexicographical corpus of contemporary standard Romanian: division in subclasses, internal morphological structure of its members (primitive and derivatives nouns, in particular diminutives, internal formations), and morphological variability. Keywords: nominal morphology, Romance plural, Romanian language, Turkish loanwords, inflectional morphology.

neutering neuter – grammatical gender and the dehumanisation of women in German

Grammatical gender in German has traditionally been described as a rather arbitrary system (Helbig and Buscha 1988). This is not the case in regard to terms of person reference, where natural gender assignment is the norm: Masculine and feminine grammatical gender largely correlate with the extralinguistic assignment of male and female gender. Neuter gender predominantly denotes inanimate entities (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). The use of neutral gender in reference to women nevertheless has a long history in German, usually with pejorative connotations (Köpcke and Zubin 1996, 2009). Historically, this can be illustrated in relation to nouns, pronouns and articles: 1 By neuter nouns denoting ‘socially incomplete’ women, e.g. das Weib ‘woman (archaic), hag, n.’, das Luder ‘hussy, n.’ and in the increased use of neuter eliciting diminutives in reference to female individuals, e.g. das Mädchen ‘girl, n.’, das Fräulein ‘miss, n.’ (Nübling 2017). 2 Through the use of neuter pronouns and neuter articles in combination with female names in a number of German dialects, e.g. das Emma, es ‘the (n.) Emma, it’ (Busley and Fritzinger 2018). In contemporary standard German, the use of neuter articles and pronouns instead of feminine ones seems to be used as a discursive tool to denigrate and dehumanise women whose gender performance does not conform with hegemonic concepts of femininity. This paper focuses on the intentional manipulation of grammatical gender in reference to women as a tool of degradation and dehumanisation and outlines the historical development of neuter forms of reference in contexts where feminine would be expected.

Construction mining

The German Constructicon Project (www.german-constructicon.de) aims at documenting grammatical constructions in contemporary standard German on the basis of annotated corpus examples, including relations between constructions and between constructions and evoked semantic frames. So far, the research focus has been mainly on the development and computational implementation of a constructicographic workflow (including a parsing pipeline) that allows for addressing any kind of constructions on varying levels of schematicity, idiomaticity, and abstractness. However, such an exemplar-driven procedure precludes us from systematically identifying constructional candidates. In this article, we scrutinize ways to operationalize and implement data-mining procedures to inductively identify construction candidates.

Assumptions of mass-media contributors about sources of language norms and rules of language use (based on survey materials)

The article represents the results of a survey among mass-media contributors (journalists, editors, content-managers) on their assumptions about compulsory requirements to use the national language in mass-media, inter alia — what legal limitations are established for this, which sources are used for the norms of the Russian language, those necessary to follow, and if mass-media contributors are specially trained on these norms in editorials offices. The survey showed that only a quarter of respondents knew about the compulsory rule to follow the norms of contemporary standard (literary) Russian in spheres where the national language (including mass-media) is used, and only 6% knew about the necessity to adhere to the official norms. A comparable number of respondents knew the sources for these norms. This leads to the conclusion that requirements to follow the norms of contemporary standard language established by legislation on national language are not effective. The widespread use of the Internet, primarily the site gramota.ru, articulately indicates the need to update the source of official norms of contemporary standard Russian language for its use as the national language. This source should be electronic and freely accessible, uniting different dictionaries and reference books, in order to provide comprehensive information on the norms for using acertain word in a particular language situation. More than 50% of respondents knew about the existence of mechanisms of state control over compliance with the requirements of language legislation, but they were not familiar with the actual requirements of this legislation. Editorial offices of media organizations do not pay due attention to this question.

Numerical Study of Optimal Location of Non-Circular Segmented Failure Surface in Soil Slope With Weak Soil Layer

The article addresses stability analysis of complicated slopes having weak soil layer sandwiched between two strong layers. The search for critical failure surface and associated optimum/minimum factor of safety (FOS) among all potential failure surfaces can be posed as an optimization problem. Two different variants of particle swarm optimization (PSO) models, namely inertia weight-based PSO (IW-PSO) and contemporary standard PSO (CS-PSO), are used to obtain optimum global solution. Detailed comparison between the global optimum solutions obtained from two PSO variants and the effect of swarm size is studied. The performance of IW-PSO and CS-PSO are studied by observing the convergence behavior of the respective algorithms with respect to iteration count. The influence of velocity clamping on the optimized solution is investigated and its use is found beneficial as it prevents the solution from overflying the region with global best solution. The studies related to swarm diversity demonstrating the exploitation and exploration behaviors of the algorithms are also presented.

