The paper deals with the Slovak linguistics from the view point of its values at the beginning of the 21st century, especially as presented in the concept by Ján Horecký and in the prediction about the future attitudes to language, which were presented by Jiří Neústupný 20 years ago. The author says that the focus of Slovak linguistics on a system and a certain isolation of the language and its users is about to be overcome. This tendency is confronted with language holidays such as International Mother Language Day and European Day of Languages.
The paper deals with the issue of standardization of foreign geographical names in Slovak. The issue for discussion is the standardization of the name Lombardy instead of the hitherto used name Lombardia. The author analyses the relationship between these competitive names and their functioning in Slovak. She bases his findings on the frequency of occurrence of these names in the corpora of the Slovak language – the family of web corpora Aranea and the Slovak National Corpus. The analysis takes into account the issues of lexicographic processing of these names, the principles of standardization of foreign names in Slovak, as well as international trends leading to reduction of exonyms in national languages. The practical use of the names Lombardia / Lombardsko is evidenced by examples from corpora. The author also notes them in the context of the linguistic adaptation of other names in the Italian regions. She considers the prioritization of the exonym Lombardsko at the expense of the form Lombardia through standardization as a manifestation of adaptive maximalism and linguistic purism in general in Slovak. Thus, the question of standardization of geographical names in Slovak also acquires a sociolinguistic dimension.
The paper pays attention to paradigmatic relations of word-formation, particularly to the component of word-formation system represented by the concept of word-formation chain which is the evidence of recursiveness in word-formation. The word-formation chain is defined as the order in which words follow each other while the next word is derived from the previous one in a row, e.g. Slovak voda ‚water‘ → vodník ‚water goblin‘ → vodnícky ‚relating to water goblin‘. The analysis concentrates on a statistical, word-formation and morphological analysis of 44,705 word-formation chains of sizes ranging from two to eight members. The most frequent chains consist of three words, two words, or four words, respectively. The data are based on Slovník koreňových morfém slovenčiny [Slovak Dictionary of Root Morphemes] (Sokolová et al., 2005, 2007, 2012).
The basic results of interdisciplinary analysis of primeval faience beads (terminus technicus in archaeology) have been presented. They were found in the grave N. 1 at the site Spišské Tomášovce, position 3, Fortification I. The findings of five beads with partially saved layers of glass glaze with turquoise colouring on the surface have been examined. The beads were found in the skeleton grave No 1 of the Košťany Culture from Early Bronze Age. The optical investigation has been made by microscope Jena Vert Carl Zeiss Jena with CCD -Iris Sony camera. The chemical content of the beads has been specified with the help of electronic microscopy (SE M). The petrographic characteristics of the findings have been specified with microscope Olympus EX50. The conclusion was that the beads were produced probably with the method of cementation and were coloured with the use of oxide of copper.
The basic requirement for international professional communication is a precise expression and a harmonized multilingual terminology of the domain. The author treats the possibility of establishing such a system of terms in the field of slaughtering meat, its culinary preparation and the preparation of dishes at the base of meat. The aim is to create a French-Slovak system of terms used in the field of gastronomy previously envisaged. Resources can be divided into several groups: recipe books, culinary dictionaries and encyclopaedic works, research, manuals, standards and codes, etc. The research provides not only partially harmonized terminology, but also shows a number of specific semantic and terminological inconsistencies, as well as suggestions for their solution. The various methods and processes necessary to delineate the subject, to create systems of terms and to harmonize terminology will be attempted. At the end, a critical evaluation of results will be proposed from the point of view of confirming or rebutting assumptions about the harmonization and equivalence of the terminology being addressed.
Comparative balance inventory of the post-Velvet Revolution development in both Slovak and Czech literature represents a record of the qualitative and quantitative differences connected with a reintegration of works belonging to samizdat and exile communicational circle in the national literary corpuses. Besides, it places on record different forms of such phenomena like spiritually oriented poetry, surrealism, postmodernism with their specific features in the both Slovak and Czech environments. It also points out the fact that while in the Slovak society after November 1989 the impulses from the exile and its literature influenced mostly political and religious life, in the Czech environment they were manifested mainly in a new value ordination of the national literature. The article concludes that two decades of democracy evidently confirmed autonomy of both the mentioned national literatures, although some of the phenomena seem to be common on the both sides during the mentioned period. The main common denominator was the fact that both of the literatures were quite remarkably enriched during the last two decades from quantitative as well as qualitative aspect.
Present paper attempts to scrutinize the 18th-century interpretational debates between the Slovak and Hungarian proto-nationalist circles and persons about the Great Moravian past and about the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition. The article does not intend to introduce the contradicting historical narratives in detail, or analyse the righteousness of stances in light of later research results, but to focus on a special dimension of these disputes: i.e. how emotional and intellectual motives could play a role in the evolvement of identity debates. The conceptual framework of the research is that beside clear interest-motives (including personal or collective interests, as struggle for prestige or position), the feeling of being hurt by “untrue” statements could also bolster personal identification processes and inter-ethnic boundary-making processes. The paper’s general contribution to identity studies and conflict studies is that – beside interest-based motives, like struggle for power and (personal or collective) domination – emotional and cognitive motives are also relevant in nation-building, while their strong interrelatedness seems to be also evident. Methodologically, the early Slovak-Hungarian debates on Great Moravia, Svatopluk or on the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition – despite the scarcity of sources – seems to be a suitable research terrain due to the lack of institutionalized structures of nationalization; hence, bottom-up identification and boundary-making processes might be easier to detect than in later ages.
