Book
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. Том X, часть 3.
The volume is dedicated to Viktor Khrakovsky's 80th anniversary. Viktor Khrakovsky is among the most prominent Russian typologists. He was among the creators of Peterburg typological school. The volume includes papers in typology, Russian lingusitics, Arabic studies and other domains of linguistics.
Some properties of Russian modal constructions with reflexive verbs marked by -sja are discussed in the paper – in particular, modal passives (U menja diplom ne pišetsja – lit. ‘With me, graduataion paper is not being written’, i.e. ‘I do not make any progress with my graduation paperʼ) and modal impersonal passives. Firstly, the marking of the base subject is claimed to be only indirectly related to the transitivity of the base verb: Summaries and Keywords 782 in modern Russian, all theoretically possible combinations (u-phrase + transitive base verb, dative subject + intransitive base verb, as well as more rare u-phrase + intransitive base verb and dative subject + transitive base verb) can be observed. Secondly, in some contexts, such as questions like Chego tebe ne P ‘Why do not you P’ some restrictions on the use of impersonal modal constructions become less stringent.
This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of grammatical relations and argument structure in the languages of Europe and North and Central Asia (LENCA). Topics covered with respect to individual languages are: split-intransitivity (Basque), causativization (Agul), transitives and causatives (Korean and Japanese), aspectual domain and quantification (Finnish and Udmurt), head-marking principles (Athabaskan languages), and pragmatics (Eastern Khanty and Xibe). Typology of argument-structure properties of ‘give’ (LENCA), typology of agreement systems, asymmetry in argument structure, typology of the Amdo Sprachbund, spatial realtors (Northeastern Turkic), core argument patterns (languages of Northern California), and typology of grammatical relations (LENCA) are the topics of articles based on cross-linguistic data. The broad empirical sweep and the fine-tuned theoretical analysis highlight the central role of argument structure and grammatical relations with respect to a plethora of linguistic phenomena.
In this article we report some new experiments in the area of words clustering for the Russian language. We introduce a new clustering method that distributes words into classes according to their syntactic relations. We used a large untagged corpus (about 7,2 bln of words) to collect a set of such relations. The corpus was processed using a set of finite state automata that extracts syntactically dependent combinations having explicit structure. These automata were used to process only unambiguous text fragments because of combination of these techniques increases the quality of sampled input data. The modification of group average agglomerative clustering was used to separate words between clusters. The sampled set of clusters was tested using one of the semantic dictionaries of the Russian language. The NMI score calculated in this article is equal to 0.457 and F1-score is 0.607.
«Bankruptcy» Concept Within the Legal Linguistics Coordinates: Russian–English–French Approximations
The article addresses the notion of bankruptcy as perceived by speakers of current Russian, English and French languages both lawyers and participants in professional communication from other trades. Semantic structure of the term is identified based on its lexicographic and regulatory definitions.
The volume includes proceedings of the 23th Scandianvian Conference of Linguistics (SCL 23) that was held at Uppsala University 1–3 October 2008. It includes studies covering a wide spectrum of approaches to linguistics, for example, cross-linguistic typological studies, linguistic variation and language change in contact situations as well as studies relating to bilingualism and to second and foreign language learning.
This paper deals with the Semantics/Pragmatics distinction in a contrastive ethnolinguistic aspect. I argue for the validity of this distinction based on cross-linguistic data. My claim is that the specificity of the so-called language key words [Wierzbicka 1990:15-17] - linguospecific items particularly representative of a given language speakersђ mentality - is due to pragmatic rather than semantic peculiarities. These pragmatic peculiarities distinguish the key words both from their synonyms within the same language and their counterparts in other languages. The languages under discussion are Russian and English, analyzed within a combined frame of Integral Language Description model [Apresjan 1995:8-238] and Wierzbickaђs ethnolinguistic approach.
An attractor, in complex systems theory, is any state that is more easily or more often entered or acquired than departed or lost; attractor states therefore accumulate more members than non-attractors, other things being equal. In the context of language evolution, linguistic attractors include sounds, forms, and grammatical structures that are prone to be selected when sociolinguistics and language contact make it possible for speakers to choose between competing forms. The reasons why an element is an attractor are linguistic (auditory salience, ease of processing, paradigm structure, etc.), but the factors that make selection possible and propagate selected items through the speech community are non-linguistic. This paper uses the consonants in personal pronouns to show what makes for an attractor and how selection and diffusion work, then presents a survey of several language families and areas showing that the derivational morphology of pairs of verbs like fear and frighten, or Turkish korkmak 'fear, be afraid' and korkutmak 'frighten, scare', or Finnish istua 'sit' and istutta 'seat (someone)', or Spanish sentarse 'sit down' and sentar 'seat (someone)' is susceptible to selection. Specifically, the Turkish and Finnish pattern, where 'seat' is derived from 'sit' by addition of a suffix-is an attractor and a favored target of selection. This selection occurs chiefly in sociolinguistic contexts of what is defined here as linguistic symbiosis, where languages mingle in speech, which in turn is favored by certain demographic, sociocultural, and environmental factors here termed frontier conditions. Evidence is surveyed from northern Eurasia, the Caucasus, North and Central America, and the Pacific and from both modern and ancient languages to raise the hypothesis that frontier conditions and symbiosis favor causativization.
The paper is focused on the study of reaction of italian literature critics on the publication of the Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Jivago". The analysys of the book ""Doctor Jivago", Pasternak, 1958, Italy" (published in Russian language in "Reka vremen", 2012, in Moscow) is given. The papers of italian writers, critics and historians of literature, who reacted immediately upon the publication of the novel (A. Moravia, I. Calvino, F.Fortini, C. Cassola, C. Salinari ecc.) are studied and analised.
In the article the patterns of the realization of emotional utterances in dialogic and monologic speech are described. The author pays special attention to the characteristic features of the speech of a speaker feeling psychic tension and to the compositional-pragmatic peculiarities of dialogic and monologic text.