Book of Abstracts, SCLC 2012

Page 1

BOOK OF ABSTRACTS

SCLC 2012 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Zagreb Croatian Philological Society Zagreb, 27-29 September 2012


SCLC 2012

Plenaries Ewa Dąbrowska Northumbria University, UK Economy and extravagance in grammar Linguists have traditionally set great store by the principle of economy. General rules and principles are almost universally preferred to more specific ones; and any rule or principle that can be subsumed under a more general statement is deemed redundant, and hence unnecessary. Most linguists also assume, either implicitly or explicitly, that language learners extract the most general rules compatible with the data they are exposed to, and, consequently, that speakers of the same dialect extract the same rules. This general methodological stance, as well as the specific assumptions that follow from it, have been challenged by usage-based approaches to language. Proponents of such approaches (Langacker 1988, 2000; Bybee 2005, 2010; Barlow and Kemmer 2000) maintain that in mental grammars, low-level rules and specific exemplars co-exist with more general rules; and to the extent that linguistics aims to be a cognitive science, adequate linguistic description must reflect this. In this presentation, I review several experimental studies showing that native speakers do indeed rely on local generalizations even when these can be subsumed under more general rules, and that different speakers sometimes extract different rules from comparable input, and discuss their implications for linguistic theory.

Davor Dukić University of Zagreb Imagology as text analysis: towards the (re)construction of an image Imagology was established in the 1960s as a sub-discipline of comparative literature, but during the last three decades it has been practiced also (or primarily) in various philological departments across the Western world. Imagological discourse has always been situated between the study of text and the study of culture, i.e. between the analysis of fiction and generalizations about geo-cultural spaces. On this particular occasion, I will focus on the philological part of imagology and discuss some problems concerning imagological text analysis, such as: the geo-cultural mapping of a fictional text; the linguistic scheme of an image (imagotypical representation of some geo-cultural space); imagotypical prejudices and the difference between a practical concretization (reading) and an analytical reconstruction of an image; “semantic obstacles” as axiological ambivalences or contradictions in the same text, intertextual allusions, diachronic changes of an image, irony, etc.

2


SCLC 2012

Mirjam Fried Charles University, Prague Constructional variation: the case of Czech relative clauses The talk explores one of the central challenges in grammatical analysis, namely, capturing the inherently dynamic, variable nature of grammatical structure. The theoretical issues will be illustrated on one particular syntactic form in Czech that has been largely ignored in the grammatical literature: relative clauses with the non-declinable relativizer co + resumptive pronoun (exs. 1-2), against the background of the stylistically and semantically neutral relative clauses introduced by the fully declinable relative pronoun který ‘which’. The co-relativization represents a robust family of constructions that show varying degrees of schematicity, each with a set of characteristic properties. The relevant analytic categories, with implications for relativization strategies beyond the Czech facts, revolve around the referential type of the relativized noun, the interaction between relativization and deixis, and the semantic contribution of the proposition expressed by the relative clause. The analysis takes into account also freqsuency-based patterns of usage as attested in the Czech National Corpus. Using the analytic and representational tools of Construction Grammar, I will show how grammatical generalizations can be organized in cognitively and communicatively coherent networks of overlapping grammatical patterns. The networks provide a way of (i) identifying points of fluctuations within the usage of a particular form and (ii) tracking incipient shifts within a functional space. (1) a. ta paní, co u nás bydlí, je moc hezká that woman CO at us lives is much pretty ‘the woman [CO] lives with us is very pretty’ b. proč jsem nevyhrála já, co to víc potřebuji? why AUX.1SG not.won 1SG.NOM CO it more need.PRES.1SG ‘Why wasn’t the winner I, who needs it more?’ (2) Ten člověk, co jste ho za mnou kdysi poslal, viděl jste ho ještě někdy? that man CO AUX.2PL 3SG.ACC after me once sent ‘The man [CO] you sent [him] to me a while back, did you ever see him again?

Papers in general sessions and theme sessions Hyug Ahn Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Iconicity and prototypicality in Russian biaspectual verbs Category of aspect reflects a speaker’s interpretation of a situation and Russian has developed a unique system of verbal aspect. Binary opposition of perfective and imperfective is morphologically mandatory for all verbs, but there are so many exceptions. The grammar of verbal aspect seems chaotic and biaspectual verbs are an example of the exceptions. Biaspectual verbs express one aspect in a given context, but it is sometimes difficult to decide 3


SCLC 2012 the aspect based on the contextual information. The isomorphism gets weaker as the newly borrowed biaspectual verbs use affixes to express aspectual difference. Prefix po- and suffix iva- make new aspectual partner or pair of biaspectual verbs. These new aspectual relations resemble the prototypical relation of Russian aspect, which is binary opposition of perfective and imperfective. Therefore it is possible to say that Russian biaspectual verbs are related to the prototype with the iconicity in their forms and meanings. In other words, Russian biaspectual verbs reflect that language constantly evolves and in the center of the evolution is located the concept of prototype. These verbs were in the periphery of the category of Russian aspect, but the number of the group gets bigger and the members adapt themselves to the prototype of aspect. Prefixation and suffixation show the evolution of biaspectual verbs from the periphery to the center of aspect category in Russian. These verbs constantly increase by borrowing foreign words and the evolution will be observed more frequently. The following diagram summarizes the current research:

Agnieszka Będkowska-Kopczyk & Wojciech Lewandowski University of Bielsko-Biała / Independent researcher O-/ob- in Slovene and o-/ob(e)- in Polish. A Comparative Cognitive Analysis This paper presents a comparative analysis of the verbal prefix ob- ‘round, around’ in Slovene and Polish from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Following Goldberg (2006) as well as Michaelis and Ruppenhoffer’s (2001) analysis of be-verbs in German, we assume that the combinations of prefixes and verbs form abstract argument structure constructions, in which prefixes denote the core event-structure schema consisting of a spatial configuration between a trajector (TR) and a landmark (LM) (in the sense of Langacker), while verbs add some additional information to the constructional meaning. In accordance with the widely accepted assumption that linguistic categories constitute a radial network of senses, we show, through a corpus study, that the prototypical spatial sense of the prefix is instantiated by two interrelated event schemas, both related to the notion

4


SCLC 2012 of circularity. In one of them, the TR moves around a LM (e.g. (1); in the other, the TR causes a LM to be surrounded by some entity, as in (2). (1) Slovene Janez je obšel hišo. Polish Jan obeszedł dom. John ob-go-PAST house-Acc ‘John went around a house.’ (2) Slovene Janez je obvezal roko s povojem. Polish Jan obwiązał rękę bandażem. John ob-wrap-PAST hand-Acc bandage-Inst ‘John bandaged his hand.’ As far as the semantic relation between the verb and the constructional meaning is concerned, we observed that the verb prototypically specifies the manner in which the action denoted by the prefixed event-structure schema is performed (e.g., expressions such as those in (1) and (2) can be paraphrased as “John moved around the house walking” and “John caused the hand to be surrounded by a band by means of binding, respectively). Furthermore, we demonstrate that these central spatial configurations give rise to different spatial sub-configurations (e.g. the TR moves partially around a LM, the TR acts partially around the LM, or the TR moves around his or her axis) and metaphorical extensions. The latter emerge, according to the Invariance Hypothesis, when the ontological elements from the concrete source domain are mapped onto an abstract or target domain. For instance, both in Slovene and in Polish the two prototypical spatial senses of the ob-pattern are the basis for two different types of mental (be it perceptual, emotional or cognitive) activities. The spatial configuration in which the TR moves around a LM metaphorically extends to a configuration in which the TR moves mentally around a LM. The configuration in which the TR causes a LM to be surrounded by some entity metaphorically extends to a configuration in which a LM is surrounded by an abstract entity. The first extension is coded by Experiencer-Subject mental verbs (e.g., Slovene ogledati si, Polish oglądać ‘o-watch’), and the latter, in contrast, is coded by Experiencer-Object mental verbs (e.g., Slovene obdolžiti, Polish obwinić ‘ob-accuse’). References Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work. The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Michaelis, L., Ruppenhofer, J. 2001. Valence Creation and the German Applicative: The Inherent Semantics of Linking Patterns. Journal of Semantics (18), 335-395.

Neil H. Bermel & Luděk Knittl University of Sheffield ‘Infrequency effects’ in Slavic morphosyntax A growing body of evidence (e.g. Divjak 2008, Kempen and Harbusch 2005, 2008) suggests that high frequency in a corpus is a good predictor of the acceptability of an item to native speakers of the language. A rather trickier question has proved to be what to do with infrequent items, especially when they are not only infrequent in an absolute sense (relative 5


SCLC 2012 frequency in a corpus) but also infrequent in a proportional sense, i.e. for a particular morphosyntactic slot an alternative construction is preferred in the majority of instances. In usage, such items appear to be largely – but not completely – pre-empted by the dominant variant. However, our research has shown that native speakers often rate such items as reasonably acceptable, despite the finding that they are relatively rare in the written environment. The questions here include: why is entrenchment incomplete in these instances, i.e. why do non-dominant forms continue to appear in discourse, and why do they continue to attract at least middling levels of acceptability judgments, when their rarity should lead them to be dispreferred? In our research, we looked at Czech words whose locative and genitive singular case endings were potentially variable, i.e. they were members of the “masculine hard stem” pattern, which exhibits the endings -ě/-u for the locative singular slot and the endings -a/-u for the genitive singular slot. Most words have the latter ending; a restricted number of nouns have the former ending; and a small but very common set display variation between the two. As a proxy for usage, we employed the SYN2005 subcorpus of the Czech National Corpus. This subcorpus has 100m items drawn from a balanced range of written texts; the proportions of text types in the corpus reflect recent research into the habits of the reading public. A spread of lexical items that use these endings in varying proportions in the corpus was chosen. Questionnaires were subsequently drawn up that asked native speakers to rate the acceptability of these forms in minimal (sentence-long) contexts, drawn from the corpus with certain modifications. The respondents – c. 300 primarily non-linguists from Czech universities and an academic high school – rated items on a 7-point Likert scale, which were then subjected to ANOVA to determine which factors were most significant in determining their ratings. Initial findings (Bermel & Knittl, forthcoming) confirmed a strong link between frequency and acceptability, but also noted the persistently high ratings for some items found in very low proportions and low relative frequencies in the corpus. Further analysis of the “less significant” factors (Bermel & Knittl 2012) shows that syntactic environment plays a pervasive, if low-level role in people’s acceptability judgments, and it appears that certain syntactic constructions with a high degree of uniformity can boost the acceptability of the non-dominant form. This suggests an alternative reading of entrenchment and pre-emption. Much of the scholarly literature (e.g. Brooks & Tomasello 1999, Bresnan 2006, Goldberg 2009) is based on examples from language acquisition, where the endpoint is known and results in the ruling out of one or another variant, or constructions like the English ditransitive, where there is a clear direction of historical travel. Czech morphosyntax presents a far murkier case where, despite the general expansion of the u ending in both cases, the -a and -ě endings also seem to maintain high acceptability in their own, restricted syntactic domains. Our suggestion is thus that the end result of the processes of entrenchment and pre-emption might not always be deterministic; they can result in an oscillating steady state in which both forms retain a degree of acceptability in a range of constructions. References Bermel, Neil and Luděk Knittl: 2012, Morphosyntactic variation and syntactic environments in Czech nominal declension: Corpus frequency and native-speaker judgments. Russian Linguistics 36 (1): 91–119.