The aim of this article is to give an overview of global environmental problems, outline the ways in which countries and people have tried to solve them and present some of the most important aspects of global environmental policy as part of its development. The influence that international relations scholars and global environmental policy scientists can have on policy-makers is also solved, with a primary focus on diffuse influence. Political and scientific measures and international regimes that have tried to solve certain environmental problems or tried to find a compromise between these measures are also mentioned.
The following study draws attention to the emergence of homonymous language units as a result of a simultaneously acting process of neologisation or more precisely internationalisation as their most productive source in the last more than two decades in the Slovak-Bulgarian language correlation.
This article aims to systemize the trends in world literature research, highlighting the differences between the concepts of this phenomenon as embraced by “small” and “large” literatures. It also takes account of the Czech and Slovak line of thinking which questions the concept of world literature as normative poetics or the standardized canon of masterpieces and their various discourses. The historical experience of Czech and Slovak comparative literary studies defending the independent values of Slavic literatures suggests that there cannot be any arbitrary research on world literature. With some exceptions and regardless of their terminologically and semantically different interpretations of this specialism, contemporary theoretical concepts (as embraced by Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Marko Juvan, Franco Moretti, etc.) re-establish recognizing world literature as an international research issue or a subject employing English as a universal means of communication. Imposing such notion would allegedly condone inequality as a kind of epistemological framework to codify the binary opposition of “developed” and “underdeveloped” or “the centre” and “periphery”. It was mainly the Czech-Slovak structuralise tradition (represented by Frank Wollman, René Wellek, Dionýz Ďurišin, etc.) that rejected national literature as a natural starting point of world literature. Anchored in the Central European intellectual milieu at the crossing of various aesthetic movements, these “defensive” theories were linked with the structural concept of the Prague Linguistic Circle, letting alone the multilingual tradition of the former Habsburg Empire and the phenomenon of migration which implied the aspect of polyglossia and heterotopia as a breeding ground for comparative scholars.
The first part of the study deals with the question of how the domestication of Anglicisms is related to the ethno-structural and orthographic setting of the receiving, i.e., from the point of view of adaptation, the dominant language. Attention is also drawn to the fact that the degree of adaptation differs significantly in individual thematic groups of words and communication spheres. The second part explains how this disparity is related to the naming function of the borrowed words, but also to the attitudes of Slovak speakers. The third part of the study reflects the increasing number of intolerant attitudes towards adapted forms of Anglicisms naming common realities. This phenomenon and its consequences in the form of a weakening of the principle of dominance of the receiving language is demonstrated in the textual functioning of the unadapt Anglicism puzzle and its adapted variant pucle.
Lemmatization and morphological tagging is an indispensable step in Slovak corpus linguistics. In this article, we evaluate two state-of-the-art Slovak language lemmatizers and MSD taggers. One is based on MorphoDiTa and the other is based on spaCy. We measured accuracy on the test subset of manually lemmatized and MSD annotated corpus and found that the combination of lemma and tag achieved 93.5% accuracy with MorphoDiTa, and 95.6% accuracy with spaCy. Most of the errors occurred in disambiguating MSD tags for homonymous uninflected parts of speech such as particles, conjunctions, and adverbs, and in disambiguating singular masculine inanimate nominative and accusative. In these cases, spaCy shows a noticeable improvement over MorphoDiTa, likely due to a better exploitation of the context of the words.
The paper is based on the brief data on the syntax of the Orava dialects in Habovštiak’s monograph Oravské nárečia [Orava Dialects] (1965) and tries to detect some peculiar syntactic forms, the functioning of synonymic constructions with regard to their territorial distribution, frequency, stylistic characteristics and place on the temporal axis. The material base of the paper consists of samples of dialect texts published in Habovštiak’s monograph and his extensive anthology of dialect narratives Oravci o svojej minulosti [The Orava Inhabitants about Their Past] (1983). Results of the research indicate that, in comparison with neighbouring dialects, Orava dialects use syntactic constructions with the primary prepositions do, na, za to a larger extent, and that they also express the simile by means of the conjunctions sťa and že. The productive item of their syntactic system is the genitive of negation, as well as several kinds of infinitive constructions. A characteristic feature of all Orava dialects is the use of the negative form of the 2nd pers. sg. The verb mať [to have] in the function of denying existence – as a synonym of the form ňejest it is the main element for expressing this meaning in the dialects of Upper Orava.
