In this communication, we provide an overview of two international events in the field of encyclopedic studies and lexicography that took place in 2025. These include the International Encyclopedia Conference in Rome, organized by the Treccani Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, which brought together representatives of leading national encyclopedic projects from Europe and around the world. The discussions focused on the challenges and strategies for developing encyclopedic resources in the digital age, the integration of artificial intelligence, the modernization of editorial practices, and the role of encyclopedias in fostering critical thinking and digital literacy. The conference emphasized the importance of international cooperation and the preservation of scholarly standards in a rapidly evolving global information environment. The second event—the LETS 2025 International Seminar, organized by Universiti Putra Malaysia—was dedicated to preserving and revitalizing linguistic heritage through digital technologies. Its program covered a wide range of topics, from innovations in lexicography and terminology to corpus-based studies, machine translation, mobile applications, and the documentation of minority languages. Special attention was given to presentations addressing the status of encyclopedias as authoritative sources of knowledge and the interplay between traditional and technological approaches in contemporary humanities. Both events underscored the growing role of encyclopaedics and lexicography in shaping the digital knowledge infrastructure and sustaining intercultural dialogue.
The article is based on a revised an expanded version of the presentation entitled »Fallout Shelters in Zagreb After the End of World War II«, given at the 71st Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, held 18–22 April 2018 in St. Paul, Minnesota. The fallout shelters built on the territory of the City of Zagreb have largely remained outside the scope of architectural historiography. Nevertheless, the city’s Civil Protection organization recently cited the existence of over 900 shelter facilities under its authority. The research and analysis presented herein covers the period in which the fallout shelters were built, who conceived them, who designed and built them, under whose technical and political influence they appeared, who financed them, and, finally, whether they are necessary or obsolete in present times. The construction of air raid shelters began in 1932 and flourished in the period before World War II. The air raid shelters (officially Protuavionska zaštita, lit. Anti-Aircraft Defense) conceived in the 1948–1971 period were an integral part of the Civil Protection Forces. After the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, Yugoslav president Tito introduced the doctrine of self-defense and ordered the construction of fallout shelters, which was carried out in the 1974–1991 period. The article concludes with five key points. Politically, the entire process of shelter construction, including fallout shelters, was hugely dependent on the political changes in the former monarchical, and later socialist Yugoslavia. After the late 1960s, fallout shelters became one of the instruments of the militarization of Yugoslav society in the 1970s and retained this status until the collapse of the Federation. Economically, the construction of fallout shelters was a huge burden to the socialist economy, despite the availability of cheap labor and the Yugoslav debt-driven self-management-based economic system. Hyperinflation in the 1980s eroded the nominal funds that had been collected as a »shelter tax«. Technologically, the reinforced-concrete shelter construction was in line with contemporaneous global developments. While the construction of the structures themselves did not present any problems, the control process was inadequate due to parallel power structures. The question of aesthetics was not even raised, as the shelters were conceptualized solely for protecting the population. Due to the project’s military nature, the visible parts of the shelters were designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, while the interiors were executed in the simplest possible manner. Regarding their fate, the shelters proved useful during the air raids in the 1991–1995 period, but afterwards they gradually fell into neglect. Nevertheless, the current administrations are attempting to organize their use in the event of possible natural or human-made disasters, particularly in light of the worsening geopolitical situation at the time of this article’s presentation and publication.