6


SCLC 2012 Bermel, N. and Luděk Knittl: In press, ‘Corpus frequency and acceptability judgments: A study of morphosyntactic variants in Czech’. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Bresnan, Joan: 2006, Is knowledge of syntax probabilistic? Experiments with the English dative alternation. In Featherston, Sam & Wolfgang Sternefeld (eds.), Roots: Linguistics in search of its evidential base, 77–96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Brooks, Patricia J. & Michael Tomasello: 1999, How children constrain their argument structure constructions. Language 75 (4). 720–738. Czech National Corpus (Český národní korpus) – SYN2005. Available on the web at www.korpus.cz Divjak, Dagmar: 2008, ‘On (in)frequency and (un)acceptability’, in LewandowskaTomaszczyk, B. (ed.), Corpus linguistics, computer tools and applications – State of the art, Frankfurt, 213–233. Peter Lang. Goldberg, Adele: 2009, ‘The nature of generalization in language’, Cognitive Linguistics 20, 93–127. Kempen, Gerard and Karin Harbusch: 2005, ‘The relationship between grammaticality ratings and corpus frequencies: A case study into word order variability in the midfield of German clauses’, in Kepser, S. and M. Reis (eds.), Linguistic evidence: Empirical, theoretical and computational perspectives, Berlin and New York, 329–349. Kempen, G. and Karin Harbusch: 2008, ‘Comparing linguistic judgments and corpus frequencies as windows on grammatical competence: A study of argument linearization in German clauses’, in Steube, A. (ed.), The discourse potential of underspecified structures, Berlin, 179–192.

Karoly Bibok University of Szeged A lexical-constructional treatment of the Russian locative alternation Background. The investigations in this paper are carried out in the framework of a lexicalconstructional treatment of syntactic alternations, i.e. changes of syntactic argument structures (Bibok 2010). This treatment has been offered instead of well-known and widely used lexical and constructional approaches rivaling with each other (Arad 2006). The basic idea of such a proposal is that the disadvantages characteristic of the rivals may be overcome if both lexical and constructional factors are simultaneously paid due attention. According to the lexicalconstructional conception of syntactic alternations, lexical meanings are considered underspecified. At the same time, they are encyclopedically and pragmatically rich enough to motivate two or more constructionally emerging meanings. Meaning representations built such a way guarantee alternating syntactic structures of the same verbs. Since research into lexical meaning needs interactions between the lexicon and pieces of encyclopedic or contextual information, lexical-constructional analyses are extended to lexical pragmatics, which takes a contextualist stance against a minimalist one in the debate on the semanticspragmatics boundary. Investigations. I attempt to apply the above mechanisms to Russian locative alternation and elaborate an underspecified lexical representation that results in different interpretations in different constructions. The core idea of my analysis comes from S. Iwata’s (2005) work on English locative alternation verbs. However, the lexical-constructional investigations in the present paper have their special features both in connection with lexical and constructional 7


SCLC 2012 meanings. As a conclusion, it can be stated that more predictive power can be ascribed to a lexical-constructional approach to syntactic alternations than to lexical or constructional conceptions because the former exactly distinguishes the verbs in (1)(3) that alternate from those non-alternating in (4)(6). Cf. (1) (2) (3)

(4) (5) (6)

а. б. а. б. а. б.

Иван мажет масло на хлеб. Иван мажет хлеб маслом. грузить лес на баржу грузить баржу лесом брызгать воду на цветы брызгать цветы водой

а. б. а. б. а. б.

Ваня сыпал сахар в банку. *Ваня сыпал банку сахаром. Иван лил топливо в бак. *Иван лил бак топливом. *венчать корону на голову монарха венчать голову монарха короной

References Arad, M. 2006, The spray-load alternation. In: The Blackwell companion to syntax, vol. IV, Eds. M. Everaert – H. van Riemsdijk, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 466–478. Bibok, K. 2010, From syntactic alternations to lexical pragmatics. In: The role of data at the semantics–pragmatics interface (Mouton Series in Pragmatics 10.), Eds. E. Németh T. – K. Bibok, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 261–304. Iwata, S. 2005, Locative alternation and two levels of meaning. Cognitive Linguistics, 16, pp. 355–407.

Maja Brala-Vukanović & Anita Memišević University of Rijeka From 'od-' to 'do-' in Croatian. Sources, Goals, boundaries and beyond in prefixal semantics In order to try and contribute to the existing contrastive and comparative look at South Slavic spatial language, and possibly prompt new lines of research in the aforementioned scholarly context, the authors of this paper propose a simultaneous inquiry into a series of ‘od-‘ and ‘do-‘ prefixed verbs in the Croatian language. We take a look at all the root verbs that, in standard Croatian, appear in combination with at least one or with both of these prefixes, examining the semantic features of root verbs, and the semantic network of prefixed verbs. The analysis, grounded in the cognitive linguistic framework, centrally looks at the relation between closed class lexical items (in this case two prefixes), and the semantic elements which seem to be systematically associated with these morphological units, where the central issues examined are related to the semantic features of the root verbs combining with the prefixes under scrutiny, and the semantic similarities and differences between the root verb and the prefixed verb. The analysis is largely based on Janda's (1986) analysis of ‘do-‘ and ‘ot-‘ in Russian. Here, it is however worth noting that in the literature on Slavic prefixes, ‘do-’, i.e. its 8


SCLC 2012 translational equivalents, have received considerably more attention that ‘od-‘, i.e. its translational equivalents. A contrastive semantic analysis of the verbs resulting from the prefixation with both of these elements, might also shed light on the possible answer as to why this is so. The two central questions of the paper are: a) what are the similarities between and differences in the lexical coding of semantic elements in the context of verbal activity as expressed in Croatian ‘od-‘ and ‘do-‘ prefixed verbs (and, furthermore, is this related to the well known Goal-Source asymmetry in language and cognition, see e.g. Markovskaya, 2006; Papafragou, 2010); and b) what is the relation between spatial and other meanings expressed by ‘od-‘ and ‘do-‘ prefixed verbs (considering also the relation to the root verbs). Less directly, but by no means less centrally, the paper also opens up a number of issues linked to prefixation (such as the contribution of the prefix to verbal semantics, as well as the issue of crosslinguistic lexical patterning universality vs. specificity). By exploring the semantic network of the ‘od-‘ and ‘do-‘ prefixed verbs in standard Croatian, the authors propose a series of motivated links between central, spatial semantic components expressed by ‘od-‘ and ‘do-‘, and less central but related semantic elements, which belong to (stem from, and relate to) other domains of experience, thus giving rise to metaphorical extensions (of spatial / motional meanings) into the non-spatial domains. The key notions of Source and Goal are, in final analysis, coupled with concepts such as ‘closure’, ‘retribution’ and ‘severing’ (for ‘od-‘), and ‘addition’ (for ‘do-‘). These elements are repetitively realized in a number of human experience domains, which are systematized in a network of senses. References Janda, L. A., 1986. A semantic analysis of the Russian verbal prefixes za-, pere-, do- and ot-. Verlag Otto Sauger, München. Markovskaya, E., 2006. Goal-source asymmetry and Russian spatial prefixes. In: Peter Svenonius (Ed.), Tromsø working papers in Language and Linguistics: Special Issue on Adpositions (Nordlyd). Vol. 33. pp. 200-219. Papafragou, A., 2010. Source/goal asymmetries in motion representation: Implications for language production and comprehension. Cognitive Science, 34. pp. 1064-1092.

Mario Brdar & Rita Brdar-Szabó University of Osijek/Eötvös Loránd University Croatian place suffixations in –ište: polysemy, metonymy and metaphor The focus of this presentation are Croatian suffixed nouns ending in –ište. According to Babić (1986: 123), there are actually five related suffixes forming a cluster: -ište, -lište, -elište, -ilište, and –ovište). The first is claimed to be mildly productive, the second is very productive, while the rest is unproductive and occurs only in a handful of formations. Their distribution seems to be morphologically and phonologically conditioned in an intricate way, but for our purposes the variant –ište will be treated as the underlier, and the rest as its allomorphs. If we exclude the last allomorph above, the cluster is semantically very compact: apart from a small number of suffixations denoting physical objects, all the other denote place names, e.g.: (1) igralište ‘playground, playing field, court’, ognjište ‘fireplace, hearth’, vrelište ‘boiling point’, klizalište ‘skating rink’, središte ’centre, middle-point, center-point’, gledište 9


SCLC 2012 ‘position, viewpoint, standpoint’, biralište ‘polling station’, crpilište ’pump site, well field’, krumpirište ‘potato field’, sajmište ’fair, market-place’, kućište ‘case, casing, enclosure, housing’ Their counterparts in many other Slavic languages, besides some morphologically simple words, are either suffixations with a cognate suffix, or complex nominal expressions. Their counterparts in some Germanic or Romance languages, and in Hungarian, tend to be either compounds or complex nominal expressions. These complex nominal expressions and compounds share certain structural elements: the heads of compounds or of syntactic phrases that function as counterparts are lexical items denoting point-like, field-like, or house-like entities. On the basis of such elementary contrastive analysis it appears that as nomina loci, Croatian suffixations in -ište are used to denote a number of related locative concepts: entities with zero dimension, i.e. points, two-dimensional entities, as well as some three-dimensional entities. All of them also exhibit abstract, figurative uses. In this presentation we aim to seek to find answers to three related questions: 1. Are we dealing here with a case of polysemy of individual suffixations, or with a case of polysemy or polyfunctionality of the suffix? 2. How can we account for this polysemy, i.e. how can we best motivate it? Specifically, what is the starting point for the extension, and what cognitive mechanisms make it possible? 3. How can various types of relevant data be combined, e.g. the frequency of use, diachronic data, etc. to fit an otherwise cognitively plausible model of extensions? In keeping with the basic premisses of a usage-based approach, we will assume that a possible starting point for the extension was a culturally salient individual lexeme (or a small group of lexems) denoting a dimension-neutral or a zero-dimension entity that was a general point-like, not clearly bounded, place (metonymically) associated with what is denoted by the base. We will further claim that it was metonymically extended to denote a 2-dimension entity, i.e. an open-air surface, and then to denote a 3-dimension entity, i.e. an enclosed and covered, houselike place. All these stages served as a trigger for further analogical formations, which also may acquire more abstract, metaphorical senses.

Khristina Chizhova Tübinger Universität SEMANTICS OF боль / PAIN IN RUSSIAN LINGUACULTURE Sensation of pain is based on a determined biological neural impulse. However, its perception is structured individually on the basis of cultural practice, legitimate in a given linguaculture. Pain manifests itself as an exclusively individual experience and at the same time appears as a linguacultural category. The frame of the category pain includes the following fundamental and central aspects (slots): 1) sensation of pain; 2) localization of pain; 3) expression of pain (consciously or

10


SCLC 2012 unconsciously); 4) origin of pain; 5) attitude towards pain; 6) overcoming pain; 7) influence of pain on the further life. The following table illustrates the key notions of the frame of боль/ pain. Russian linguaculture 1. Sensation of pain

Pain is conceived as a part of the environment that make be dangerous or coursing injury (like fire or nail) : распирающая, сжимающая, жгучая, острая, едкая боль; Pain is thought to be an enemy (personification): жестокая, злая боль; Degree of endurance of pain: непереносимая боль; Duration: ноющая, пульсирующая, хроническая боль; Possibility to be expressed: невыразимая, несказанная боль.

