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Centred around six exceptional Danish linguists: Vilhelm Thomsen, Otto Jespersen, Kristian Sandfeld, Louis Hjelmslev, Knud Togeby and Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, this paper analyses the development of linguistics in Denmark from mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century. The paper makes evident that these linguists, through their scholarship, research area, choices and methodology, together with their reciprocal interactions and joint affiliations, had a strong influence on the evolution of Danish linguistics.

The paper presents the methodological and technological challenges in the creation of the multilingual, corpus-based lexicographic resource CombiDigiLex (https://combidigilex.wixsite.com/deutsch), with three main aims. First, the application-oriented research context and grounds for the development of the multilingual lexico-grammatical information system CombiDigiLex, which is intended to provide information for the languages German, Spanish and Portuguese, for its use in the L2 production and translation process, are presented. Furthermore, the most relevant features of the mentioned resource in its current version (v.1.0.6) are presented. Finally, the methodological and technical difficulties of data gathering as well as lexicographic data displaying, that not only had to be overcome during the official project period, but which even at the time of writing this paper are still partly open fronts, are outlined.

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania 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.)

Long before the coining of the term "polysemy" (Bréal 1897) the many senses of linguistic units have been analyzed, such as sacred, legal or literary texts, logical propositions, scholarly terms or simple words. This paper focuses on the two opposite methods of handling polysemy-before- the-word-existed developed by lexicographers and encyclopaedists in France, between the treatise Des Tropes by the grammarian philosopher Dumarsais (1730) and the 6th edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie (1835). It shows how close is Breal's notion of « polysemy » to the option of dividing the different meanings of a term according to the distinct domains of knowledge they are relevant to, as practiced by the encyclopaedists (d'Alembert, Beauzée), in order to remind that polysemy is not a pure fact but a theoretical and methodical option, related to some particular linguistic tasks (here, to make an inventory and a classification rather than to give an interpretation or a translation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studii de Ştiintă şi Cultură is the property of Studii de Stiinta si Cultura 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 paper tackles the question of automated meaning acquisition. In several cases, meaning change can be considered as a process spreading both in time and through domains. In addition, this phenomenon relies on interactions between word meaning in discourse and dictionary definitions. We outline the main steps of a procedure to highlight the spread of a new word meaning in corpus, to extract semantic content represented by domain labels and to match corpus and dictionary information. The methodology is illustrated by experiments on several lexical units observed in a press corpus ranging from 2004 to 2010 and divided into several domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Coptic grammars appeared for the first time (middle of the thirteenth century), only the dominant Arabic linguistic tradition could serve as a point of reference. However, Coptic, which was losing its status of vernacular, does not belong to the same family as Arabic. Through some typical samples related to script, phonology, and morphology, this paper tempts an insight into the way the Arabic conceptual and terminological apparatus was applied and adapted to Ancient Egyptian in its final stage. We show that in general medieval Coptic grammarians did in fact succeed in their undertaking. Whatever deficiency one may find, this should not necessarily be imputable to the linguistic tradition that acts as a model, but rather to the external conditions affecting the very intellectual activity of the protagonists.