<p><strong>Context and relevance.</strong> Over the past 30 years, the number of foreign military specialists who are trained in Russia has been constantly increasing. The expansion of the sphere of educational services correlates with the promotion of the Russian language abroad, partnership in the political and military sphere. At the same time, there is a contradiction between a rigid and regulated military system, manifested in universities of the Ministry of Defense by excessive formalization of classes, the use of mainly traditional methods and techniques of training, on the one hand, and the need to train a graduate - a successful specialist, with a rich palette of soft skills that can quickly adapt to changing conditions and make decisions quickly, related to the life of subordinates, memorize and operate with a large amount of information - on the other. Accordingly, the methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language for cadets of the preparatory department and the following courses should be distinguished by flexibility, adaptability, ethnospecific and professionally oriented orientation. The article discusses the problem of defining a military terminology system within the framework of terminological lexicography. The <strong>purpose</strong> of the article is to consider the definitions of the terms <em>military sublanguage, military vocabulary, military term system</em> as a basic, preliminary stage of understanding your own process of pedagogical design and creating an interactive dictionary of military vocabulary for cadets of the preparatory department of universities of the Ministry of Defense. <strong>Hypothesis.</strong> The concepts of "military vocabulary" and "military term" are ambiguous, historically changeable, the border between the term and non-term is mobile and is due to extralinguistic circumstances: political situation, militaristic policy, scientific and technological progress, etc. <strong>Methods and materials.</strong> The study used general scientific methods of analysis, systematization, deduction, as well as private scientific methods - linguistic description, pedagogical design. <strong>Results.</strong> There is no generally recognized classification of military terminology in linguistics, which necessitates a multidimensional study of military terminological units. <strong>Conclusions.</strong> In the process of training foreign military specialists in universities of the Ministry of Defense, it is necessary to master not only terminological units, but also military argos, jargon, vulgarisms, colloquialisms, etc., which are actively used in oral discourse. Starting from the preparatory course, it is advisable to place methodological and methodological principles that imply the study of the language in all its wealth through its integration into the professional sphere as the basis of the linguistic paradigm for teaching the Russian language as a foreign military term system in specialized universities.</p>
When a new object or activity or idea enters in a culture, the word or words which express it may be borrowed. The most basic function of a loanword is communicating the new object or idea. A culture may elect to use its own resources (as ‘horsepower’ for a steam locomotive engine) for the new item Hoffer, (2002). The present research aims at examining the English borrowed words into Urdu language. It begins with Introduction to the borrowing in general and English with reference to Urdu in particular. It also discusses various forms of borrowing. English language has been in contact with Urdu during the British colonization in India. This has resulted into borrowing so many lexicons into Urdu which must be studied linguistically. It is argued that borrowing has enhanced the communicative range of Urdu lexicons. This is the qualitative study in its nature. Loanwords have been categorized in different domains. Then, the historical background of Urdu and English language interaction until now, and the processes, reasons that are involved in the borrowing of loanwords in Urdu from English language has been discussed.
The Perception and Comprehension of Audiovisual Advertisements Among Learners of Polish
The main aim of this article is to examine the extent to which international learners of the Polish language are able to understand audio-visual advertisements based on idiomatic phrases. To answer this question, research was conducted amongst students of B2 level or higher, according to the Common European Framework of References for Languages (Council of Europe, 2002). This paper joins two distinct but inseparable disciplines in this field of study – namely marketing and language – in order to demonstrate audio-visual commercial advertising as a language discourse.
Postrzeganie i rozumienie reklam audiowizualnych wśród uczących się języka polskiego jako obcego
Celem artykułu jest zbadanie, w jakim stopniu uczący się języka polskiego jako obcego są w stanie zrozumieć audiowizualne przekazy reklamowe, oparte na związkach idiomatycznych. Aby odpowiedzieć na to pytanie, przeprowadzono badania wśród studentów na poziomie B2 lub wyższym, zgodnie z Europejskim systemem kształcenia językowego (Rada Europy, 2002). Artykuł ten łączy dwie odrębne, ale nierozłączne dyscypliny nauki – marketing i lingwistykę – w celu przedstawienia reklamy audiowizualnej jako dyskursu językowego.
Computational linguistics. Natural language processing, Semantics
The great commitment of Andrija Štampar in the 1920s and 1930s paved the way for the reorganisation and improvement of the public health service. His ideas about the necessity of founding and opening public health centres and stations throughout the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia) played a very important role in these efforts. The opening of the Public Health Centre in Osijek, which encompassed numerous services including a dispensary and anti-epidemic service, secured a higher quality of healthcare for the local population. The Public Health Centre functioned fully in accordance with the then programme of social medicine advocated by Štampar, who resided in Osijek several times before 1930. The newly opened Public Health Centre included a city and school polyclinic; a sanitary inspection service; an anti-TB, skin, and venereal diseases dispensary; an anti-trachoma and anti-rabies station; a children’s dispensary; a dental department; and a Hygiene Institute, while the experimental animals necessary for the working of the institute’s bacteriological laboratory were kept – until the construction of a dedicated outbuilding (in 1958/59) – in an outbuilding located next to the building housing the Neurology Department today (part of the Osijek General Hospital).
The central object of computer lexicography is a computer or electronic dictionary, which must have a sufficiently large vocabulary, provide the consistent extraction of information depending on the user’s need and provide complete grammatical information about the words of input and output languages. Taking into account the current trend in the development of special terminological dictionaries, the authors propose an English-Belarusian-Russian dictionary of technical terms. At the initial stage of the work the dictionary was named TechLex and covers the following subject areas: architecture and construction, water supply, information technology, pedagogy, transport communications, economics, energy-supply. Currently, each subject area of the dictionary is located in the Internet GoogleTable and contains about 1000 terms. It has the possibility to be simultaneously filled by several teachers. The linguistic database of the dictionary is not created by the traditional way of processing a large number of paper dictionaries and combining the received translations. Lexis from sequential processing of scientific and technical English periodicals of particular subject areas is the base of it. The software of the proposed electronic dictionary is designed taking into account the analysis of modern electronic multilingual translation dictionaries and is a client-server application in Java programming language. The client part of the system contains a mobile application for the Android operating system, which was tested on tablets and smartphones with different screen diagonals. The interface of TechLex dictionary is designed in such a way that only a single zone is activated according to the query, so there is no need to view all the subject areas of the dictionary. The proposed TechLex dictionary is the first technical multilingual electronic dictionary with an English-Belarusian-Russian version.