2. Localization

Own – foreign pain: чужая боль, моя боль

of pain

Physical pain: боль в спине, головная боль, боль в груди; Mental pain: сердечные раны, душевная боль

3.Expression of Pain expressed unconsciously: изменение мимики и цвета лица, стоны, крики pain Pain communicated consciously: стоны, крики, в том числе проклятия и призывы смерти, плач, поглаживание больного органа or терпение и не показывание страданий 4. Cause of pain

Cause of physical pain: malfunction in organism or reaction to an agressive milieu: ангина, хирургическая операция, физическое наказание, воздействие жары и холода Cause of mental pain: reality that does not correspond to the ideal state of affairs: утрата (чести, достоинства, любви, близкого человека и т.д.), расплата за проступки

5. Attitude

For his perfection one needs pain (standpoint, fully developed in Christianity);

towards pain

Pain manifests itself as a frightening phenomenon which ruins man (standpoint of humanism). Gender-defined aspect of the attitude towards pain.

6. Overcoming

Use of means to soothe pain (painkillers);

pain

«Spiritual anaesthesia»: incantations, prayers; 11


SCLC 2012

Resolute overcoming of pain, ignoring its presence; Relief of pain of another human being by compassion.

7. Influence

Actual influence of pain: «при этой боли жизнь представляется отвратительной»;

of pain on the further life

Influence of pain on further life of man: pain as a moment which makes man better, pain sharpens his ability to perceive the world in which he lives and other people.

Thus, pain is distinguished by its degree of intensity, its duration and localization. The attitude towards pain as a meaningless torment or as a turning point in the life, determines the facilities of expressing it and also the tactics of overcoming pain. We may distinguish two key positions in the evaluation of the influence of pain on the life of human beings. On the one hand, pain signifies suffering, poisoning man’s life, demanding his complete attention, being capable of annihilating his will and leading to degradation. On the other hand, overcoming pain widens the horizon of a person and strengthens her/him both physically and mentally.

David S. Danaher University of Wisconsin Mirroring the Truth: Václav Havel’s Plays as Conceptual Compressions How do Václav Havel’s plays – as a hybrid of Western Theater of the Absurd and Czech Theater of the Appeal – model truth? As he himself stated, Havel chose drama as his primary genre not because he was fated to be a playwright, but because theatrical performance provided the formal vehicle best suited to convey his message. Although there have been many studies of Havel as a playwright, an adequate explanation for why drama provided him the means that he sought and how his dramatic style models truth has yet to be offered. In arguing that Cognitive Science offers a framework for making sense of these questions, I will focus on Havel‘s trilogy of one-act Vaněk plays from the 1970s (GoetzStankiewicz 1987) and argue that these three related one-acts represent a conceptual compression of a complicated blend into a human scale. Compression is “one of the governing principles of conceptual blending theory” in which the complicated is miniaturized into the simple to facilitate understanding (Cook 2010: 31). Fauconnier and Turner have written that dramatic performances are classic blends: they represent fictional spaces in which the characters “live”, and the spectators of a performance are invited to live within the blend and look directly at and simulate its reality (Fauconnier and Turner 2003: 266-7). Considered as a coherent trilogy, the Vaněk plays compress a set of complex political and social questions – questions directly relevant to totalitarian Czechoslovakia but applicable to all modern consumer-industrial societies – into a human scale: in this compression, the larger problems are rendered personally understandable and accessible, and the powerless thereby become (potentially) powerful.

12


SCLC 2012 Two additional factors lend particular force to Havel’s dramatic compression. On the one hand, he makes uses of the techniques of the Theater of the Absurd, an approach to drama that “provide[s] a new language, new ideas, new approaches, and a new, vitalized philosophy to transform the modes of thought and feeling of the public at large” (Esslin 2001:15). On the other, ‘he creates a unique dramatic persona, Ferdinand Vaněk, who is less of an on-stage character than he is a dramatic principle: he is an empty space onto whom the spectators project their own emotions and insecurities. Combined, these factors comprise the appeal (or apel) component of the plays, the purpose of which is “‘to engage the intellect and the imagination of the spectator in order to force him to agree, disagree, compare, and view a subject matter from various angles’” (Trensky 1978: 105). The impact of Havel’s special kind of dramatic compression will perhaps be better understood as neuroscientists discover more about the functioning of so-called mirror neurons (Iacobini 2008). As I will try to show, Havel’s plays represent absurdist simulations compressed to a human scale. They are, in this regard, like maps that compress a large and richly detailed environment into a useful scale: the audience does not experience them as maps but rather “we experience what the maps make it possible to perceive” (Cook 2010: 26). It is precisely in this sense that Havel’s Vaněk plays mirror a deeper, pre-reflective truth about modern society and thereby provide an appropriate vehicle for Havel’s broader message. While my paper takes literature (Havel’s plays) as the analytic figure with Cognitive Science (blending theory) as the ground, it can also be read as a contribution to research on applying discoveries in neuroscience to theater and performance (see Cook 2010 and Blair 2008). References R. Blair. 2008. The Actor, Image, and Action: Acting and Cognitive Neuroscience. A. Cook. 2010. Shakespearan Neuroplay. M. Esslin. 2001. The Theatre of the Absurd. G. Fauconnier and M. Turner. 2003. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. M. Goetz-Stankiewicz (ed). 1987. The Vaněk Plays. M. Iacobini. 2008. Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Other People. P. Trensky. 1978. Czech Drama Since World War II.

Stephen Dickey University of Kansas Perfectivizing Prefixation and Verbs of Motion in the History of Slavic German, Lithuanian, and Slavic (Russian is taken as representative) all allow prefixed telic/perfective verbs with a prospective or future meaning: (1)

a. b. c.

Ich trinke mein Bier aus und gehe. (German) Išgeriu alų ir einu. (Lithuanian) Ja vyp'ju pivo i pojdu. (Russian) ‘I out.drink my beer and go.’

13


SCLC 2012 In the expression of ongoing events, however, these languages begin to behave differently. Slavic does not allow any kind of prefixed perfective verb to express ongoing events, whereas German and Lithuanian both allow prefixed telic verbs of motion (VoM) in the expression of ongoing events: (2)

a. b.

Guck mal, er geht gerade in die Straße hinaus. ‘Look, he’s just going out into the street.’ Va, žiūrėk, jis išeina į gatvę. ‘There, look, he’s out.going into the street.’

(German) (Lithuanian)

A further difference exists between German and Lithuanian: the former allows prefixed telic non-motion verbs in the expression of ongoing events, 1 whereas Lithuanian does not: (3)

a. b.

Guck mal, er trinkt gerade sein Bier aus. (German) Look, he’s drinking up his beer right now.’ Žiūrėk, jis *išgeria alų. (Lithuanian) Look, he’s up.drinking his beer.’

While the Germanic, Baltic and Slavic languages have all shared a reliance on prefixation for verbal derivation, German represents a pre-aspectual system, Lithuanian represents a protoaspectual system (cf. Wiemer 2002), and the Slavic languages represent a highly grammaticalized aspectual system. In this regard, data presented above are puzzling: only in the highly grammaticalized aspect system does the prefixation of VoM produce perfective verbs that cannot be used to express ongoing situations. In Lithuanian, prefixation often creates such perfective verbs (cf., e.g., išgerti ‘drink up’) but not in the case of VoM (cf., e.g., išeiti ‘go out’). Proceeding from the assumption that Lithuanian represents a proto-aspectual system, this paper proposes a fairly counterintuitive hypothesis concerning the development of Slavic aspect: prefixed motion verbs were not initially prototypical examplars of perfectivizing prefixation; in fact, they initially resisted perfectivization and were only later incorporated into the nascent aspectual systems. One piece of evidence for this hypothesis is provided by “directional perfectives,” the use of perfective verbs to describe static topographic features, cf. the examples in (4). (4) a. […] jaže debrъ otъ Ierusalima poidet; ot Gepsimanii bo debrъ poidet skvozě lavru i prixoditь k Sodomьskomu morju. (Old Rusian, 12th cent.) ‘[…] which valley goes from Jerusalem; from Gethsemane the valley goes through the monastery and reaches the Sea of Sodom.’ b. […] i inii sědoša na Dvině i narekošasja poločane, rěčьky radi, jaže vtečetь vъ Dvinu, imenemь Polota […] (Old Rusian, 14th cent.) ‘[…] and others settled on the Dvina and were called the Polochans, because of the river that flows into the Dvina, by the name of Polota […]’

1

An exception in German are achievement verbs prefixed in er-, e.g., ersterben. As er-, which in modern German is semantically opaque, does not occur with motion verbs, this class of verbs is irrelevant for the issues at hand.

14


SCLC 2012 Directional perfectives are attested in older stages of Slavic and are characteristic of modern Slovene. Given the general scarcity of such usage in modern Slavic, in a diachronic analysis it can to be considered relic material from a time when prefixed motion verbs did not display exclusively perfective usage patterns. With the exception of performatives (which are a very special case) prefixed perfective non-motion verbs are not attested at all in such present-tense usage. This paper discusses other evidence for the hypothesis and suggests the following answer to the question of why VoM would resist obligatory perfectivization when prefixed: The reason is that motion, unlike other activities, is directly observable as it proceeds toward a goal state, and the goal state is observationally inferable from a motion activity in a way that goal states with non-motion activities are not. A motion activity can be observed and the type of motion event can be identified based on the vector of the trajectory relative to a landmark as it proceeds. In contrast, when spatial prefixes are metaphorically applied to other events, they create predicates referring to situations in which the progress toward the goal state is not directly or easily observable, so that they create abstract, complex scenes consisting of an activity and its result simultaneously, necessarily in summary fashion, which can only be constructed inside a conceptualizer’s head and not observed. Accordingly, prefixed nonmotion verbs displayed a stronger tendency to become “perfective” than VoM from the outset. References Dickey, Stephen M. (2003) Verbal Aspect in Slovene. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 56(3): 182–207. Galton, Herbert. 1976. The Main Functions of the Slavic Verbal Aspect. Skopje: Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Regnéll, C. G. (1944) Über den Ursprung des slavischen Verbalaspektes. Lund: Häkan Ohlssons boktryckeri. Wiemer, Björn. (2002) Grammatikalisierungstheorie, Derivation und Konstruktionen: am Beispiel des klassifizierenden Aspekts, des Passivs und des Subjektimpersonals im slavisch-baltischen Areal. Habilitation thesis, University of Constance.