An overview of the participles ending in -ci, -vsi and -m(i) from the perspective of the lexicographic description of the contemporary Serbian language

From the perspective of lexicography, this paper presents an analysis of participles ending in -ci, -vsi and -m(i), which in contemporary Serbian language fall within two categories: 1) the category of contemporary participial continuants, whose action is attributed to the noun as a temporary, current feature at a definite point in time, and 2) the category of adjectives that semantically correspond to past participles or to adjectives proper. As regards the descriptive dictionaries of the contemporary Serbian language, the participles ending in -ci, -vsi and -m(i) are lexicographically treated primarily in the Dictionary of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (the SASA Dictionary). Comparing the example sentences excerpted from various texts belonging to the contemporary standard Serbian language, on the one hand, with those excerpted from the SASA Dictionary, on the other, it can be noted that the SASA Dictionary does not contain examples of participle forms with the reflexive morpheme -se, while they can be said to be confirmed in other sources. This can be explained as resulting from the impact of the Serbian language norm, according to which participles do not belong to the contemporary standard Serbian language. This is especially true of forms containing the reflexive morpheme -se, which are not to be found in any modern grammar of the standard Serbian language. It is concluded in the paper that the SASA Dictionary treats the participle forms of both aforementioned categories and of three separate participle forms according to the verb tense (past and present) and voice (active and passive). As for the sources confirming the use of these forms, they can be found not only in those dating from the first half of the 19th century, when participles were commonplace in the literary language of Serbs, but also in the works of the 20th-century authors using the contemporary standard Serbian language. In accordance with that, the conclusion to be drawn is that participles should be treated and included in dictionaries, both in those whose compilation is ongoing (i.e. the SASA Dictionary) and in the future dictionaries of the contemporary Serbian language. The excerpted material shows that participles are used by prominent authors in Serbian science, religion and culture. As for the issue of which label to use for the indicated types of participles in the descriptive dictionary of the contemporary Serbian language, it is argued in this paper that in order to resolve it one should take into consideration at least two sets of facts related to the presented material. One refers to the examples of the formation of participles that in fact originate from the older layers of our literary language and which have been preserved in identical or similar form to this day (e.g. odsedsi, usopsi), while the other concerns participles created in a contemporary synchronic process involving contemporary verbs in current use and their meanings (dogorevajuca sveca, plac radjajucih stvorenja, etc.). The former set of examples is marked with standard labels, such as ?zast.? (?obsolete?), ?arh.? (?archaic?), ?rsl.? (?Russian Church Slavonic?), ?csl.? (?New Church Slavonic?), ?ssl.? (?Serbian Church Slavonic?), ?stknj. arh.? (?from earlier literary sources, old-fashioned?), used in the lexicographic description of participles in the SASA Dictionary, which can also be used in other descriptive dictionaries of the contemporary Serbian language to indicate the literary epoch in which a particular form of participle originated, or its pragmatic value. Concerning the latter set of participles, if they were to be introduced into a descriptive dictionary of the Serbian language, they would require different labels, since these are the words formed according to the participle-building pattern of the present-day synchronic lexical-grammatical process.

Въпроси на съвременния български книжовен език и неговата история / Issues in Contemporary Standard Bulgarian and its History