In literature, writers have the liberty to deviate from linguistic norms under a principle known as poetic license. Poetic license allows deviation in favour of making language inspiring. Deviation from linguistic norms often implies that writers can take liberties with word formation, thus neology in literary contexts should be addressed specifically. This article analyses the status of literary coinages in the scope of neology and describes the specific context of children’s literature. The article also offers a typology of nonce formation processes for occasionalisms, with textual analysis, from a corpus of children’s books, using J. Tournier’s matrices of lexicogenesis [2007: 51].
This article is the third instalment in a trilogy of studies that deal with corpus-driven Bantu lexicography as applied to Lusoga. Having dealt with corpus-building in Part 1, and macrostructural aspects in Part 2, we now focus on the microstructure of a dictionary and in particular on the concept of Mapping Meaning onto Use. The starting point is Patrick Hanks's book chapter by the same title, which we transpose to a study of the high-frequent motion verb -v- in Lusoga. Our detailed analysis is as much practical as it is methodological.
Philology. Linguistics, Languages and literature of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania
This paper presents the results of an analysis of the development of the antonymic database of the Ural School of Semantics. To compile a new dictionary of synonyms and antonyms, comparative research of lexicography resources was conducted. The researchers studied six traditional dictionaries as well as the Russian Wiktionary and the Great Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Synonyms, which is being compiled under the supervision of Professor L.G. Babenko. All the materials having been converted into a machine-readable form, the researchers compared the alphabetic glossaries with the basic parts of dictionaries. The article also includes an analysis of aspectual pairs of verbs, as well as the correlation of direct and reverse antonymic pairs. The author discusses data related to the number of antonymic pairs in each dictionary and the overlapping of glossaries in the lexicographic resources in question, providing comments to the statistical data of the resources, including the most comprehensive ones (the Russian Wiktionary and the Great Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Synonyms). The author also defines the nuclear and peripheral zones of Russian antonymy. The former comprises 57 antonymic pairs, present in all dictionaries (abstract — concrete, antipathy — sympathy, poor — rich, etc.), and the latter has about a thousand antonyms, which appear at least in four of the eight dictionaries. The peripheral zones are identified with reference to the Russian Wiktionary. Additionally, the article describes groups of antonyms, united by a reason, which prevented them from being included into classic dictionaries. The author draws conclusions concerning problems with describing Russian antonyms and opportunities of further work within the framework of the research programme of the Ural School of Semantics.
History (General) and history of Europe, Language and Literature
"User-friendly corpus sentence: Parameters for automatic selection"
he paper presents how corpus sentences can be used in learners’ lexicography and in data-driven language learning.
There are two methods for the automatic selection of corpus sentences suitable for language learners: machine learning methods and rule-based methods. The paper focuses on the rule-based methods and describes them through the example of a tool called GDEX (Good Dictionary Example) (Kilgarriff et al. 2008). GDEX helps automatically select sentences suitable for language learners. It takes into account certain parameters: sentence and word length, threshold of low frequency words, keyword position, the absence and presence of certain words etc. The paper introduces the parameters of Estonian GDEX configuration and discusses which parameters need to be studied further.
The paper also introduces the new corpus EstonianNC GDEX, aimed at language learners. The corpus contains only sentences that meet the requirements for Estonian GDEX configuration. In the sentences there are no low frequency words, vocabulary is controlled (no slang, vulgarisms or profanities occur), and all sentences are full sentences and contain verbs. At the moment, the new corpora is accessible only in the corpus query system Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004). In future, it will be possible to integrate it into dictionary portals aimed at language learners.