Dagmar S Divjak & Amy Baddeley University of Sheffield Too rare to care? Quantifying the effect of frequency of occurrence on the acceptability of rare structures One of the basic tenets of cognitive linguistics is the conviction that language is a dynamic system emerging from language use. Such a usage-based view on language attributes a central role to the notion of frequency: frequencies of occurrence are considered to be indicative of a whole range of phenomena, from meta-linguistic acceptability over (proto)typicality to cognitive entrenchment. Different from previous work on the frequency-acceptability gap (Arppe & Järvikivi 2007, Bermel & Knittl 2012, among others), I examine what type of corpus-based frequencies predict acceptability ratings best (Divjak 2008) and quantify the contribution frequency makes to assigning meta-linguistic acceptability ratings to low frequency structures. Data on how well 95 Polish verbs that participate in the [Vfin Vinf] construction (Bańko 2000, Polański 1980-1992) fit the [Vfin that V] construction were elicited in a large-scale 15


SCLC 2012 survey (cf. Cowart 1997) in which 285 native speakers of Polish rated sentences, adapted from corpus sentences, on a 5-point Likert scale. Frequency data, i.e. raw frequencies, contextual frequencies, conditional probabilities and collostructional strength (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003) on both the and the [Vfin Vinf] and [Vfin that V] construction were collected from the IPI-PAN "sample" corpus, a morpho-syntactically annotated corpus made up of 30 million segments. A mixed effects ordinal logistic regression model was fit to these corpusderived usage frequencies using the clmm function from the package ordinal (Christensen 2011, version of May 16 2011) in R (version 2.11.1). Aim was to detect which of the 4 types of frequency measures best predict the acceptability ratings assigned to the that-clauses and what percentage of the variation corpus-derived frequencies account for. Of the four types of frequency measures typically considered in cognitive corpus linguistics, i.e. raw frequencies, contextual frequencies, conditional probabilities and collostructional strength, conditional probabilities were found to have the largest impact on predicting the actual rating assigned. Schmid’s reliance score (Schmid 2010) that captures the frequency of a verb*construction combination given the frequency of the verb, predicts acceptability ratings particularly well. This outcome extends Jurafsky’s (1996) and Wiechmann’s (2008) findings to low frequency items: here too, conditional probabilities are more relevant than raw frequencies. Regressing acceptability ratings on frequency of occurrence in a model that accounts for rater generosity reveals a 30% exactly correct prediction rate for acceptability of structure. This finding confirms that language experience plays a role not only in processing structures but also in judging structures (which, admittedly, presupposes processing to some extent), although frequency alone is insufficient to predict and hence explain human behaviour in tasks that appeal directly to the system. Experience with language, as reflected in frequencies of occurrence, seems to be used as a scaffold to erect a dynamic linguistic system. Even if other mechanisms, such as analogy, may exert influence once a structure is firmly in place, traces of the frequency-scaffold remain visible. Selected references Arppe, A. & J. Järvikivi. 2007. ‘Every method counts - Combining corpus-based and experimental evidence in the study of synonymy’. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory (3): 131-159. Divjak, D. 2008. On (in)frequency and (un)acceptability. In: Barbara LewandowskaTomaszczyk (ed.). Corpus Linguistics, Computer Tools and Applications - state of the art. Frankfurt a. Main: Peter Lang. [Łódź Studies in Language] Bańko, M. 2000. Inny Słownik języka polskiego PWN. Warszawa: PWN. Bermel, N. & Knittl, L. 2012. Morphosyntactic variation and syntactic constructions in Czech nominal declension: corpus frequency and native-speaker judgments. Russian Linguistics 36.1: 91–119. Christensen, R. 2011. A Tutorial on fitting Cumulative Link Mixed Models with the ordinal Package. [http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ordinal/vignettes/clmm_tutorial.pdf – last accessed 2 August 2011] Cowart, W. 1997. Experimental syntax. Applying objective methods to sentence judgments. Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications. IPI-PAN – http://korpus.pl Jurafsky, D. 1996. A probabilistic model of lexical and syntactic access and disambiguation. Cognitive Science, 20, 137–194. Polański, K. 1980-1990/1992. Słownik syntaktyczno-generatywny czasownków polskich. I-IV Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolinskich/V Kraków: PAN. 16


SCLC 2012 Schmid, H.-J. 2010. Does frequency in text instantiate entrenchment in the cognitive system? In Dylan Glynn and Kerstin Fisher (eds.), Quantitative methods in cognitive semantics: Corpus-driven approaches 101–133. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Stefanowitsch, A. & St. Th. Gries. Collostructions: investigating the interaction between words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2): 209-243. Wiechmann, D. 2008. On the Computation of Collostruction Strength. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 4(2): 253-290.

Hanne M. Eckhoff, Laura A. Janda, Tore Nesset University of Tromsø / University of Oslo “The Many Faces of БЫТИ: What Was That Verb Doing in OCS?” We examine the behavior of the Old Church Slavonic verb БЫТИ ‘be’ on the basis of data from the Pragmatic Resources in Old Indo-European Languages corpus (PROIEL, foni.uio.no:3000/). БЫТИ is by many measures a unique verb. БЫТИ is the most frequent verb in OCS (accounting for 13.8% of all OCS verb attestations in PROIEL), БЫТИ is used as an auxiliary and has entire subparadigms that other verbs lack (future, subjunctive), БЫТИ is historically derived from two different verbs (compare Latin esse, fieri), and БЫТИ appears in a large range of grammatical constructions. We show that it is possible to study the syntax of a dead language in a statistical, frequency-based manner. Taking inspiration from work on behavioral profiles (Divjak and Gries 2006; Gries and Divjak 2009), we employ two measures, each of which can be understood as a subset of behavioral profiles: grammatical profiles and constructional profiles. A grammatical profile is the relative frequency distribution of the grammatical forms of a word, and a constructional profile is the relative frequency distribution for the grammatical constructions that a word appears in. We use these two measures to compare БЫТИ with other OCS verbs and to investigate the constructions that characterize БЫТИ’s use. If one looks at the grammatical profiles of verbs attested >20 times in PROIEL, one finds a statistical pattern that is remarkably similar (over 95% identical) to Dostál’s (1954) division of OCS verbs according to aspect. Adding БЫТИ into the formula makes surprisingly little difference. In terms of its grammatical profile, БЫТИ looks much like an ordinary imperfective verb; its closest neighbors are знати ‘know’ and пити ‘drink’. We identify six primary constructions of БЫТИ, in order of descending frequency, which are quite distinct in terms of the grammatical profile of БЫТИ used in each: -- Copula: вы есте соль земи ‘you are the salt of the earth’ -- Position: отцъ мои иже естъ на небесьхъ ‘my father who is in heaven’ -- “Auxiliaroid” (with participles other than l-participle): писано естъ ‘it is written’ -- Existential: въ дому отца моего обитҍли мъногы сѫть ‘in my father’s house there are many rooms’ -- Auxiliary: правҍ сѫдилъ еси ‘you have judged rightly’ -- Happen: быстъ же идѫщемъ по пѫти рече единъ къ нему ‘and it happened when they were walking along the road that someone said to him’ We conclude that it makes most sense to consider БЫТИ to be a single verb in OCS. The grammatical constructions this verb appears in form a network of relatively distinct, yet related functions in which the copula and existential constructions play a central role.

17


SCLC 2012 References Divjak, Dagmar and Stefan Th. Gries. 2006 “Ways of trying in Russian: clustering behavioral profiles“. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 2:1, 23–60. Dostál, Antonín. 1954. Studie o vidovém systému v staroslověnštině. Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství. Gries, Stefan Th. and Dagmar Divjak. 2009. “Behavioral profiles: a corpus-based approach towards cognitive semantic analysis”. Evans, Vyvyan and Stephanie S. Pourcel (eds.), New directions in cognitive linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 57-75.

Tanja Gradečak –Erdeljić University of Osijek Metaphorical basis of diminutive verbs in Croatian One of the most complex fields of Slavic morphology is the treatment of lexical aspect or aktionsart. This complex morphosemantic category is particularly productive in all Slavic languages which boast very rich derivational morphology and have even been claimed to be the source of a Sprachbund organised around the role of preverbs in the development of aktionsart (Kiefer 2010). In studying the relationship of aktionsart and its treatment of temporal element in the construal of verbal meaning, we found a puzzling discord in contemporary Croatian grammars regarding the position of diminutive meaning of Croatian verbs in the taxonomy of verbal affixes (Barić et al. 2003, Silić and Pranjković 2005). A slightly confusing status of the meaning of diminutive in morphological descriptions of verbal derivational processes resulted from rather opposing distribution of particular verb forms into classes of diminutive or pejorative verbs, with the examples such as moljakati or piskarati having only diminutive meaning assigned to them, where we would intuitively attribute to them a degree of pejorative meaning as well. In order to understand what Silić and Pranjković (2005:151) imply when denoting diminutive verbs as those with the decreased meaning we must take into account the conceptual metaphor CATEGORY CENTRALITY IS SIZE when a decrease in size or the scope of meaning of the verb would imply its peripheral status in reference to the prototypical meaning of the verb. This conceptual metaphor relies on the basic ontological metaphor MORE IS UP and thus GOOD IS UP, but with more intriguing repercussions regarding its relationship to the conceptual metaphor TIME IS SPACE. We shall argue that the decreased duration of the process denoted by a diminutive verb may imply a decrease in the scalar concept of value implied by the vertically positioned spatial scale, so that the resulting parallelism in the smaller amount of time spent in doing the activity indicates a smaller degree of attention and appreciation for the activity. Following Jurafsky's (1998) structured polysemy model we would like to present the ranges of meaning denoted by diminutive affixes arranged around the basic meaning of their evaluative force, particularly in reference to their processual value, i.e. duration and intensity. The aims of the paper are threefold: to elicit a corpus of affixes operative in creating diminutive aktionsart in Croatian by comparing the data in Croatian grammar books (but for the sake of crosslinguistic support also by consulting grammar books and dictionaries of Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian). Using the corpus data (Croatian National Corpus and Croatian Language Repository) we want to establish the range of contextual uses when the 18


SCLC 2012 duration of a process coincides with the subjective evaluation of the quality or intensity of the process and thus imply their potential pragmatic value. Finally, by organising the data around conceptually most salient domains we shall attempt to create a radial network of meanings pertaining to Croatian diminutive verbs. References Barić E., M. Lončarić, D. Malić, S. Pavešić, M. Peti, V. Zečević, M. Znika (1995). Hrvatska gramatika, Školska knjiga, Zagreb. Jurafsky, D. (1996). Universal Tendencies in the Semantics of the Diminutive. Language, Volume 72, Issue 3. 533-578. Silić, J., Pranjković, I. (2005). Gramatika hrvatskog jezika: za gimnazije i visoka učilišta. Školska knjiga, Zagreb.

Jan Huleja Charles University, Prague Reframing – change of the Czech opinion of Greece on the basis of changes in its media image Our paper is based on the theory of frames, as presented in the works of E. Goffman, C. J. Fillmore, J. Butler, and especially G. Lakoff, who applies the theory in the field of media communication and indicates its potential as an interpretive tool for grasping the media image of the world. The frame could be understood with the help of above-mentioned experts as a complex, interdisciplinary concept on the border of sociology, psychology and cognitive science. It can be accurately characterized as an interpretive scheme, by which man grasps and processes reality. Framing helps one to understand the reality and contributes to the formation of his opinions and attitudes. Its characteristic feature is the summarization of complex events, on the other hand, however, also its simplification, false generalizations and stereotyping. Man creates frames based on cognitive processes, and they are an integral part of his mental structures (G. Lakoff points to the unconscious nature of cognitive framing). A classic example for the Czech native speaker is a pair of coexisting opposite frames: the stereotypical frames of euro-skepticism and euro-enthusiasm in which the same event on the European Union is interpreted differently by euro-skeptics and euro-enthusiasts. Suitable field for the theory of frames provides the area of media communication, as it is nowadays a fundamental institution affecting the social and political views of individuals as well as public opinion. The reason is that the present time offers so many media messages, that the media to succeed in a competitive battle for viewers resort to the use of themes in the form of a simplified black-and-white and already-interpreted stories to encourage more or less clear understanding of such messages. Framing research and publication of its results can liberate the key-signs and key-themes of the media discourse from indoctrinations, it enables to view the media text as free from unwanted stereotypical associations, connotations and overall semantic load. The main contribution of the theory of frames we see in the return of the dynamics to media texts, in the form of their reinterpretation, in some cases, radical subversion. This can only be provided if we successfully diagnose their framing, remove them, and finaly put the exposed texts into new contexts, ie reframe them. Framing contributes significantly to the learning of strategies of manipulation, since the simplified media stories appear real for the recipient, because they are performed every 19


SCLC 2012 day as such. Due to the continued practice they became so obvious that we are not aware of their process of structuring, and we do not allow any other alternative interpretations. So, the media create new myths, new worlds and heroes, which are involved in the formation of the modern image of the world – an old picture of the world, as known for generations, is damaged by new frames, which creates a new, media image. The sign of the media age is that the construction of the frame and its immediate deconstruction becomes more and more turbulent. On the material of Czech media texts concerning Greece and Greeks we would like to document the radical transformation of the media image, which occurred at the time of the so called Crisis, that affected in the meantime from all of the Member States of the European Union Greece the most. Material of media texts dedicated to Greece and Greeks from the period before the "crisis" and during the "crisis" reveals the transformation of the media world and document the transformation of frame in which contemporary Czech citizen think about Greece, and which probably shares with the majority of the citizens from so called responsible states of the European Union. Research proves that what was before the crisis evaluated with positive or neutral attributes, is now described with negative attributes. The Greek “story” has already been overwritten – his picture was put in a negative frame. Awareness of this fact may lead recipient to the creation of new, more balanced frame – that is to say, to, perhaps, more objective reframing.