This paper offers an analysis of the French integrated consecutive (result) construction, starting out from the correlative system observed in the ancient Indo-European languages, in particular the one which J. Haudry terms « dyptique inverse ». It is shown that the morpheme que, a relative marker, has a content that is identifiable on the basis of the main clause (as in the case of canonical relative clauses) but which functions as a causal principle in relation to the subordinate clause. At the same time, it is also shown that sentences containing consecutive subordinate clauses involve two distinct structures superimposed one on the other: one of these is defined in terms of the hierarchical constituents of distributional analysis, and the other in terms of two independent clauses. The latter structure makes it possible to account for certain ambiguities that may be found in their interpretation. In that respect as well, consecutive clauses are similar to canonical relatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper “Similarities between Comparative and Exclamative Degree Markers: French ce and Spanish lo”, we first analyse the so-called pseudo-relativized phrasal comparative construction X que ce que P in French and X de lo que P in Spanish. We after compare the pseudo-relativized phrasal comparative construction properties with the properties of the exclamative French construction Ce que P! and of the Spanish one ¡Lo X que P ! whose form, degree reading, and some syntactic and semantic features are similar. We eventually conclude about the nature of que/que, introducing both subordinate constructions, as a complementizer (and not a Wh- item). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the interaction, or very close interdependence, between lexicon and grammar in the domain of Romance subordinating conjunctions. It is shown that fully lexical elements do not allow for a number of changes from a syntactic class to another (sub-) class, and, conversely, that empty words of the same class do allow for such changes. There are grammatical patterns that are not in accordance with their original nature. These turn out to be related to certain semantic classes of subordinating items, and are to be analysed in terms of syntactic/ semantic parallelism constraints operating on the clauses under conjunction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper deals with the preposition au-delà de as a scalarity marker in three languages — French, English and Hebrew — representing each a distinct family: Roman, Germanic and Semitic, respectively. Our study is performed in the theoretical framework of the semantics of degree (cf. J. Hay, C. Kennedy, B. Levin 1999 ; C. Kennedy & L. McNally 1999 ; C. Piñón 2000 ; C. Kennedy 2001 ; C. Kennedy & B. Levin 2002 ; P. Caudal & D. Nicolas 2003, among others). Most of the current studies concentrate on the analysis of scalar and comparative modifiers. However, little has been said about the prepositional environment. The purpose of this study is, therefore, to find out what makes a prepositional phrase capable of measuring a property or an event on a degree scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present the conversion of a specialized dictionary of bioindustries by means of Lexical Functions (Mel’čuk et al. 1984, 1988, 1992, 1999 ; Mel’čuk et al. 1995). The dictionary is based on semantic derivation as described in Explanatory and Combinatorial Lexicology, and explores compatibilities with lexico-syntactic descriptions as in Fillmore (1977, 2003) and Levin (1993) in order to assign circumstantial Lexical Functions. We first describe semantic relations such as hyperonymy, hyponymy, synonymy, antonymy and several cases of meronymy ; subsequently, we discuss verbs and predicative relations with reference to arguments and adjuncts. Finally, we explore the possibility of pursuing the research with an additional entry for definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The aim of this paper is to present a contrastive analysis of reformulation markers in French (c’est-à-dire) and in Greek (δηλαδή). Within this perspective, we propose to examine in which cases we can substitute one marker to the other in order to verify if they are equivalent or not. The analysis shows coincidences in their prototypical functions such as explanation and definition, whereas differences arise when pragmatic factors are involved. Assuming that those differences have roots in discourse, parallel differences are expected to be found in their semantic instructions. We argue that their comparison can lead us on one hand, to seize their common properties allowing them to permute in similar contexts, and, on the other hand, new markers, that were not taken into account initially, can reveal new data for this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a general lack of web-based tools for morphologically complex dead/old languages. Reading texts in such languages even with dictionaries is quite challenging. It is difficult to identify the lemma of a word form occurring in texts, which one could look up in a dictionary. The need for additional grammatical information about a word (classes of declension, conjugation, etc.) poses another problem. The Lexicographic Centre at Ivanè Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (TSU) has embarked on creating a fully digitalized, web-based chrestomathy of Gothic and Anglo-Saxon texts with dictionaries and grammatical paradigms integrated in it, which would facilitate the study of these linguistically important languages. Each word of the digital versions of Gothic and Anglo-Saxon texts is hyperlinked to the corresponding headword from the dictionary. The dictionary entry itself, in addition to the meaning of the word, provides via another hyperlink all necessary information concerning the morphological class and inflectional patterns of the word in question. The paper describes the structure of the Chrestomathy and its modus operandi; analyses the dictionary component of the online resource and some lexicographic solutions; discusses lexicological and technical aspects of the online resource, etc. The method applied in the Chrestomathy can be successfully used in developing similar resources for extant, morphologically complex languages characterized with the abundance of inflectional and suppletive forms, such as Hungarian, Turkish, Russian, German, Georgian and many others.