Issue 3/2020 of Balgarski ezik is dedicated to the 110th anniversary of the birth of Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin. The first paper presents an overview of some of his contributions to the study of the grammatical categories of Bulgarian verbs, the advancement of orthography theory and the normativisation of Bulgarian spelling as well as to the history of Modern Standard Bulgarian. The study Konstantin Petkovich and Bulgarian Linguistics authored by Lilia Ilieva and Galina Nikodimova brings into focus Konstantin Petkovich’s views on Bulgarian language as reflected in the translator’s notes to his Russian translation of Franc Miklosič’s work Lautlehre der Bulgarischen Sprache, where he sketched the main features of the Bulgarian dialects, outlined the Bulga¬rian linguistic territory and provided comparisons between Bulgarian gram¬ma¬tical forms and forms in Modern Greek and Romanian. Nadka Nikolova’s paper titled Anastas Granitski’s Translation “On Commercial Writing” (1858): Introductory Notes deals with part of his 1858 translation of „Тръговско рѫководство“ (A Trade Guide) by Konstantinos Melas. The author emphasises the role of the translation in the reception of business correspondence models from the European Mediterranean on the Balkans and offers the hypothesis that these letters influenced the Bulgarian language on various levels: in terms of spelling and language features, genre specifics and terminology. Katya Charalozova deals with The Codification of Punctuation Norms in Spelling Dictionaries and Spelling Guides Published in the 1920s and studies the rules for the use of punctuation marks by analysing the state of the codification at the beginning of the 20th century as compared with contemporary codification. As a result, the author confirms the hypothesis about the continuity in the process of codification. Ruska Stancheva’s work Towards Normative Grammar presents differences between descriptive and normative grammar. The theoretical prerequisites of modern normative grammar and the principles on which the normative description is based are derived. Tatyana Aleksandrova and Zhaneta Zlateva explore A Fragment of the Process of Reconfiguration of Doublets in the Standard Bulgarian Language (Based on the Nouns Pozhetvovanie and Pozhertvuvanie; Samopozhertvovanie; Sebepozhertvovanie). The authors study the dynamics of codification and the factors determining the normative status of this group of nouns. In his paper on Semantic Characteristics of Christian Theological Terminology Bozhidar Pitev delves into the specific semantic nature of Christian theological terminology and proposes a classification and a theoretical and methodological model for its analysis. Hristiana Krasteva’s A Comparison of the Prosodic Features of the Clitic Cluster in Bulgarian Declarative and Interrogative Sentences studies the prosodic and intonational features of these sentences from a clitic cluster’s perspective.

Enhanced Exhibitions? Discussing Museum Apps after a Decade of Development

OverviewThe introduction of the smartphone into the private and professional lives of humans has provided a channel to real-time and place-specific information that can enhance (and disturb) day-to-day living. Given such impact, many museums and archaeological exhibitions have chosen to develop digital applications to enhance the visitor experience via accompanying the visitor through the exhibitions. Yet after a decade, these applications still seem understudied and, in practice, very undeveloped. This review aims to shed some light on the possibilities and shortcomings of museum apps. I discuss and critically evaluate the technical efficiency, practical utility, and user experience of the British Museum Guide (Museums Guide Ltd.) and My Visit to the Louvre (Musée du Louvre) applications. These two mobile apps represent the contemporary standard for museum apps, thereby allowing me to generalize about this genre of digital media.

Attitudes towards Anglicisms in Contemporary Standard Slovak

The extensive spread of anglicisms in the last decades is a tendency that can be observed in a number of languages, including Slovak. This situation immediately raises concerns about the possible effects on national languages. In Slovakia, the attitudes to borrowings from English find their place between two poles of a continuum. On one hand, there are Slovak users (not only linguists) who are strongly against borrowings and especially anglicisms. Some even consider them a serious threat to Slovak as a national language which is part of Slovak identity. On the other hand, some users are keen to use English words in their Slovak. Then many Slovak speakers are confused as to what is acceptable and seek help from an official authority. The authority is represented by Jazykovedný ústav Ľudovíta Štúra Slovenskej akadémie vied (Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics of the Slovak Academy of Science). The Institute has set up a Linguistic Advice Service to answer questions about correct use. There is a database of the questions and answers which can be searched by key words or browsed in alphabetical order. The analysis focuses on the queries concerning anglicisms. The results of the analysis show how different attitudes to anglicisms in Slovak correlate with the lexicographic treatment of the words.

The Case Against Theory of Mind

Considerations in the previous chapters led to an acknowledgment of the important role played by social context and intersubjective relations for understanding action. In this and subsequent chapters I explore in more detail, not only how action is related to social interaction, but also the nature of social interaction itself. In this chapter I start with the critical task of showing how contemporary standard approaches to questions about social cognition and theory of mind go wrong and fail to explain how we understand others, and more generally how they cover up the importance of embodied interaction in social contexts. Here I discuss the standard approaches of theory theory and simulation theory, as well as hybrid versions of these theories. I outline eight objections to these theories.