Alina Israeli American University Russian verbs of motion: a new taxonomy of prefixes This paper will provide a new taxonomy of prefixes and circumfixes with verbs of motion (VOM) that improves on the system provided by Titelbaum (1990). The problem with existing descriptions is that too much credence is given to the formalism of the prefixes, and not enough to the semantic distinctions. The latter reveal that in many cases we are dealing not with one prefix but with two (ot, pod, po), three (circumfix raz--sja), or even four (s, za) homonymous prefixes. Further analysis demonstrates that the distinctions between prefixes are not solely semantic, but also structural, in terms of their attachability, effects on the stem, and aspectual and subaspectual implications. Attachability: While in some cases attachability is precluded by semantics (*vbresti), in others it is due to the type of VOM: s1 and po2 can be attached only to indeterminate verbs (and not to all of them: *sbrodit’), while po1 can be only attached to determinate verbs. Stem change: It is well known that eight indeterminate verbs usually change their stems when a prefix is attached. Actually, there are some prefixes that indeed change the stem of these 8 verbs (for example, s2, s3, ot1, za2, za3, za4, s––sja) and other prefixes that do not (for example, s1, po1, po2, ot2, za1). Aspect: Some prefixes (for example, s1, za1) perfectivize indeterminate verbs, others (for example, s2, s3) only determinate VOM, thus creating aspectual homonyms, such as: s1vozit'p - 'to take there and back' vs. s2vozit'i - 'to be in the process of bringing things down' and s3vozit'i - 'to be in the process of bringing things together'. Similarly, za 1 perfectivizes the indeterminate VOM, while za 2, za3, and za4 do not; however, the indeterminate 20


SCLC 2012 imperfectives with three different za's represent three different submeanings of imperfective: za2 means process, za3 means annulment, and za4 means iterative. This analysis has both theoretical and pedagogical implications. References Janda, Laura A. (1985) "The Meaning of the Russian Verbal Prefixes: Semantics and Grammar." The Scope of Slavic Aspect. Eds. Michael S. Flier and Alan Timberlake. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica. 26-40. Titelbaum, Olga A. (1990) "Prefixed Russian verbs of motion." Russian Linguistics 14 (1): 37-46. Zaliznjak, Anna A. (1995) "Opyt modelirovanija semantiki pristavochnyx glagolov." Russian Linguistics 19 (2): 143-185.

Laura A. Janda & Stephen M. Dickey University of Tromsø / University of Kansas Slavic Perfectivizing Prefixation as a Verb Classifier System We advance the hypothesis that Slavic perfectivizing prefixes constitute a verb classifier system as defined by McGregor (2002). This hypothesis is based on parallels between Slavic prefixation and numeral classifier systems, which are common in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia and South America (Aikhenvald 2000: 98-124). Some striking parallels are the following: 1) A numeral classifier language has two types of reference for nouns: a bare noun without a classifier refers to a substance, while objects are specified by adding classifiers. Simplex imperfective verbs in Slavic languages refer to unbounded activities, while the addition of a prefix makes it possible to refer to a specific event (the verbal equivalent of an object). 2) Numeral classifiers cooccur with quantifiers (usually numerals), and Slavic aspect has also been described as a kind of quantification, with the perfective often associated with measure adverbials. 3) Shape is considered the most common parameter expressed by numeral classifiers crosslinguistically. Slavic prefixes likewise give shape to a predicate in terms of a path through space, most evident when prefixes are attached to determinate motion verbs. 4) Nouns in numeral classifier languages are sorted into groups by their classifiers. Slavic simplex verbs are also sorted into groups according to the prefixes they use to form aspectual partner verbs. 5) Some classifier languages have more one type of classifiers; it is possible to have both sortal classifiers (which identify objects) and mensural classifiers (which quantify, but are distinct from quantifiers). When Slavic prefixes create aspectual partner verbs (“pairs”; e.g. Russian na-pisat’ ‘write’) and lexically distinct perfectives (e.g. Russian pod-pisat’ ‘sign’), they are analogous to sortal classifiers in a language like Yucatec Maya, where different classifiers (tz’íit ‘long-thin’ vs. wáal ‘flat’) give us the default meaning of há’as ‘banana’ vs. a more specialized one: ‘un-tz’íit há’as [one long-thin banana] ‘one banana fruit’ vs. ‘un-wáal há’as [one flat banana] ‘one banana leaf’. Slavic prefixes that create procedural perfectives 21


SCLC 2012 (e.g. Russian po-plakat’ ‘cry for a while’) are analogous to mensural classifiers like Korean makkeli han mal [rice.wine one measure] ‘one measure of rice wine’. The formation of procedural perfectives is widespread and systematic in Russian (East Slavic) and Bulgarian, but relatively marginal in the other Slavic languages. This observation suggests that the verb classifier system in Russian and Bulgarian is more complete, and supports Dickey’s (2000) East-West aspect division in Slavic. Languages such as Czech that do not utilize procedural prefixes to a high degree are argued to represent a parallel to languages such as Warekena (Anamoim dialect, cf. Aikhenvald 1998: 299), which have primarily sortal classifiers, whereas East Slavic and Bulgarian can be argued to parallel languages such as Chinese and Yucatec Maya, which have highly developed systems of both sortal and mensural classifiers. Recognizing Slavic prefixes as aspectual classifiers enables us to understand Slavic aspect more fully from a typological perspective. There are also pedagogical implications: students of Slavic languages can learn meaningful systems rather than having to simply memorize combinations of prefixes with simplex verbs. References Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2000. Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dickey, Stephen M. 2000. Parameters of Slavic Aspect: A Cognitive Approach. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. McGregor, William B. 2002. Verb Classification in Australian Languages. (= Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 25). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ladislav Janovec Charles University, Prague Changing of Language Picture of World (Modified Picture of World) In this paper we present the problems of language and examples of the modified picture of the world, which is formed in the mind of recent speakers, particularly children, on the basis of media texts, especially advertising and children's programs. The term language picture of the (natural) world characterizes the levels of understanding among people, the borders of the area of their conceptualization. The research of the language picture of world descibes us as a part of the world and our grasping and structuring reality, however, the individual experience of the world is emphasised as well. Language picture of the world is regarded as metaphorical, based on physicality, naive and naturally semiotic. Language picture of the world is heterogeneous, axiological, selectional, integral and dynamic. Its center is formed, according to Vaňková, by everyday experience of natural world, and its basis for study are folklore texts, including phraseology and artistic texts. The language picture of the world is constantly in motion and transformed. As Vaňková mentioned, very specific influence on the transformation of the language picture of the world have the media and advertising. Media and advertising texts nowadays significantly affect the very rapid change of language picture of the world, create a modified image of the language picture of the world, as this phenomenon we call. Present researches show that media texts (and above all foreign) predominate among those with whom one comes into contact every day, even the young generation are no longer familiar with classical texts, especially with those that serve as 22


SCLC 2012 a source of research of the picture of the world. While the Czechs who are around thirty years are aware of Czech classical literature and folklore and at least a certain quota they read, those who are around twenty know only the fragments, often mediated primarily through film. Similarly, in recent years the knowledge of Czech classical phraseology has been significantly reduced. Accordingly, we can observe the decline of large number of metaphors and connotations, as well as emptying and dying of symbols that were considered as essential for understanding to certain concepts. Here we see an important moment in restructuring of linguistic background of the world; in the creation of its modification.The current children's ideas about fairy-tale creatures can serve as a good example. Czech classic witch is in terms of appearance, an old and hunchbacked, she often has a black cat on her shoulder and hand broom, wearing a torn, patched clothes and a headscarf. Zrinka Jelaska & Tomislava Bošnjak Botica University of Zagreb / Institute of Croatian language and Linguistics, Zagreb Conjugational verb types as prototype based categories Slavic grammarians, Croatian in particular, categorize verbs into conjugational types from different points of view. This paper tries to find foundations of conjugational verb type categorization in the cognitive linguistics framework (e.g. Langacker 1987, 1991, Taylor 2003). It views conjugational verb typology as prototypically organized category (e.g. Rosch 1978, Tabakowska 2005), which has to be relevant to a language community as category is the conceptualization of a collection of similar experiences that are meaningful and relevant to a language community (Radden, Dirven 2007). In line with cognitive linguistics, the authors believe that grammatical categories have structural meanings, even phonological (e.g. Taylor 2003, Jelaska, Gulešić-Machata 2005) and analyze phonological differences in conjugation defining forms in relation to morphological and (verbal) meaning differences which could be assigned to the types as categories. The data consists of more than 24 000 Croatian verbs and verbs are categorized into groups, types and subtypes that display different degrees of membership. Verb types are members of category verb groups (a, i, e), while verb subtypes may be included in a type (e.g. prijateljevati vs. umirivati within putovati type). The relationship between infinitive, the most non-finitive verbal form, and present, which is on the other side of the finiteness scale, is enough to categorize a verb into a conjugational type. Conjugational verb types are defined by their phonological and morphological shape, which predict their phonological changes in flection. Many less prototypical types are made of complex, derived members. The findings on the role of frequency are confirmed by two experiments where students were asked to list ten or twenty verbs, with the hypothesis that the most salient verb types (e.g. verbs of prototypical types) will be frequently listed and high on the list. Type of Croatian verbs such as gledati are considered a prototype of the conjugational category. It is phonologically transparent, the largest conjugational category, spreadable (yet the percentage of prefixed verbs is very low), completely open, very productive, frequent (based on individual verbs which appear in basic Croatian vocabulary), predictable, recognizable from present forms; it is the only member of a group. Other types differ from the prototypical one as they do not share one or more of those properties, or have it to a lesser degree. The closest to the prototype is type moliti, but its size depends on spreadity more than in the prototype, it is less phonologically transparent in some forms, somewhat less open. Types such as voljeti, plesati, trčati, are considered to be less prototypical members, while poznavati is seen as a peripheral member of the category type. The most salient properties for the judgment besides phonological forms seem to be morphological simplicity (non-derived 23


SCLC 2012 verbs) and frequency (the percentage of its members in the basic vocabulary, particularly within the most common hundred words). Within small size types the ones with more lexical meaning are viewed as more prototypical.

