Working paper
Nominal Morphology of Mehweb Dargwa
The retrieval of low frequency words is usually slower than that of high frequency words. Neuroimaging research on the role of word frequency in linguistic tasks suggests candidate brain areas for the neural substrates of this effect. The only previous fMRI study of word frequency in Russian (Malutina et al., 2012) used an action naming task and obtained data that were highly inconsistent with results for other languages, findings which were mainly obtained using noun-retrieval tasks. In order to verify whether the reasons for such inconsistency were methodological or cross-linguistic, we examined the fMRI correlates of word frequency in Russian using a covert object naming task. We found that the retrieval of low frequency and high frequency nouns activated the same general pattern of brain areas typical for object naming tasks in many languages. Several brain regions were more activated in the low frequency but not the high frequency condition, including the areas and structures usually associated with linguistic processing (the inferior frontal gyrus bilaterally, the left thalamus, the left insula), visual perception (the fusiform gyrus, the inferior occipital gyrus, the middle occipital gyrus bilaterally) and cognitive and motor control (the supplementary motor area and the right cingulate gyrus). The right cingulate gyrus was the only area that responded only to the low frequency stimuli but not the high frequency items, when compared to the baseline. At the same time, we found no brain areas that responded more to high versus low word frequency. These results are generally consistent with previous fMRI studies in English, German and Chinese and therefore suggest that the inconsistency between the previous research in Russian and other languages was due to the possible interaction of the part of speech (verb or noun) and word frequency in brain mechanisms for word retrieval, rather than cross-linguistic differences.
The Mehweb language is an isolated one-village language of the Dargwa group (Nakh-Daghestanian). Mehweb speakers moved outside the Dargwa-speaking area and now they are located near the Avar and Lak speakers. Many authors treated Mehweb specific features as archaic. In this paper I argue that some features of the Mehweb consonant system shows many innovations which could be partly explained by contacts with other languages and specific Mehweb internal processes.
Case study method has been used for a long time to develop intercultural communication competences in non-linguistic universities. However, the cases represented in textbooks have some disadvantages which make the intercultural case study less interesting and effective. To eliminate these problems the article suggests new approach to intercultural case study on the basis of theme intercultural case blocks.
The volume presents several papers on Mehweb, a one-village language spoken in the central part of Daghestan, a republic of the Russian Federation.
This paper reports the results of a phonological study of stress in the Dargic branch of East Caucasian (Nakh–Daghestanian) languages. The main part of this issue is based on Xuduc, Qunqi, and Tanti (three Dargic varieties). Evidently in all Dargic languages, except the North varieties, stress is meaningful. Its position in the absolutive form depends on the word structure (in a different way in different varieties). In the other forms some of the morphological markers are usually stressed (e. g. all plural form markers) and some – are only stressed in words with a certain root declination type.
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.