Languages are an integral part of everyday life; they define our interactions with other people as well as the physical and mental spaces we inhabit over time. Since ancient times, languages have fascinated humans. [...]
The Germanic terms for the days of the week that contain the names of Germanic deities are often taken to result from Romano‐Germanic interactions in the fourth century AD. Yet this need not be the case: the linguistic arguments underpinning this view are not decisive. A reassessment of these names suggests that an early medieval process of transfer in scholarly Christian contexts may be equally, if not more, plausible.
This volume brings together a collection of twelve papers originating from a workshop entitled “Phonology and Morphology of the Germanic Languages,” which the editors organized at the Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, in August 1997. It is divided into three sections: phonology, prosodic morphology, and morphology. A variety of languages and topics are treated, ranging from Icelandic vowel length and Scandinavian accent to Old English, Dutch, and German nominal inflection. There is some treatment of earlier stages of languages and historical topics do come up, but the emphasis is decidedly synchronic. Almost all the papers adopt a constraint-based approach, and a number are developed within the framework of optimality theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993). A brief overview of each of the papers follows.
The article aims to disseminate Spanish through an interdisciplinary methodology. To promote reflection on culture from within culture itself, it is suggested to investigate past events using contemporary mechanisms as a starting point. This means highlighting modern works of art that can connect students with historical aspects while fostering their motivation. In alignment with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, three ideas are offered in order to enrich purely linguistic approaches. They are literary materials, closer to entertainment than to traditional didactic resources, and figuratively expose some of the key issues of recent Spain. The first proposal consists of a rapper's poetry that tackles sensitive topics for Western society, while the second one focuses on the new version of a folk composition by another female artist. Thirdly, the role of an actress in the movie about a tragic period for Spaniards is referenced. The poem, the song and the film seem interesting because they are likely also unknown to foreign learners. Ultimately, the objective is to shed light on the contrasts and similarities between their own values or heritage and those of the target language.
в статье рассматривается применение корпусной лингвистики для анализа грамматических и стилистических особенностей германских языков. Обоснована актуальность применения корпусного подхода при изучении языков и отдельных его языковых явлений. Проведен анализ современных исследований по вопросам применение корпусной лингвистики для анализа грамматических и стилистических особенностей германских языков, в частности, немецкого, датского, шведского. Определены преимущества применения корпусного подхода при изучении грамматических и стилистических особенностей языка. Отмечено, что корпусный подход применяется на базе качественного и количественного методов анализа текстов в рамках отбора как одноязычных корпусов, так и параллельных. При этом одноязычный корпус чаще всего используется в целях определения частотности употребления тех или иных грамматических конструкций, стилистически маркированных языковых единиц и коннотаций в рамках текста определенного стиля / жанра. Параллельный корпус направлен на исследование семантики и прагматики грамматических конструкций и стилевых черт оригинала в его переводе на другой язык с точки зрения их содержательной интерпретации, тем самым достигается системный уровень анализа эквивалентности в рамках сопоставительного аспекта. the article discusses the use of corpus linguistics to analyze the grammatical and stylistic features of Germanic languages. The relevance of using the corpus approach in the study of languages and its individual linguistic phenomena is substantiated. An analysis of modern research on the use of corpus linguistics to analyze the grammatical and stylistic features of Germanic languages, in particular German, Danish, and Swedish, has been carried out. The advantages of using a corpus approach when studying the grammatical and stylistic features of a language are determined. It is noted that the corpus approach is used on the basis of qualitative and quantitative methods of text analysis within the framework of the selection of both monolingual and parallel corpora. At the same time, a monolingual corpus is most often used to determine the frequency of use of certain grammatical structures, stylistically marked linguistic units and connotations within a text of a certain style/genre. The parallel corpus is aimed at studying the semantics and pragmatics of grammatical structures and stylistic features of the original in its translation into another language from the point of view of their meaningful interpretation, thereby achieving a systemic level of equivalence analysis within the framework of the comparative aspect.
The study was carried out within the framework of the current problems associated with the evolution of the absolute participial construction in several living and extinct languages of the Romance, Germanic and Slavic groups. The controversial issues, versions of the origin and development of the structure in these languages ("Latin", "Greek" and "autochthonous") are discussed. The structural and semantic features of the absolute participial construction are compared. It has been established that in the languages under study, the construction has a binary structure that includes a name (noun or pronoun) playing the role of a logical subject, and a participle in the role of a logical predicate. Together with the main sentence, the construction forms a paratactic syntactic complex, the constituents of which are not connected with each other by means of service words. Similarities include the ability to express definitively or syncretically temporary meaning; as for the differences, they are the expression in some languages of a causal, conditional, concessive, target, connecting meaning. Depending on the peculiarities of the development of grammatical systems of languages, the structure may include participles of different types, prepositions may be present, the structure may take both the general case form and another case fixed by the language for this type of structures. The words order, which can be either direct or inverse or depend on the transmitted meaning or part of speech of the subject, also differs in the languages. In conclusion, the necessity of further comprehensive analysis of this type of structures is substantiated.
The human capacity to construe artificial languages has been manifested in several distinct domains including at least the following goals: to increase communication, to explore real languages, to avoid philosophical and logical ambiguities and to evoke imaginary worlds. This chapter analyses these goals and reveals that the notion of impossible language has been productive even outside linguistic research.
This chapter presents a general description of North American Icelandic (NA Icelandic), a heritage language spoken by a few hundred speakers in language conclaves in the Northern Plains of the United States and Canada. The description is mainly based on studies of the development of Icelandic as a heritage language in intense contact with English in North America (Arnbjörnsdóttir 2006). Generalizations about features of the NA Icelandic lexicon, morpho-syntax and phonology are presented in an effort to lay the groundwork for the next stage of NA Icelandic heritage linguistics. Finally, a possible future research agenda for NA Icelandic is outlined that is in line with the recent discussion about the importance of heritage languages for our understanding of the acquisition and loss of language (Benmamoun et al. 2010).
Abstract. In this paper the formal semantics of Spanish directive verbs, especially permissive deontic verbs, is studied. A dynamic perspective is adopted in which the meaning of an expression is not its truth conditions but its discourse update potential. The paper focuses on the following aspects of directive permission verbs: the analysis of their basic meaning in contrast with other modals; aspectual and temporal restrictions on the complements of permission verbs; restrictions on the subject of permission verbs; combinations of modals; and conjunction and disjunction of permission statements. A unified account is presented in a dynamic modal framework. An action is conceived of as a program expression denoting a set of sequences of states. Each sequence represents an execution of the action. Modal (directive) verbs are treated as operators introducing universal or existential quantification over sequences of states.