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Copyright of International Journal of Language Academy is the property of Rota Kariyer and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of German International Journal of Modern Science / Deutsche Internationale Zeitschrift für Zeitgenössische Wissenschaft is the property of Artmedia24 and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Lexical suffixation is an essential feature of the Salish language family. Such suffixes form closed classes of morphemes that express various types of meaning, e.g., somatisms, locatives, natural phenomena, artefacts, phytonyms, etc. Most Salish lexical suffixes are of substantive nature. However, they hardly ever correspond with free forms of substantives, be it synchronically or diachronically. The authors reviewed a number of theories concerning the origin and development of the Salish lexical suffixes. Based on the synchronic and diachronic analysis, they put forward the following hypothesis of the origin of the Salish lexical suffixes. The suffixes stared as a dependent predicative construction, eventually compressed into a morphologically-coherent model according to the following evolution scheme: dependent predication / nominalized predicate → compounding / incorporation → lexical suffix (bound morpheme). Thus, the synchronous Salish substantives are diachronically based on verbal stems with their process semantics. The study adds to the linguistic understanding of the origin of various parts of speech and the borders between substantives and verbs.

The present volume "Languages in Comparison. German - Ladin - Italian. Volume 3: Noun, Adjective, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction" deals with the Comparative Grammar of German, Ladin, and Italian. It covers the parts of speech noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, and conjunction. The chapter on nouns covers gender, number, and case. The chapter on adjectives covers adjectives in the narrower sense and numeral adjectives. Similarities and differences in the usage and morphology of adjectives are presented. The book is primarily aimed at teachers in the Ladin Alpine valleys, but also at students and teachers of Romance and Germanic studies. [Extracted from the article]

If register is an essential part of language description, as has been stressed in past decades, it cannot be left out of consideration in the historic stages of a language, even though we have no direct grasp of its situational-functional contexts there. Although time-consuming and methodologically challenging, this is a necessary undertaking. The paper takes up the challenge, using the examples of Old Lithuanian and Old Latvian, where the beginning of written transmission roughly coincides with the spread of the Reformation and its counter-movements. Our text material is taken from the seven earliest Baltic postils: the Old Lithuanian Wolfenbüttel Postil, Bretkūnas’s, Daukša’s, and Morkūnas’s postils, the first part of Sirvydas’s Punktai Sakymų, and the third part of Knyga Nobažnystės (the Summa), and Mancelius’s Old Latvian postil. Postils, which nowadays are virtually unknown, were a very early, widespread and long-lived book type, so they were perfectly placed within written transmission to influence both the development and change of register. Combining two text types, differing in communication intent and addressees, namely gospel readings and the homilies that explain them, they can be shown to offer an excellent starting point for investigating historical registers, and for possible methods of exploring them. Based on suitable excerpts from our texts, we investigate a selection of potential register markers from morphosyntax, word order and lexicon: Mancelius’s use of the perfect tense in its different functions is close to orality, while the preterite marks Biblical passages or allusions. An analysis of word order in Old Lithuanian and Old Latvian main clauses shows that gospel readings clearly prefer VO to OV, whereas the choice between SV and VS does not seem to be tied to a difference between text types. Word order among the individual authors indicates clear differences which would have to be investigated within a larger text corpus. Pairings of two (rarely three) (quasi-)synonymous parts of speech (Ger-man Doppelungen) can be used as a stylistic device (synonymia) or to avoid commitment to a less-than-established theological concept, but they can also serve a descriptive need. Their predominant occurrence in the homilies signals their explanatory character in view of the addressees of the postils, who were to be given assistance in understanding and disseminating the Gospel text. Also, the greater freedom in combining parts of speech which is observable in all the postils exceeds the limits of a stylistic device and can be most plausibly explained as a case of historical register variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Word Classes" by Winfried Thielmann offers a new and credible approach to the classification of word classes. The author uses a functional perspective and considers language as a "highly complex tool". The book consists of two parts: the first part deals with the problems of traditional classification of word classes and provides reasons for a revision. The second part discusses various word classes and provides explanations for the assignment of representatives to the traditional categories. The book is suitable for students of German studies and includes exercises and summaries. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Swahili Forum is the property of Swahili Forum and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