n this paper, we scrutinize and compare the African lexical elements shared by several varieties of Upper Guinea Portuguese Creoles, belonging to the three branches of this group: (i) Continental (Bissau, Cacheu, Casamance, and Geba), (ii) Insular (Fogo and Santiago), and (iii) ABC islands (Curaçao). This is the first study to provide comparative data for a wide range of different creoles of this group. The comparison is based on a standard list of 96 African-derived terms attested in Santiago Capeverdean Creole and builds on three main comparative criteria: (i) presence/absence of a given African-derived term, (ii) phonetic similarity and (iii) semantic similarity. The results show how these items help us understand better (i) which African languages were the main contributors to the formation of the early Upper Guinea Proto-Creole that must have been spoken around the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as (ii) the historical and phylogenetic relationships existing between the various Upper Guinea Portuguese Creoles at stake. Particularly worthy of mention is the examination of the African element in Fogo Capeverdean and the considerations about the internal classification of the Continental branch of this group of creoles.

The aim of this article is to assess the soundness of the Verb Second (V2) hypothesis as applied to the Medieval Romance languages against some critical stances that have emerged in the literature. In the first part I retrace the main steps through which research conducted in the frame of historical comparative linguistics could recognize some generalizations concerning word order, clitic placement and subject expression, and I show how these were merged into the V2-hypothesis developed in the frame of Generative Grammar. In the second part I offer a critical discussion of the main objections that have been raised against this hypothesis, which I classify in three main types: 1. some refute the hypothesis by simply ignoring the relevant facts; 2. others deny that word order in Medieval Romance was ruled by a V2-system by emphasizing the differences from Germanic V2; 3. still others deny that the V2-hypothesis can account for the Romance word order by ascertaining constructions that the hypothesis cannot explain. I show that the objection raised do not affect the core of the proposal: 1. the facts are real, and the V2-hypothesis can explain them; 2. differences exist between Germanic V2 and Romance V2, but the core phenomena are the same; and 3. alternative word orders are attested in Medieval Romance, but these are the remains of previous linguistic stages which survive as archaisms near the prevailing V2-system. In the third part I comment on some empirical problems that are in need of more extensive research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of this issue is the analysis of the bilingual Japanese – Italian Dictionary published in 1994 (second edition 2008) by Shogakukan of Tokyo. The analysis concerns the use of the bilingual dictionary as a tool in Italian language learning for Japanese native speakers. This paper analyzes in particular the structure of the dictionary (both the macrostructure and microstructure), from the word list and the phraseology, to the metalanguage and the symbols, the additional information and the sections in the addendum.

This paper presents the results of a comparative study of English and French translations of Norwegian predications of intransitive motion events containing the path prepositions mellom [between], gjennom [through] and over [over/across]. These three prepositions may code paths that cross a barrier. The data for the study consists of the translation equivalents in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus of intransitive motion predications containing all three Norwegian prepositions. The English translations are shown to conform by and large to a satellite-framed pattern. As for the French translations, there are differences between all three path types with respect to both verbal and adverbial coding. There are quite a few tokens in which manner is coded verbally for all three path types, perhaps more than one would expect in the case of what is commonly taken to be a predominantly verb-framed language.

After pointing out the shortcomings and methodological weakness of the general theory of linguistic reconstruction, the author disputes the alleged antiquity of Uralic. Proto-Uralic as reconstructed by the scholars seems to be the sum of a set of features belonging to several distinct language families. The paper examines a number of lexical concordances with historically attested languages and comes to the conclusion that the Proto-Uralic word-stock is the result of a sum of borrowings that took place from the most disparate languages: Balto-Slavic, Old Swedish, several Turkic dialects, Mongolic, Tunguz, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, late Middle Persian dialects, Byzantine Greek and Latin. Yet, other languages may also come into account: Chinese, Caucasian languages as well as languages unknown in present day are possible candidates. A large number of bases of the Uralic wordstock can be easily identified by following a few phonological constraints. The linguistic features of the Uralic daughter-languages seem to show that they originated from a pidgin language spoken along the merchant routes that connected the Silk Road to North- and East-European trade. It is a well-known phenomenon that sometimes, when groups of people speaking different languages come into contact for the first time, a new restricted language system (lingua franca or pidgin) comes into being in order to cater to essential common needs. For this reason, pidgins tend to arise along trade routes. Taking into account the characteristics of the original word-stock as well as the report of the Byzantine Emperor Constantinos Porphyrogennetos, according to which the Magyars learned the language they speak from the Xazars, the place of origin of the Proto-Uralic pidgin is to be identified with the Xazarian Qaγanate. The Xazarian Qaγanate succeeded in gaining full control over the trade in the Caspian and Black Sea regions during the three hundred years 650–950 of our era. The Xazars are known to have established their trade posts from the Talas Valley in Kazakhstan up to the very heart of Sweden. Xazaria was one of the main trade routes in the early Middle Ages, and the most likely place where a new language might have developed. The Uralic languages are very probably the creolised offspring of an ancient pidgin that developed around the Xazarian trade posts and along the trade routes controlled by the Xazars.