Marika Kalyuga Macquarie University, Sydney On Russian toska and skuka Emotions signified by the Russian lexemes toska and skuka, as well as toskovat’ and skuchat’, are interconnected. The aim of this paper is to show how these emotions are linked with regards to the following features: the causes of these emotions, their objects, their physiological or behavioral manifestations, in addition to their intensity and duration. Data collected from the National Russian electronic corpora (http://www.ruscorpora.ru/searchmain.html) demonstrate that toska mostly implies deep spiritual suffering, sadness and depression. Symptoms of toska vary greatly and may include pain, helplessness, hopelessness, insomnia or excessive sleeping, loss of appetite or overeating, loss of energy or restlessness, absence of interest in nearly all activities and apathy or the seeking of stimulations to forget this emotional state. Since toska may involve a lack of interest in any activity and the perception of one's surroundings as dull and boring, proneness to skuka “disinterest, boredom” is a symptom of toska. Apart from being a sign of deep emotional suffering, skuka can also be caused by not having anything in particular to do or by being forced to do what one does not want or by being prevented from doing what one wants to do or from being where one wants to be. However, if skuka, or boredom, became as intense and long lasting state, it could result in toska. Therefore, the role of skuka in toska is dual since it can be a sign of toska “spiritual suffering, deep sadness, depression”, as well as a cause of this emotion. The state of toska or toskovat’ is often caused by an actual or anticipated separation from a loved one, familiar environment or home. Skuchat’, a verb related to skuka, can also refer to being in an emotional state caused by longing to be back home and missing loved ones, aspects of their familiar environment or attachment objects. The difference between toskovat’ (po + dative) and skuchat’ (po + dative) is the degree and duration of separation anxiety and emotional pain. Separation anxiety and emotional pain are intense and long lasting in toskovat’ but can vary from mild to intense and continuous in skuchat’. Hence, when referring to missing someone or something, contrary to toskovat’, the state of skuchat’ does not necessarily imply pain. Therefore, the emotion can be felt not only as a result of the absence of dear people or meaningful places in one’s life but also as a result of the absence of more trivial objects (which is possible but highly unusual for toska). The comparison of lexemes for related emotions highlights the specific features of the emotions that they refer to, thus achieving better understanding of their characteristics.

Amir Kapetanović Institute of Croatian language and Linguistics, Zagreb The body in Mediaeval culture and the body as a container in Old Croatian Although the application of conceptual metaphor theory to written heritage from the past is not very popular among scholars of the cognitive sciences, and has even proven 24


SCLC 2012 controversial, it seems after all there is no better way to find out more about how world was comprehended in past times. The theory of conceptual metaphor has not been applied to Old Croatian texts so far, thus we plan to research manifestations of only one, very important metaphor – THE BODY IS A CONTAINER - in the Old Croatian vernacular. Research will be performed on a computerised corpus that consists of Old Croatian thematic and stylistically heterogeneous texts from the 11 th to the early 16th century. This conceptual metaphor is widely present in many cultures and languages both in the past and today (sometimes accompanied by culturally-specific traits), and it can also be found as a central metaphor for the expression of the most “basic” emotions in Old Croatian texts ( THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR EMOTIONS) where emotions were conceptualised as fluids. Manifestations of this metaphor in Old Croatian are the same as or similar to those in other languages (in most cases, the body is filled with emotions). The conception of the body as a container and the conception of emotions as fluids in Old Croatian texts is discussed. However, the research revealed that the body was not only filled with emotions. For example, in the Middle Ages it was debated whether the devil could enter the (human) body - and what was the Devil's body filled with? Hence, in the end we shall find answers to the question of what the body could be filled with within the context of the Mediaeval conceptions of body and corporality.

Daniel Karczewski University of Warsaw Differences between Singular and plural generics in Polish The present analysis is a work-in-progress report which seeks to examine, by looking at naturally occurring Polish data, the singular and plural generic noun phrases in Polish as well as the speaker’s reasons for selecting one option over another with special emphasis on their respective overall meanings. Generics express generalizations about members of a class. It is widely acknowledged that they can assume a variety of grammatical forms (Carlson and Pelletier 1995; Langacker 1999; Radden 2009). Considering the parameters of definiteness and number, the forms in (1) will emerge. Likewise, there are different grammatical forms tautological expressions can take, as shown in (2). (1)

a. Barns are red. b. The lion is a predatory cat. c. A madrigal is polyphonic.

(2)

a. Boys will be boys. b. War is war. c. A party is a party.

If we look more closely at the aforementioned generics and tautologies, it is possible to claim that there are certain similarities between these two phenomena. More specifically, the change of (1a) and (2a) into the singular form would be disallowed. The question that arises is why the tautology Boys will be boys is acceptable, whereas the variant with the definite article, viz. *A boy will be a boy is disallowed. Or to take example (1a) why Barns are red sounds fine whereas ?A barn is red sounds odd. In view of these facts, this paper aims to use

25


SCLC 2012 Wierzbicka’s analysis of tautologies (1991) to investigate whether it can shed any light on generic noun phrases in Polish, as in (3) and (4). (3)

a. Kobieta/Baba za kierownicą. b. Facet to świnia.

‘A woman behind the wheel’ ‘Guys are pigs’

(4)

Dziewczyny są sprytne.

‘Girls are smart’

Results collected from the preliminary research seem to suggest that by using plural phrasing we tend to show greater tolerance towards an entity in question whereas by using singular phrasing we tend to arouse distrust towards an entity in question. References Carlson, Gregory N. and Francis Jeffry Pelletier (eds.) 1995. The Generic Book. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1999. “Generic constructions”. In Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 247-260. Radden, Günter. 2009. “Generic reference in English: A metonymic and conceptual blending analysis”. In Uwe-Panther, Klaus, Linda L. Thornburg and Antonio Barcelona (eds.) Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar. Amesterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 199-228. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1991. “Boys will be boys: even ‘truisms’ are culture-specific”. In Wierzbicka, Anna. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 391-452.

Daniela Katunar University of Zagreb Diminutives in Action: A Cognitive Account of Diminutive Verbs in Croatian The category of diminutives cross-cuts various word classes in many languages (e.g. nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs), though most descriptions focus almost exclusively on nominal diminutives (see Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994, Jurafsky 1996). In Croatian, diminutive verbs form a numerous and productive subset of verbs with various meaning extensions formed by suffixation and prefixation (e.g. gleduckati ‘to watch unattentively’, piskarati ‘to write badly’, lupnuti ’to hit lightly’, poigrati se ‘to play around (a little)’), and some authors mention their existence in other Slavic languages as well (see Panocová 2011). In his study on the universal tendencies of the semantics of the diminutive, Jurafsky (1996) provides a semantic model based on the notion of radial structure (Lakoff 1987), in which various meanings of diminutives (such as approximation, pejorative meaning etc.) can be deduced from the source meaning ‘small’ via metonymic or metaphorical extensions. Jurafsky’s analysis, however, seems rather problematic as the basis of a comprehensive account of the meanings of diminutive verbs. Namely, the question that arises is what would the concept ‘small’ or ‘reduced in size’ refer to when applied to diminutive verbs, which refer to actions and not objects. As the Croatian data will show, a much more viable source meaning of diminutive verbs would be that of ‘less intensity’, which can be appropriated to classify the various meanings of verbs such as a) less attentive actions, e.g. čituckati =to read lightly, gleduckati = 26


SCLC 2012 to watch unanttentively, b) iterative actions, e.g. skuakutati = to hop (in small jumps), c) dispersive actions, e.g. šetuckati = ‘to stroll around (no specific direction) and d) pejorative actions, e.g. piskarati ‘to write badly’ in terms of a radial structure motivated by metonymic and metaphorical extensions. Furthermore, diminutive verbs in Croatian also interact with notions of perfectivity, pluractionality and iterativity in specific ways (e.g. lupnuti ’to hit lightly - PERF’ / lupkati ‘to hit lightly and repeatedly - IMPERF’), pointing to the fact that diminutive verb morphology has consequences with respect to their aspectual and telic characteristics (see also Tovena 2011), often resulting in a blend having both diminutive and grammatical properties (e.g. suffix –nu- has a perfective and diminutive meaning, for example gutati ‘to swallow – IMPERF.’ / gucnuti ‘to take a small sip – PERF.’). We will show how these grammatical notions necessitate a reinterpretation of the diminutive meaning in terms of the grammatical properties inherent to verbs. Thus the main goal of this paper is to provide a semantic classification of diminutive verbs within a cognitive linguistics framework which will take into account a) the polysemous structures formed by the diminutive verbs with respect to the underlying conceptualization patterns, b) their interaction with the traditionally grammatical notions of perfectivity, pluractionality and iterativity. Such a classification does not exist for diminutive verbs, and we believe it provides a model for the analysis of diminutive verbs in other Slavic languages and can be used to revise a general model of the semantics of diminutives. Conversely, the analysis of diminutive verbs provides new insight on the role metonymy and metaphor play in word formation as well as their influence in terms of the interplay between semantic and grammatical categories. References Dressler, Wolfgang U., Lavinia Merlini Barbaresi. (1994) Morphopragmatics: Diminutives and intensifiers in Italian, German, and other languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Jurafsky, Daniel (1996) "Universal Tendencies in the Semantics of the Diminutive". Language, vol.72, No. 3, 533. - 578. Lakoff, George (1987) Women, fire and dangerous things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Panocová, Renatá (2011) “Evaluative suffixes in Slavic” Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov, Series IV: Philology and Cultural Studies • Vol. 4 (53) No.1 – 2011 Tovena, Lucia M. “When Small is Many in the Event Domain” Evaluative Morphology” in: Diminutives and Augmentatives in the Languages of the World (2011) Körtvélyessy, L., Stekauer, P. (eds.); Lexis – E-journal of English Lexicology Eugenia Kelbert, Saša Rudan Yale University Applications of Semantic and Conceptual Analysis of L2 Writers: Nabokov, Brodsky and Stylistic Consequences of Bilingual Cognition Roman Jakobson, as early as 1956, points to the interrelation between the neuroscience of language processing and literary creativity 2; Vladimir Alexandrov asserts,

2

Roman Jakobson, Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances (1956), On Language, ed. Linda R. Waugh et al., Cambridge, USA, 1990

27


SCLC 2012 further, that “what students of the brain have discovered” can be applied “without reducing literary studies to a mere appendage of cognitive science” 3. One of such discoveries is the established correlation between the age of SLA and “a more variable activation” 4 of the Wernicke's and Broca's areas of the brain (especially following the so-called Critical Period5). Studies of paradoxical aphasia suggest, further, a different mnemonic basis for late-learned languages6. In other words, were a non-native speaker capable of achieving “native speaker competence”, this result may still be produced by different areas of the brain than the native language(s). This paper builds on the results of a previous paper presented by at the International Symposium on Bilingualism Oslo 2011. It seeks to test \ some of the recent advances in the cognitive science of the SLA on the example of two Russian-born writers, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Both writers, forced to emigrate to the United States, ultimately switched to English as their primary language. Both established themselves as major figures in Russian and English literary canons alike. The present paper follow Aneta Pavlenko 7 in looking at what translingual (L2)8 writing can tell us about the relationship between SLA and literary style. Juxtaposing the complete Russian and English corpora of the two writers, it seeks to shed light on two questions: first, whether a writer’s style changes in any fundamental way when he switches into a different language, and secondly, whether such changes would vary—as the neuroscientific evidence would suggest—between a writer who acquired his L2 as a child (in our case, Nabokov), and as an adult (Brodsky). The methodology employed draws on a range of computational methods from the fields of semantic/lexical/ontological analysis and mapping of text, as well as of extracting/building a meta-knowledge out of the informational text. We attempt to develop our research on a more granulated level using part-of-speech tagged corpora in correlation with (bilingual/interlingual) WordNet databases. This is used in order to calculate such variables as a text’s cross-entropy, the range and the ‘exoticism’ of the vocabulary used (as compared with the Brown Corpus), the distribution of different parts of speech throughout the text etc, with reference to a range of authors writing in their native language. This analysis will serve to evaluate the extent to which a writer employs the resources of a language in terms of vocabulary, range and complexity of structures, syntax, predictability et cetera. Compared systematically across the two languages, this data will enable the authors to trace the potential influence of the age of SLA on the style of an L2 speaker – or, more importantly for the study of literature, an L2 writer. No less crucially, it will determine a range of possible criteria, applicable beyond this study, for cross-lingual comparison of literary texts.