So-called adverbs are a notorious problem for the theory of lexical categories, in large part because they are so diverse. Different subclasses of adverbs often resemble some other word class more closely than they resemble each other (and certain German adverbs can even be better analysed as defective adjectives). The present article reexamines the criteria for the identification of a category of adverb that are traditionally used in the grammar of German. It is pointed out that adverbs mostly evade the application of the semantic, distributional, and morphological criteria that can be used for defining categories in general. Adverbs are therefore to be seen as the bottom of the barrel that is left over by the criteria singling out other word classes. Hence, there is no standard category feature in the sense of a feature that encodes for adverbs' grammatical properties, and it is argued that this is possible because adverbs are confined to contexts without grammatical feature selection. A detailed case study looks at the distinction between adverbs and prepositions in German, arguing that the traditional criterion, which takes prepositions to be those noninflectable words that govern a complement while adverbs would not govern any complements, leads to very unnatural divisions. The distinction must rather be made in terms of lexical weight. As a result, the classification of the Duden grammar (Dudengrammatik 2016), and hence the two-level model of grammatical categories that underlies it, is rejected. Still, adverbs should not be identified with prepositions, since this would blur the distinction between lexical words and function words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The speaker deals with explanations in the complex field of prosodic characteristics designated as emphasis on a definite part of the lexical content, as "stress pattern" or traditionally as "word stress". He points out that the stress varies in disyllabic units in which the stress is on both syllables. This variation can and must be covered by rules in all units. In the case of polysyllabic units the rules are easier to grasp. He then spoke of functional and combinational characteristics of the units dealt with, which are also traditionally regarded as "parts of speech" in Chinese, and finally on the internal structure of all combined units dealt with in the dictionary. Analysis of this structure is based on research into morpheme combination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first known Slavonic grammatical treatise The Eight Parts of Speech survives in forty-three manuscripts, the two oldest of which (from the14th and 15th century respectively) belong to the Serbian, while all the others belong to the Russian redaction. Our study seeks to show that the text relies mostly (but not only) on The Art of Grammar by Dionysius Thrax and on his disciples. An analysis of the Slavonic grammatical terms and their Greek basis is followed by the translation of the text from Old Church Slavonic into contemporary Serbian furnished with necessary commentaries.

In a time of proliferating electronic devices such as smartphones, translators of user interfaces are faced with new challenges, such as the use of existing words in new contexts or in their obtaining new meanings. In this article, three lexicographic reference works available to translators in this field are compared: the Kuberwoordeboek/Cyber Dictionary (Viljoen 2006), the Pharos Afrikaans–Engels/English–Afrikaans Dictionary (Du Plessis et al. 2010) and the Microsoft Language Portal (www.microsoft.com/Language 2015). A list of selected examples (in English) is used to determine the extent to which each of these three works fulfils the needs of the user in terms of meaning discrimination for translating into Afrikaans. After determining this, an attempt is made to indicate whether the use of meaning discriminators such as part-of-speech markers, punctuation, paraphrases of meaning, and contextual and co-textual guidance (as indicated by Beyer 2009: 11) may have contributed to the success or failure of the given reference work, in order to arrive at a conclusion about the link between lexicographic theory and usability.

Šiame straipsnyje pristatomas lietuvių šnekamosios kalbos (šiaurės žemaičių dialekto) intonacijos tyrimas ir jo rezultatai. Lingvistinė analizė atlikta remiantis A. Girdenio modifikuota fonetine transkripcija užrašytais tekstais iš trijų skirtingų šiaurės žemaičių arealų zonų – Endriejavo, Alsėdžių ir Tirkšlių apylinkių. Šiuo tyrimu siekta išsiaiškinti, kas būdinga šnekamosios (tarminės) kalbos intonacijai, kurie žodžiai laikomi centriniais sintagmoje, kokią funkciją jie atlieka.Tyrimo metu atlikta kiekybinė ir kokybinė intonacijos ženklais pažymėtų kalbos dalių analizė. Nustatyta, kad žemaičių tekstuose dažniausiai intonuojamos nominatyvinės ir emocinės ekspresinės kalbos dalys, atliekančios informatyviųjų teksto elementų vaidmenį, o nenominatyvinės intonuojamos rečiau ir sinagmoje gauna kirtį sporadiškai.Atskirai ištyrus sintagmas su kylančia (antikadencija) ir krintančia (kadencija) intonacija, nustatyta, kad antikadencinės sintagmos dažnesnės negu kadencinės. Gauti rezultatai aiškinami tuo, kad viena iš pagrindinių krintančios intonacijos funkcijų – paryškinti remą, t. y. svarbiausią, aktualiausią informaciją, paprastai tenkančią vienam kuriam nors žodžiui frazėje. Reminį žodį gali lydėti viena arba kelios teminės sintagmos, tariamos su kylančia intonacija.Patyrinėjus šiaurės žemaičių šnekamosios kalbos intonaciją daroma išvada, kad kadencija ne visada sietina su rema, o antikadencija – su tema. Intonuoti žodžiai gali atlikti ir gramatinę funkciją: kadencija – žymėti frazės pabaigą, antikadencija – reikšti remos sudedamąsias dalis. Be to, intonacijai būdingas ir individualumas – tos pačios žodinės sudėties ir kalbinės aplinkos sintagmos skirtingų kalbėtojų gali būti intonuojamos skirtingai.