As the title suggests, the paper presents the contrastive analysis of the meanings of the basic colour term blue and green in Italian, French and Polish. As the first step prototypical reference of the term is established in each language. Most attention is paid to the idiomatic and paremiology extension of the prototypical meaning. An attempt is made to discover cultural similiarities and differences "hidden" in the analysed words.

The aim of the text is to present some of the mechanisms which have been identified in linguistic semantics as leading to "multiple senses". After introducing the notion of plurisemy and contrasting it with polysemy, it thus describes "semantic integration" (i.e. the way semantic constraints associates one with another), using multiple examples, and shows how the diversity of constraints which have to be satisfied implies the coexistence within interpretation of various interpretative strata, but also how the satisfaction of a single constraint may take various forms and thus lead to multiple meanings. Different strata which have been identified so far (namely morphemic, constructional, contextual, prosodic comments) are then described, while it is also shown the inexistence of anything that could be called "sentence meaning", for if sentences do introduce constraints on interpretation, the way these constraints can be satisfied is not introduced by the sentence. It is finally shown that i) within a pool of constraints, each constraint actually drives the interpretation of the others; ii) and that as a consequence, far from being a marginal or peripheral phenomenon, both the diversity of meanings and the superposition of interpretative strata must be recognized for what they are, namely an open window into the real nature of the mechanisms which govern interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the critical research into the history of archaeology, the paper aims to explore the influence of linguistics and, more generally, the role of language in modern societies, upon the formation of the culture-historical approach in the discipline, focusing upon the situation in the Serbian archaeology. In doing so, the author follows the series of the similar critical historical accounts of the history of archaeology, pointing to the conceptual burden carried along with the culture-historical practice of attributing artefacts according to their cultural affiliation, automatically making inferences about the cultural/ethnic identity of the people who used them. The need to analyse the relationship between linguistics and archaeology at the time of formation of the discipline originates from the standpoint that, even if we do not advocate the complete rejection of the culture-historical tradition (still impossible, however), it is nevertheless necessary to understand the ways in which certain meanings were formed, implicit to the archaeological concept of culture. In this way, it becomes possible to avoid the interpretive mistakes inherent to the conceptual burden of the discipline.

This paper deals with all types of articles, their use and their “no-use“, as one of the traditional parts of speech, as “one of the odious instruments of our grammar" (Alexis François, La grammaire du purisme et l'Académie française au 18ème siècle, Paris, Société Nouvelle de Librairie et d’Édition, p. 70). It creates a real dividing line for the language phenomenon, because it divides languages into two distinct categories: languages with article and languages without article. Beyond the grammatical technicality created by the article system and the absence of article within the nominal group, this presentation allows us to rethink the noological and phenomenological necessity of this grammatical category. It is therefore necessary to wonder about the absence of articles in languages ​​with articles (French, German, English, Italian, Macedonian, etc.) and on the absence of articles in languages ​​without articles (Croatian, Serbian, Russian, Turkish, etc.). In languages ​​devoid of any article system, a determinant of numeral origin is related to the article. It appropriates an indefinite adjective value: “(a) certain”. Both possibilities or both ways to express articles in those languages ​make it possible to enrich the binary tensor in psychomechanics of language. It happens as soon as we add the median extensities, not reducible to the traditional scale known as “definite article” – “indefinite article” – “zero article”.