3

Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Literature, Literariness, and the Brain, Comparative Literature, Spring 2007, v53(2), p. 100 4 Bloch et al., The age of second language acquisition determines the variability in activation elicited by narration in three languages in Broca’s and Wernicke’s area, Neuropsychologia 47 (2009) 625–633 5 Eric Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1967 6 John H. Schumann, et al., The Neurobiology of Learning: Perspectives From Second Language Acquisition, 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., UK, p. 63-64 7 John H. Schumann, et al., The Neurobiology of Learning: Perspectives From Second Language Acquisition, 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., UK, p. 63-64 8 Steven Kellman, The Translingual Imagination, Nebraska University Press, 2000

28


SCLC 2012 Pavel Koval Moscow State University On the imperfective imperfective The paper reports on a corpus-based study of imperfectivization of imperfective verbs, illustrated in (1). (1) Natasha tem bystrym šagom, kakim ona begivala v gorelki, pobezala v perednjuju. 'Natasha ran to the hall with the pace that she used to run while playing run-and-catch.' (Leo Tolstoy) The verb begivat' 'run many times, run systematically' is a product of imperfectivization of begat' 'run', imperfective already. The very fact that imperfective verbs license further imperfectivization is widely discussed in the literature (Isačenko 1960, Bondarko & Bulanin 1967, Švedova (ed.) 1980, Maslov 1984, Zaliznyak & Šmelev 2000), but the distribution of imperfective imperfectives mostly remains unexplained. Specifically, it is not clear what restricts the application of the secondary imperfective morpheme iva(j) to the imperfective verb stem. For instance, all we know from Švedova (ed.) 1980 about this phenomenon is that "verbs of the multiplicative Aktionsart... are derived by the suffix iva/va/a applied to a restricted number of stems of a few imperfective verbs that describe non-directed motion, speech, existence, location, change of location or specific physical action". This study aims at contributing to finding a solution to this problem and to identify factors that restrict ability of imperfective verbs to undergo further imperfectivization. The study is based on the representative sample of 220 Russian imperfective verb stems. For each stem, derived imperfectives were found in the Russian National corpus, and their absolute and relative frequencies have been evaluated. This study was supplemented with an experiment where the same derived imperfectives were presented to Russian native speakers who were asked to evaluate their grammaticality. Each informant was offered 20 examples and an equal number of fillers (to not overload their intuition and to not obscure clearness of judgments). The study revealed a bunch of semantic restrictions on the imperfectivization of the imperfective. The most prominent restriction has to do with the eventuality type / lexical aspect of a non-derived predicate. There is a sharp asymmetry in the frequency, confirmed by grammaticality judgments, between activities, on the one hand, and accomplishments and achievements, on the other. As an illustration, consider (2): (2) S Aleutskix ostrovov za nedostatkom bumagi, pisyvali donesenija na laftakah. They used to write reports from Aleutian islands on lafataks because of lack of paper. (3) shows an imperfective pisyvat' combined with an indefinite plural incremental theme donesenija 'reports, dispatches'. As we know from the theory of aspectual composition (e.g., Krifka 1992, Filip 1999 and elsewhere), such predicates denote activities. Corresponding sentences with an incremental direct object in the singular, which denote accomplishments, are judged ungrammatical by native speakers. (4) ??... pisyvali donesenie... write a/the report. The corpus study confirms the restriction illustrated in (): there is a huge asymmetry between incremental derived imperfectives like pisyvat' 'write.IPFV-IPFV' occurring with plural (96%) vs. singular (4%) objects.

29


SCLC 2012 References Bondarko & Bulanin 1967 — Бондарко A.B., Буланин Л.Л. Русский глагол. М.: Просвещение, 1967. Filip 1999 — Filip H. Aspect, eventuality types and noun phrase semantics. New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1999. Isačenko 1960 — Исаченко A. B. Грамматический строй русского языка в сопоставлении со словацким. Т. 2. Братислава: Изд-во Словацкой АН, 1960. Т. 2. Krifka 1992 — Krifka M. Thematic relations as links between nominal reference and temporal constitution // Sag I., Szabolsci A. (eds.) Lexical matters. Stanford: CSLI, 1992. Maslov 1984 — Маслов Ю. С. Очерки по аспектологии. Л.: Изд-во ЛГУ, 1984. Švedova (ed.) 1980 — Русская грамматика. М., 1980. Zaliznyak & Šmelev 2000 — Зализняк Анна А., Шмелев А. Д. Введение в русскую аспектологию. М.: Языки русской культуры, 2000.

Albina Kunikeeva Åbo Akademi University Socio-cognitive aspects of the concepts of èkspressia and èkspressivnost’ in Russian Scholarly Discourse The theme of my paper is the trans-disciplinary concepts of èkspressia and èkspressivnost’ and how they are understood and used in the Russian scholarly discourse, from their appearance in various types of discourse up to the present time. Special focus will be on the understanding of these two concepts in Russian linguistics, where they have been discussed and debated during most of the 20 th century, and the discussions and debates still continue. The documented history of the word èkspressia in the Russian linguo-cultural context goes back to the beginning of the 19 th century. The word èkspressivnost’ enters the scene more than one hundred years later. The use of the words èkspressia and èkspressivnost’ as scholarly terms thus dates from the first quarter of the 20 th century. Traditionally, they have been used, discussed, and defined both in psychology and within such literary and linguistic fields of inquiry as stylistics, semantics, poetics, syntax, and pragmatics. As my presentation of the history of this research will show, the definitions and conclusions obtained are often vague and fluid. Èkspressia may denote, for instance, ‘expression’(выражение); ‘strong stress’ (сильное подчеркивание); ‘expressiveness’ (выразительность); ‘expression of feelings’ (выражение, проявление чувств, переживаний); ’relation between idea and text’(отношение между замыслом и текстом). Èkspressivnost’ may denote, for instance, ’expressiveness’ (выразительность); ‘reinforcement of expressiveness, enhancement of the effect of what was said’ (усиление выразительности, увеличение воздействующей силы сказанного); ‘quality conveying the subjective attitude of the speaker’ (свойство, передающее субъективное отношение говорящего). Since the end of the 20 th century èkspressia and/or èkspressivnost’ have also been studied from socio-cognitive and neuro-connectionist perspectives. Recent studies in nonmetaphysical anthropology describe èkspressia and èkspressivnost’ as a phenomenological model grounded in complex system theory. My paper will thus present a description of the conceptualization of èkspressia and èkspressivnost’ based on an analysis of the discourse-semantic dynamism of the two Russian terms in different spheres of discourse, and it will result in an interpretation of the content of meaning of the two concepts. The paper will be read in Russian. 30


SCLC 2012

Mariya Kyuseva & Daria Ryzhova Moscow State University Lexical typology: contribution of closely-related languages (on the base of Russian and Serbian adjectives) It is considered that for qualitative typological research it is necessary, first, to analyze the maximal possible range of languages, second, to ensure balanced sampling: language families and groups shall be represented equally not to risk to announce phenomenon that is common in one language family or in one language areal the language absolute or at least statistical universal. However if the typologist claims the aim no to determine frequency of the phenomenon in different languages, but to determine principles of semantic field organization, the requirements for sampling may be much softer. If it is traditionally considered, that the research on grammatical typology must include the material of 100-200 languages, in lexical typology the postulate exists that 15 languages are enough for identification of parameters relevant for the semantic field (i.e. parameters that are responsible for quantity and link of lexemes of this semantic field) 9. The inclusion in the research of materials of relative or even close-relative languages is also considered acceptable, because lexicon changes more rapidly than grammar. The task of this research is to show that during cross-linguistic analysis of lexicon the study of closely-related languages is not just acceptable, but useful: the study of semantic field is more convenient to start with material of native language and its closest relatives. This idea isn’t completely new, cf. [Kibrik 1998], [Kibrik 2003], [Rakhilina, Prokofjeva 2004], [Rakhilina, Maisak 2007]. We will show the reasonability of this approach on the material of adjectives with the meaning of physical quality on the material of two Slavic languages: Serbian and Russian (that is native to the researches). We will concentrate our attention on the most “suspicious” class of cases: we will consider the situations, where the Serbian equivalent of the Russian lexeme is its cognate and will estimate their contribution to the typological research10. Why it is convenient to start typological analysis of lexicon with closely-related languages, one of which is native? The advantages of native language are obvious: the language intuition broadens the researcher’s horizons and simplifies the problem of material interpretation. But how can be useful the closely-related language? It can be useful at two aspects minimum. First, the data from closely-related language allow to determine more accurately the range of lexemes that are related to the studied semantic field. For example, the researcher that begins to study the qualitative field of speed in Russian language will include lexemes bystryj, medlennyj, šustryj, skoryj, but only after considering other Slavic languages, for example, Serbian in which the meaning ‘fast’ is transmitted by adjectives brz and nagao, he will add lexemes borzyj (borzoj) and naglyj, that have lost the meaning of speed in Russian long ago, but on synchronic level they demonstrate, what the results of semantic derivation of adjectives with the meaning of speed can be. 9

Cf. Haspelmath 2003 where the author supposes that even 12 languages are enough for identification of the main semantic features of the field. 10 For another type of studying of Slavic cognates see monograph [Tolstaya 2008] dedicated to the semantic reconstruction.

31


SCLC 2012 Second, the material of closely-related languages gives the opportunity to discover main parameters, relevant for the semantic field. Comparing cognates, we will easily find common part in their semantic structures and so we will be able to find their differences easily. For example, the comparison of Russian ostryj and Serbian oštar (‘sharp’) shows, that Serbian lexeme covers wider range of contexts compared to Russian, and all usages that don’t present in Russian language, are the metaphors from direct meaning “cuts well”, while all Russian metaphors go back to the image of sharp needle or piercing spear 11. So, there is the reason to assume that for this field the opposition “cutting edge” vs. “piecing end” is important. Afterwards, the analysis of other languages show, that this parameter is fundamental in the range of languages including not Indo-European ones. For example in Komi the concept ‘sharp’ is transmitted by two lexemes (lečyd and yos’), one of which describes the subject with cutting edge, while the other – subjects with piercing end respectively. References Haspelmath, M. The geometry of grammatical meaning: semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison // Tomasello, M. (ed.). The new psychology of language, vol. 2. – Mahwah, NJ, 2003, p. 211-242. Kibrik, А. Е. Does intragenetic typology make sense? // Boeder, W. et al. (eds.). Sprache im Raum und Zeit: in memoriam Johannes Bechert. Bd. 2: Beiträge zur empirischen Sprachwissenschaft. Tübingen: Narr, 1998. Kibrik, A.E. Rodstvennye iazyki kak ob’ekt tipologii [Related languages as the object of typology] //Kibrik A.E. Konstanty i peremennye iazyka [Constants and variables of language]. St. Petersburg, Aleteia, 2003, p. 191-195. Rakhilina E.V., Maisak T.A. Glagoly dvizheniia v vode : leksicheskaia tipologiia [Aquamotion verbs: lexical typology]. Moscow, Indrik, 2007. Rakhilina E.V., Prokofieva I.A. Rodstvennye iazyki kak ob’ekt leksicheskoj tipologii: russkie I pol’skie glagoly vrascheniia [Related languages as the object of lexical typology: Russian and Polish rotation verbs], Moscow, Voprosy iazykoznaniia, 2004, №1, p. 68 -78. Tolstaya, S.M. Prostranstvo slova. Leksicheskaia semantika v obscheslavianskoi perspektive [Space of word. Lexical semantics in Slavic perspective]. Moscow, Indrik, 2008.