What do corpora reveal about ongoing grammaticalization and transitions between word class categories? Everything, something, or nothing? Using the example of the lexemes nicneríkající, nichtssagend, všeríkající and vielsagend the authors examine the syntactic distribution and semantics of participial adjectives. To what extent do the Czech and German equivalents differ? What (if any) effect does the orthography have (i.e. whether the expressions are written as compounds or as chains of separate words)? Is a new form accompanied by a new function? The text presents an analysis of monolingual corpora (SYN, DeReKo) and a parallel corpus (InterCorp). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of ‘constructions’ covers the range from fully unanalyzed or “frozen” units to abstract and productive schemas that can be used to form new utterances, even with verbs that usually have a different valency (coercion). The dynamic nature of the construction as well as its functional grounding makes the construction particularly suitable for describing and explaining the course of language acquisition. Distributional analyses of the linguistic structures used across development as well as experimental tests on the productivity of these structures are the methodological means to assess the degree of freedom of constructions used at each point in development. In the earliest stages of development children rely heavily on bottom up processes and generalize only slowly. But with growing productivity they are able to generate new utterances top down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the periphrastic perfect tenses – past participle + have or be – is a phenomenon for which the analysis is especially promising with regards to the research on grammaticalisation. Firstly, it involved several steps of syntactic reanalysis and lexical recategorisation leading to a construction-specific auxiliary verb form. This allows for conclusions to be drawn about processes involved in grammaticalisation in general. Secondly, it is a grammatical change in which both Germanic and Romance languages converged. This allows for conclusions about universal conditions underlying such kinds of change. Thirdly, in German, the rise occurred rather late and within a relatively short period of time. This allows for the observation of the periphrasis in statu nascendi. In this paper, the grammaticalisation process is modeled and explained in a formal framework of generative syntax, also taking into account performance-based changes and contextual aspects providing the conditions for the relevant changes in the grammar. The main claim is that this process of grammaticalisation was terminated by an abrupt parametric change, leading to a syntactically reanalysed form of analytic inflection and the recategorisation of have as an auxiliary. The result was a full paradigm of periphrastic perfect tense. The preconditions for this grammatical change were provided by a sequence of performance-based changes and minor formal reanalyses, giving the process its gradual nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In German infinite verbal complexes with three verbs we can observe a phenomenon which so far has been treated as an irregular exception, because in a particular order, so-called ‘312 order’, all three verbs seem to occur in a wrong form. Corpus research shows, however, that the putative exception has a systematic character and can be observed over a longer time in German. This article therefore tries to take a different perspective: the problem does not lie in the exceptional expressions, but rather in our theory of German grammar which so far has not been able to derive the structures as regular. We present an optimality theoretic account of sentence final verbal complexes in German which is able to derive all systematically occurring expressions. The account comes with the cost that some thus far widely shared assumptions have to be revised. These assumptions concern the role of the infinitive marker ‘zu’ as well as the role of participial and infinitival morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Acta Facultatis Philosophicae Universitatis Ostraviensis. Studia Germanistica is the property of Acta Facultatis Philosophicae Universitatis Ostraviensis. Studia Germanistica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses the structure of personal pronouns in Russian. A German research project studied the personal pronoun in modern standard and vernacular Russian, and the results are presented. The syntactic behavior of pronouns was the focus of the study, and a comparison to personal pronouns in German was also included. Three classes of personal pronouns are described: the strong pronoun, the weak pronoun and the clitic pronoun. The pronoun types have up to three attributes determining them: the functional case, the accentuating and characteristic person and number. The positional possibilities of Russian personal pronouns are illustrated.