The author examines auxiliarity on the level of lexical units. He views it like a counterpart to the language units with full lexical meaning and it is placed among the other phenomena of the asymmetrical arrangement of formal and semantic part of language units and signs. The author views auxiliarity as a normal part of the natural language and he sees its place in the sphere of asemantic or empty phenomena in language and on the other hand in the field of zero elements in language.
The article points out a need to respect synchronic as well as diachronic aspect in explanatory description of the language system. Generalisations abot the contemporary state of language should have a synthesising character based on detailed knowledge about the reasons of departure from the uniform transparency in paradigms.
In Rational Animals Davidson argues that language is constitutive for thinking, i.e. that thinking requires possessing the notion of thought or belief. This thesis is the point of departure for author's deliberations. He tries to show that on one interpretation this thesis leads to surprising consequences. Even if a child acquires a language, it is possible that he/she doesn't think, because it is not necessary to acquire the notion of thought to possess linguistic abilities. To deal with this difficulty the author suggests that the ability to think be redefined as the ability to manipulate internal representations.
The article was written on the basis of the statements made by Ukrainian students of Polish origin recorded between 2001 and 2002. The speakers supported an opinion that was incomprehensible to most of the native speakers of Polish: one neither needs to know the mother tongue of a given nation nor speak it on a regular basis to feel a rightful member of the nation (the knowledge of Polish is not necessary to feel a Pole and, correspondingly, one does not need to speak Ukrainian to feel a Ukrainian). Therefore, contrary to what is generally believed, the language is not an indispensable component of national identity. Such a conclusion can be drawn on the basis of statements concerning the attitude towards Ukrainian in case of students declaring Ukrainian nationality and the attitude towards Polish in case of students declaring Polish nationality. The speakers' opinions on this subject vary depending on where they live in Ukraine. Regardless of that, the language may constitute a welding element for a multinational community. Such is the case with Russian among the Poles from the East studying in Poland though some of the students reject Russian as the national/official language in the country of their origin.
Traditionally, we associate the language concept with that of communication. In practice, however, this conceptual link is treated by linguists too loosely and arbitrarily. In the current study, we try to render the relationship of language to communication more transparent and accurate. We start by confronting the properties of speaking with those of other modes of human interaction. Such an approach helps us to gain a more adequate insight into the nature of language, its origins and its role in our life.
This paper assesses Luhmann’s conception of language as structural coupling. Luhmann treated language as a medium, but also tried to incorporate the Saussurean concept of sign. The paper will deal with three conflictive points. The first one is the erasure of all psychic reference that Luhmann performs. The second issue is Luhmann’s refusal to consider language as a system. The third point poses the question about the ontological bases of language, in comparison to those of the auto-poietic systems.
An essay on the relationship between language (mother tongue) and the human subject and its existence. It develops ideas of the Prague School of structural literary analysis (in particular, those of Bohumil Trnka, Vladimir Skalicka, and Jan Mukarovsky), cognitive linguistics, and hermeneutics, employing the concept of cultural competence, including criticism of its state in contemporary Czech society.
We are witnessing a growing popularity of tabloids in Poland. This is a result of two phenomena that will be the subject of my analysis: first, the content tackled by the tabloids, second — the way it is disseminated, characterised by the dominance of the image over the word. The article presents the results of research into the language of two Polish tabloids, Super Express and Fakt. Using the language of these tabloids, I analyse the most important vectors in the vision of the world and the image of humanity they propose. The research has shown that Polish tabloids present a vision of humanity and the world characterised by such categories as sensationalism, extraordinariness, commonness and shocking content. The system of values they present is highly relative. These newspapers, targeted at a wide public, use a colloquial language to a large extent.
Galicia is in the far north-west of the Iberian peninsula. It was an independent kingdom, until the mid-14th century, was Galician the language of the whole society. Since it had no native nobility or bourgeoisie, Galicia fell under permanent Castilian domination in the 13th century, with a significant influence on the use of the Galician, reduced exclusively for a private life in rural areas. In the 1950s begun the expansion of the education system and of the Castilian-language media, facilitated the generalized penetration of Castilian. Since 1981 it has possessed the status of an autonomous community within Spain. The autonomous government (Xunta) adopted a number of measures designed to promote the knowledge and use of Galician, but the effectiveness of the measures of Xunta is often questioned.
The research was aimed at finding the measure of influence of cognitive-individual variables (Need for Structure, Ability to Achieve Cognitive Structure, Self-Esteem, Cognitive Style ‘Category Width’), linguistic variables (Verbal Intelligence, Morphology Score), and demographic variables (Study-year, Grade, Living abroad) on syntactic abilities of students studying English language and culture at the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. Subsequently, we investigated the relation between syntactic ability and chosen variables. We used the following research methods: PNS Scale (Thompson et al., 1992), AACS (Bar-Tal, 1994), RSES (Rosenberg, 1965), C-W (Pettigrew, 1958), I-S-T (Amthauer, 1953, in Halama, Tomková, 2005), and Syntactic Abilities Test (Užáková et al., 2010). Findings showed a negative correlation between syntactic abilities and Morphology Score, between Study-year, Morphology Score and Grade. A positive correlation was observed between syntactic ability and Verbal Intelligence, and a negative correlation between Verbal Intelligence and Need for Structure. The observed variables explain 34% variability of syntactic ability in foreign language.