Drawing on data from the Omnia Slovaca IV Maior corpus, the paper presents a case study of the Slovak structure C1[Keď/Ak už SUBJ musieť INF… ‘if/when already SUBJ must INF’] C2[(then) (at least) …] when it is used as a pragmatic modal construction (PMC) in the sense, as is customary in Construction Grammar (CxG). In CxG, the term “construction” is used for a form-function unit that is likely to be stored in a speaker’s mental repository of words, idioms, recurrent sequences, and semi-fixed patterns. Sarcastic use of modal verbs in these cases proves the notorious ambiguity of modal verbs which are often used in utterances with specific pragmatic effects. Within given structures, the former modal meanings of the modal verb have receded and have been lost to peripheral pragmatic meaning with its illocutionary function very close to a complaint or a reproach. To identify intra-clausal and cross-clausal associations of the patterns under scrutiny, statistical tests applied in covarying-collexeme analysis will be applied to reveal which filler items (in terms of grammatical and lexical features functioning as constructional elements) contribute to the degree of its entrenchment.
The year 1989 marked a new stage in the Slovak historiography which allowed a new reinterpretation of the previous research and opened up topics which were considered taboo until then. This article discusses the results of scientific research in the field of Rusyn´s history in the twenties of the last century. This later research showed that it was a crucial period for them. On the one hand, in this period began divergent development that separated Rusyns of eastern Slovakia from their countrymen in Ruthenia. On the other hand, while this development was initially perceived negatively, it is argued that of the entire homeland of Rusyns in the Carpathian Mountains, Rusyns in eastern Slovakia have probably the best prospects for their further national development.
This contribution is a sequel to the first part of the Latin lexical excerpts published by the author in Slavica Slovaca, 46, 2011, No. 1, pp. 40-50. The present lexemes are taken from Martinus Szent-Ivany, Dissertatio haeresiologico-polemica, Tyrnaviae 1701. Non-classical vocabulary (not included in Oxford Latin Dictionary) is registered and considered within the context of the post-classical, medieval and Neo-Latin lexicon. Special attention is paid to how Neo-Latin lexicographers (O. Borrichius, J. Noltenius, A. F. Kirsch a. o.) presented the respective lexemes in their dictionaries.
In this paper, basic statistical data about the Slovak linguistic units (lemmas, word forms, collocations, parts of speech or rather word classes) are analysed using various language resources. The frequency of lemmas and word forms in contemporary Slovak according to the dictionary Frekvencia slov v slovenčine (Frequency of Words in the Slovak Language) by Jozef Mistrík (1969) is compared with the data obtained from several Slovak National Corpus versions and some of its subcorpora. This provides an overview about the stability and dynamics of the Slovak language system in various areas of its usage during the last fifty-five years. Statistical information summarized in the frequency dictionaries and lists helps to understand better and more objectively the functioning of the linguistic units in communication. It also helps to determine the attributes of both typologically distant and close languages. This contribution serves as a demonstration of the possibilities of statistical analysis and it will be used as a base for preparation of a new frequency dictionary of Slovak based on the Slovak National Corpus material.
The research on the relationship between antepreterite (AnteP) and text focuses on the following questions: (a) To what extent is an antepreterite a living form in Slovak? (b) Does antepreterite function as a grapheme with a temporal function or is it a stylistic variant of the preterite (past tense)? (c) How do the functions of antepreterite correlate with the oral/written realization of the text and its stylistic differentiation (scientific/ journalistic style)? The research is carried out on the extensive material of the corresponding sub-corpora of the Slovak National Corpus and the Slovak Spoken Corpus. The results can be summarized as follows: (a) AnteP is a marginal form, its frequency in the written text has significantly decreased since the mid-1990s; in orally realized communication, its speakers are mainly in the 70-90 age range. At the same time, however, it is a living form in some specific functions: in spoken text, as a means of social and personal deixis, it characterizes a person using what he or she has had. In memoir narrative, it signals the experience of spatial, temporal, and generational distance. In the scientific style, the AnteP of communicative verbs dominates. It specifically functions as a means of intertextuality. In the 1st person singular (as I had told/ako som bol povedal; as I had written/ako som bol napísal) it refers to a communicative act from the quite recent past. From a temporal identifier, it becomes a pragmatic comment. In the journalistic style, the rate of representation of AnteP is the lowest, but the rate of innovation of its form and function is the highest. Antepreterite is most prominent in journalistic texts as a stylistic variant of preterite and a part of the individual personal style of an author.
The utilization of folklore elements in composed music was explored by Slovak musicologists and composers during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Their views were published in monographs, historical syntheses, studies, and essays in periodicals and journals. Perspectives on the selection of folklore models and on the way of their utilization in musical compositions kept changing according to the various historical periods and the contemporaneous social and cultural situation. This study presents an overview of the perspectives of Slovak musicologists and composers on this issue within three concepts of working with folklore models: an aesthetic, a historical, and a theoretical-analytical one.
The study deals with the question when does the reflexive marker sa, si accompanying a verb present the clitic form of the pronoun and when it can be described as the reflexive morpheme used to derive verb with reciprocal semantics. Considering the results of a semantic test (reciprocity as the typical implication of the verb semantics) and syntactic test (the possibility to use the verb in the subject discontinuous construction), we came to the conclusion which verbs can be considered as derived reciprocals and thus should be processed in the dictionary and in which cases the reflexive marker is used to coin the reciprocal construction of non-reflexive verb with the reciprocity as possible, yet not typical implication.
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