The article examines the semantic structure of the legal term. Nowadays, with the rapid development of cross-cultural communication, people, while pursuing their professional career, learn specific languages, including the language of law, with terms being its important component. Terms can often impede the process of successful cross-cultural communication so teaching cross-cultural communication, according to many researchers, including P. Cranmer and K. Koskinen, is immensely important. The article aims to demonstrate that a legal term, a word or phrase used in legislation, is a generalized name for a legal concept that may lack a precise meaning in practice as it is polysemous. To proof this statement, the semantic structure of the legal term is studied from the cognitive point of view. The key terms (term, frame, lexico-semantic variant of a word, microframe (reference category)) are defined at the beginning of the article. The article also describes the classification of various semantic structures of terms developed by Prof. Belyayevskaya, based on an analysis of the cognitive foundations of the typology of semantic structures as well as on the classification of meanings. They are homogeneous semantic structures, with different lexico-semantic variants of a polysemous word representing different aspects of one microframe; these structures include monosemous terms, polysemous terms with a homogeneous semantic structure, and terms with the intermediate type of lexemes. Heterogeneous semantic structures are semantic structures, with a lexico-semantic variant of a word representing two or more reference categories rather than one category; these structures are considered to be “classical” polysemy. Two types of such structures are introduced in the article, with examples of the actualization of their lexical meaning in speech being analysed (there were used examples from the British and Russian National corpora; official legal documents and English and Russian law texts) and polysemy of legal terms being explained. The research is based on legal terms represented in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, New Large English-Russian Dictionary, English-Russian Comprehensive Law Dictionary and Black’s Law Dictionary. The study implements definitive, contextual, conceptual, and contrastive analyses. The results of the study may be used in lexicography, in teaching English to law students and in translation and interpreting training.
Polish in the light of grammaticalization theory
The paper is concerned with grammaticalization, a type of language change whereby lexical items, in specifi contexts, come to serve grammatical functions, and grammatical items acquire new grammatical functions. The aim is twofold: to shed light at the main properties of grammaticalization, and to demonstrate its applicability to Polish data. Some prominent examples in Polish are discussed: the grammaticalization of modals, imperative and avertive constructions. The paper closes with a non-exhaustive list of leads for further research into grammaticalization in Polish.
Computational linguistics. Natural language processing, Semantics
Marek Maziarz, Maciej Piasecki, Stanisław Szpakowicz
et al.
Semantic relations among nouns in Polish WordNet grounded in lexicographic and semantic tradition
The paper describes a system of lexico-semantic relations proposed for the nominal part of plWordNet 2.0 – the largest Polish wordnet. We briefly introduce a wordnet as a large electronic thesaurus. We discuss sixteen nominal relations together with many sub-types proposed for plWordNet 2.0. Each relation is based on linguistic intuition and supported by a set of tests which facilitate its identification. There are two main groups: pure lexico-semantic relations and semantic-derivational relations.
Computational linguistics. Natural language processing, Semantics
Radom se analiziraju ključni segmenti djelovanja češke manjine u Savskoj banovini 1930-ih s naglaskom na općinske izbore 1933. i 1936. te skupštinske izbore 1935. godine. Iako su Česi još od osnutka Kraljevine Srba, Hrvata i Slovenaca podržavali ideologiju jugoslavenskoga unitarizma i centralizma, za što su zauzvrat Oktroiranim ustavom bili nagrađeni pravom osnivanja manjinskih škola te isticanjem pripadnika češke manjine kao zamjenika na vladinoj listi prilikom skupštinskih izbora 1931. godine, sustavno prolongiranje rješavanja pitanja državljanstva velikoga broja pripadnika češke manjine te opće osiromašenje češkoga seljaštva i obrtništva u manjim seoskim sredinama uslijed posljedica velike gospodarske krize te velike korumpiranosti jugoslavenskoga vladajućeg aparata dovelo je do političkog raslojavanja češke manjine. Dok je dio češke manjine okupljen oko Čehoslovačkoga saveza radi očuvanja vlastitih pozicija nastavio podržavati državni unitarizam i centralizam, češko seljaštvo počelo se priklanjati opozicijskom HSS-u, koji je nudio rješavanje njihovih gospodarskih problema, da bi javnim priznanjem češke kulturne i narodne individualnosti osigurao podršku i pripadnika manjine okupljenih oko Čehoslovačkoga saveza, koji se kroz pisanje novina Jugoslávští Čechoslováci počeo otvoreno zalagati za rješavanje hrvatskoga pitanja.
ABSTRACT: The teaching of foreign language, in this case the Spanish Language, using the dictionary as a source of research has become essential in working with literary texts, considering the complexity of unknown words with which the reader / student encounters and unknown. Sometimes, unknown words relate to own lexicons of certain regions and represent a diversity of which the reader / student has not had / has access. This lexical diversity is part of the Spanish Language, since the cultures are diversified and people who make use of it. Therefore, it is intended to summarize the lexicography and its object, after this, applying the use the dictionary in Spanish-American tale, El Hombre by Juan Rulfo, seeking to ascertain which lexicons were found in the dictionary SEAS - Spanish production, destined to Brazilians - and who required consult on electronic dictionaries available on the Internet, or even on websites.
KEYWORDS: Dictionary; Literature; Lexicon.
Lexicographical project presented new type based on the idea of describing the Russian dialect phraseology as an object that has independent linguocultural value and broadcast to a specific type of mentality of Russian man.