The goal of the presented paper is to present general overview of lexical motivation in the language of advertising. It provides short description of the advertising in general and description of its language. The advertising basically contains verbal or visual representation of the advertised product, or the combination of verbal and visual signs that should be in balance and should cooperate to successfully accomplish the aims of advertising – to engage attention of percipients, to arouse their interest in the advertised product, to be memorable and, finally, to sell the product. Besides the visual representation of the advertised product the language of advertisement is very important. The lexical representation of advertising can be motivated in several ways. The paper deals with the selected specific lexical motivations in advertising – semantic/figurative, phraseological, inter-lingual, expressive, sociolectical, territorial and individual motivations. The paper provides general description of the respective motivation and its application to the language of advertisement with a set of specific examples.
The author analyses content and formal structures of a sermon as an individual genre. He reasons that texts of religious communication sphere are not united on a base of a special religious style, but they are related to the several functional language styles.
The article draws on Tugendhat’s idea of the twofold character of truth resulting from the twofold structure of self-conciousness. When asking the question Who is a person?, there is always our implicit self-evidence present. And from Kant on we also ask explicit questions, such as How do we want to understand ourselves? And What is better for us? This articulation of the problem – a product of Enlightenment – involves a rejection of the traditionally shared truth about a person. Therefore, Tugendhat’s project includes the transformation of an implicitly valid universe of meaning into explicitly justified positions. Wittgenstein’s arguing that when thematising the limits of language we cannot transcend these limits is used to show that Tugendhat’s efforts to explicitly articulate the universal structure of understanding of the concept of a human being as a whole does have its implicitly shared cultural determinations, too.
This essay discusses several topics concerning the relations between language (linguistics) and music (musicology). The first section deals with the problems of the semiotic interpretation of music (instrumental and absolute) and finds that the difficulties in arriving at clear-cut solutions to them follow from the problematic and unclear status of the signatum of musical works. In the following section, the question of 'musical content' is discussed on the basis of two classically opposing standpoints: aesthetic autonomy and aesthetic heteronomy. A further issue examined is the existential mode of musical works (with emphasis on their interpretive essence) and the position of 'text' in musical discourse. A small set of established Italian and Czech terms indicating the manner of execution are examined and their semantic vagueness and heterogeneity stated. The final section briefly comments on the various manners and genres of talking and writing about music. In particular, several texts from sleeve notes are critically examined and the usefulness as well as the problematic musicological status and mixed linguo-stylistic qualities of various concert guides, program booklets, etc. are examined.
The article deals with the questions of the dynamics of a text in comparison with the dynamics of a language. Nowadays, the understanding of the concept dynamics is not problematic in the linguistics, and it may refer to a broad, historically conducted research. The question is how to understand the dynamics of a text, i. e. if there is any uniting principle which can serve as a support. A more detailed analysis shows that the collocation the dynamics of a text represents three different conceptual understandings: it is the dynamics of a thematic and compositional construction, the particular communicational dynamics, and the historical or development dynamics of a text. Finding of this condition refuses a possibility of defining one universal understanding of this concept.
Two groups of Czech and Slovak linguists collected extensive linguistic material comprising video recordings of parliamentary sessions broadcasted on television, audio recordings of radio debates, video recordings of television interviews and discussion programs, and political advertising material from television and radio. This material was stored in archives (corpora), with the relevant parts of it transcribed, entered into special databases, analysed and evaluated. The book under review is theoretically and methodically well-founded in its evaluative analyses of three typical examples of Czech mass-media political debates and two contributions characterizing political communication in the Slovak media. These content analyses are supplemented by an introductory chapter on polemical features in political discourses. The reviewer, after having critically examined and commented on the individual chapters of the book (adding several personal observations on the issue), concludes that the work is a significant and praiseworthy achievement, successfully highlighting the present state of Czech and Slovak text linguistics, esp. dialogue studies, through both subject relevance and high scientific standard.
It is a truism that semantic concepts (concepts of meaning, denotation, reference and even truth, etc.) are relative to language. I distinguish two their kinds in accordance to their relativity to language L; the relativity is either explicit (“true in L”), or implicit (“trueL”). If language is explicated, the concepts of the former kind can be easily explicated in a plausible way and we resist semantic paradoxes. In the case of the latter concepts, the explication is also accessible and paradox-free. One can find then new interesting facts concerning famous Tarski’s theorem.
This article discusses language planning developed by the Spanish in the kingdom of Nueva Granada, now Colombia. They found an area with very special characteristics. First, Nueva Granada was a mixture of pre-Columbian civilizations. Second, that territory did not have a dominant language before the Spanish. Third, the colonizers faced very different sociolinguistic objectives: the communication with the metropolis, the translation of indigenous languages, the evangelization of the new citizens. The result was a diglossia, finally, many indigenous languages retained. Curiously, the Spanish Crown was more tolerant of linguistic diversity in America than in Europe.
There has been an ongoing intensive research of the nature of human mind in contemporary cognitive science. The author ś aim is to point out the role of metaphorical language in the experimental and theoretical mind studies. The analysis subject is to emphasize heuristic and argumentative function of metaphor in models of cognitive science representatives. Viability of this strategy appears by solving problems reaching beyond the imaginary boundaries of disciplines, f.e. reality-fiction, literal-metaphorical, text understanding, the nature of truth etc. putting significance on the function of metaphorical language in art, philosophy and science has become a great challenge for reconsidering traditional approaches to the study of human mind, body and reality.
This paper describes some of the methods usually grouped under the label of conceptual analysis. It delineates and compares three such methods: constructive method, detection method, and reductive conceptual analysis. For each of these three kinds of conceptual analysis, the problems which motivate its use are specified and the well-known instances of their application are discussed. Based on the general model of method as an ordered set of instructions, the three types of conceptual analysis differ in specifying the instructions involved in their use.
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