Approximation and suppositionThis article compares exponents of approximation (expressions like Russian около, примерно, приблизительно, более, свыше) and the words expressing supposition (for example Russian скорее всего, наверное, возможно). These words are often confused in research, in particular researchers often mention exponents of supposition in case of exponents of approximation. Such approach arouses some objections.The author intends to demonstrate in this article a notional difference between approximation and supposition, therefore the difference between exponents of these two notions. This difference could be described by specifying different attitude of approximation and supposition to the notion of knowledge. Supposition implies speaker’s ignorance of the exact number, while approximation does not mean such ignorance. The article offers examples proving this point of view.
The Bulgarian-Polish-Russian parallel corpusThe Semantics Laboratory Team of Institute of Slavic Studies of Polish Academy of Sciences is planning to begin work on the creation of a Bulgarian-Polish-Russian parallel corpus. The three selected languages are representatives of the main groups of Slavic languages: Bulgarian represents the southern group of Slavic languages, Polish – the western group of Slavic languages, Russian – the eastern group of Slavic languages. Our project will be the first parallel corpus of these three languages. The planned corpus will be based on material, dating from one period (the 20th century) and will have a synchronous nature. The project will not constitute the sum of the separate corpora of selected languages.One of the problems with creating multilingual parallel corpora are different proportions of translated texts between the selected languages, for example, Polish literature is often translated into Bulgarian, but not vice versa.Bulgarian, Russian and Polish differ typologically – Bulgarian is an analytic language, Polish and Russian are synthetic. The parallel corpus should have compatible annotation, while taking into account the characteristic features of the selected languages.We hope that the Bulgarian-Polish-Russian parallel corpus will serve as a source of linguistic material of contrastive language studies and may prove to be a big help for linguists, translators, terminologists and students of linguistics. The results of our work will be available on the Internet.
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