Zuzanna Lamza University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland The Androgynous Market – Some Remarks on the Conceptual Metaphor in the Press My research is focused on the characteristics of the press sectors almost devoid of non-persuasive journalism. For some time now this applies not only to the so-called women's magazines, but also to magazines primarily marketed to men, which - through the selection of topics of interest (concentrated on fashion and body) and the way in which these topics are covered (they all are equally dominated by promotional materials which are very different from traditional advertising messages) - become increasingly similar to magazines targeted to women with purchasing power (Glamour or Cosmopolitan) rather than to typical men's magazines (Playboy). 11

Thus in Serbian word combinations oštar okret (‘sharp turn’), oštra padina (‘steep slope’), oštra granica ('distinguished boundary') are possible. In Russian in all these cases the adjective rezkij is employed, that confirms the link with the sense ‘cutting’.

32


SCLC 2012 We shouldn't be surprised that conceptual metaphors have become key persuasion tools – the more aware and resilient against direct advertising is the consumer, the stronger is the need of publishers to hide the message in quasi-articles or between the lines of a quasiinterview. It also shouldn't come as surprise that the publishers display a skillful use of M. Johnson’s and G. Lakoff’s theory of the conceptual metaphor – which provides the advertisers with a powerful and versatile tool that practically cannot be abused (because it has infinite possible individual realizations in the text and is at the same time transparent for the reader). However, it is definitely worth discussing how homogeneous the contents of men's and women's magazines have become. My paper discusses metaphors distilled from the texts of two national issues of two international women's magazines (InStyle and Glamour) and two analogous men's magazines (Men's Health and GQ). As the latter is lacking an issue in Polish, it is substituted by Logo which belongs to the same category of magazines. The examples found will allow us to observe not only numerous ontological metaphors (FASHION IS AN ACTRESS, FASHION IS A BOSS, HAIR IS A WILD ANIMAL), but also complex structural metaphors (e.g. CARING FOR THE BODY IS A WAR/BATTLE). All of them are interesting not only because of their ubiquity, but also because their multiple individual realizations reflect subsequent facets of a given conceptual metaphor with the same or very similar words. If we take into account that the phenomenon described concerns not only homologous terms in direct translations (usually Spanish or Polish versions of English advertisements), but also phrases used in completely independent texts, we can observe the advanced state of the homogenization of the Western world – the globalization of not only the markets, but the ways of thinking and of expressing thoughts. Interestingly, this globalization tends to have a direct influence on the language of the message; several examples of 'forced' wording will be discussed (e.g. the use of a Polish word towarzyszka instead of the much more natural and common one, przyjaciółka) which often appear to render the translation more faithful to the English original. The most unexpected result of my study is that not only the language of the issue (which, we should remember, come from three very different cultures) does not seem to have any effect on the metaphorical structure of the world of glamour magazines, but also the gender of the targeted audience does not have any influence on the conceptualization of the message. So although the magazines themselves constantly emphasize stereotypized differences between women and men, their contents are built on identical conceptual foundations and expressed by the same phrases. One might describe this phenomenon as 'androgynization of press'.

Liljana Mitkovska & Eleni Buzarovska FON University, Skopje / University Ss Cyril and Methodius, Skopje From physical to abstract affectedness: prepositions vrzand varhu in Balkan Slavic This paper investigates the semantics of the Macedonian preposition vrz and its Bulgarian counterpart varhu from cognitive perspective. These prepositions represent a unique case of coding the functional meaning of LM affectedness. The translational equivalents of vrz/varhu in other Slavic languages are recruited from the domain of superposition and they lack this functional meaning. The paper has two related goals: to explain the polysemy of vrz/varhu by discovering the semantic links between all its spatial and non-spatial senses and to filter out the semantic components that vrz/varhu share with other related spatial prepositions, such as na, po and 33


SCLC 2012 nad. The dictionary definitions of both prepositions do not include the affectedness meaning, a fact that obscures the difference in use between vrz/varhu and the above-mentioned prepositions (Kuferot padna vrz/na glavata na dedoto 'The suitcase fell upon/on the old man's head). The authors, on the other hand, show how the spatial domain of vrz is shared by other semantically similar prepositions of superposition and offer an explanation as to why they differ. The corpus-based analysis of vrz enables to determine the role of the semantic component of 'affectedness' responsible for the unique position of vrz among the prepositions that express superposition. In its primary sense vrz is found with verbs denoting downward movement, such as fall, put, pour, hit, throw upon which underscore the affectedness of LM while retaining the superposition meaning. This prototype effect is preserved in all spatial extensions, although it may be considerably weakened, for instance in the spreading sense (Stavete kilim vrz svetol pod. 'Put a rug over a light floor'). This is even more pronounced in the non-spatial extensions of vrz which can be subsumed under the category of influence with predicates such as vlijae vrz 'to influence', se fokusira vrz 'focus upon', prezema kontrola vrz ' take control of, ima pravo vrz 'have the right over', etc. Even though the semantic component of affectedness is also characteristic of the Bulgarian preposition varhu, the analysis of the Bulgarian examples shows that varhu, in comparison with vrz, does not maintain this criterion so strictly. This results in a wider distribution of varhu in both physical and abstract domain. The use of varhu in Bulgarian is closer to its Greek adverbial counterpart pano (similar to English 'upon') which may have served as a conceptual source for the development of these prepositions in Balkan Slavic.

Svetlana Nedelcheva Shumen University TWO WAYS TO FORM INGRESSIVE VERBS IN BULGARIAN In Traditional grammar verbal prefixes 12 are assigned the function of aspectual markers, when added to imperfective verbs they make them prefective. Cognitive linguists oppose this view and argue that the prefix is never purely grammatical and entirely deprived of lexical meaning. This paper claims that prefixes are never ‘merely aspectual’ in meaning, and, similarly to prepositions, they contribute significantly to building and modifying construals. Prefixes are used for the formation of different Aktionsarten and the resultant verbs are more specific in their semantics than the mere feature "perfective" would apply to the original verb. Each prefix can combine with different word bases and some verb prefixes can combine with a number of different prefixes. This study focuses on the ingressive use of two Bulgarian preverbs: za- and do-. Both prefixes combine with a wide variety of verbs which makes their semantic networks quite extensive. Our database is extracted from Pashov’s thorough study on Bulgarian verbs (1966) and contains a total number of 1076 za-verbs (65% of them ingressive) and 315 do-verbs (6% of them ingressive). Those with obsolete and perfective base are excluded. The prototype for za- can be interpreted as passing from a state of non-activity into a state of activity (the trajector (TR) oversteps a limit) or as it was pointed out by Janda (1985) it is crossing a boundary. The prototype for do- is associated with the GOAL REACHED meaning. We argue that the prototypical meaning of these prefixes can be found in their ingressive uses. There is no arbitrariness in the choice of prefix and it is systematically motivated. 12

Verbal prefixes are also called preverbs.

34


SCLC 2012 As frequency shows za- is the prefix typically used for expressing ingressivity (e.g. празнувам ‘celebrate’ - запразнувам ‘start celebrating’; пързалям ‘slip, slide’ – запързалям ‘begin to slide’). Do-, on the other hand, forms ingressives with a specific group of verbs, all of them accompanied by the short pronoun forms: ме, ми, ми се (e.g. спи ми се ‘feel sleepy’ – доспи ми се ‘start feeling sleepy’; сърби ме ‘feel itchy’ – досърби ме ‘start feeling itchy’). The ingressive uses of these two prefixes can be subdivided into several semantic groups according to the meaning of the verbs, for example: Metaphorical extension

Occupation (захваля – ‘start praising’)

Destination ZA-

Motion domain (задъвка – ‘start chewing’)

Crossing a limit/border

Sound domain (затрополя ‘start rattling’)

Light domain (затрепкам ‘start flickering’)

Start of an activity

Completion of an activity

Domain of emotions (дотежа ми ‘start feeling heavy’)

Completion of an activity Goal reached DOCrossing a limit/border

Start of an activity

Domain of senses (докеселее ми – ‘start tasting sour’)

Sound domain (дорева ми се – ‘feel like crying’) State domain (доще ми се – ‘start wanting’)

Our analysis shows that with za-verbs the trajector (TR) oversteps a limit. The activities referred to by the landmark (LM) are related to the domains of motion (e.g. завилнея ‘begin to rage’; завъргалям ‘start rolling about’; загреба ‘start rowing’), light (e.g. засветя ‘start shining’; затрепкам ‘start flickering’; засияя ‘become radiant’) and sound (e.g. затрополя ‘start rattling’; захокам ‘start scolding’; захрупам ‘start munching’) or can denote some kind of occupation or a new quality the TR has acquired (e.g. занервнича ‘become nervous’; заобщувам ‘start communicating’; затъргувам ‘start trading’). 35


SCLC 2012 Although verbs prefixed by do- are defined as denoting the beginning of an activity (Bulgarian Grammar 1993: 217), in this paper we claim that it is rather the TR beginning to feel something or feeling like doing something. The TR is obligatory animate and the verbs it is associated with belong to the domains of feelings (e.g. догади ми се ‘start feeling sick’; дорева ми се ‘feel like crying’; догневее ме ‘get angry’), senses (e.g. докиселее ми ‘start tasting sour’; досмъдя ме ‘begin to smart’; досърбя ме ‘start feeling itchy’) and wishes (e.g. доще ми се ‘start wanting’; дотрябва ми ‘turn necessary’; доскучее ми ‘start feeling bored’). The trajector is both an agent and a recipient, it performs the activity on him/herself. The idea of reflexivity is brought about by the specific grammatical construction bearing reflexive particles. When za- is used together with the reflexive particle se it has the meaning of excessiveness: загледам се ‘stare’, задъхам се ‘pant’, заиграя се ‘be deep in play’, заслушам се ‘listen to’, запия се ‘drink too much’, etc. This study reveals that za- and do- express ingressivity when they combine with different verbs. They also favour different grammatical constructions which precludes their interchangeability and the arbitrariness in choosing a prefix. References Bulgarian Grammar. 1993. Vol. 2. Morphology. Sofia: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Janda, Laura A. 1985."The Meaning of Russian Verbal Prefixes: Semantics and Grammar". The Scope of Slavic Aspect, (UCLA Slavic Studies, vol. 12). Columbus, Ohio, 1985. 2640. Langacker, R. W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Maslov, Ju. S. 1981. Grammatika bolgarskogo jazyka. Moskva. Pashov, P. 1966. Bulgarskiyat glagol. Sofia.

Vitaly Nikolaev Georgetown University Patte r ns o f prefix -prepo sitio n co llo catio n in Russian v erbs of mo tio n Quantative corpus analysis is an important way of discovering patterns in language. It offers a reliable tool in quantitatively evaluating theoretical generalizations and predictions over various linguistic phenomena. In this article I report on a corpus study addressing patterns of collocation between prefixes and prepositions in the context of GOAL motion events. Motion events in Russian are expressed by a variety of prefixed motion verbs and prepositional phrases, which specify spatial characteristics of the event. In determinate motion verbs prefixes can significantly modify the spatial arrangement of an event (Titelbaum, 1990) accentuating its SOURCE, PATH, or GOAL while prepositions add more specific information pertaining to the spatial arrangement of the event (Ferm, 1990; Shull, 2003; Whibley, 1982). (1) Саша

про-

бежал

мимо

школы.

Saš-a

pro-

beža-l

mimo

škol-y.

runD -PAST.MASC.SG

beside

school-GEN.SG.

Sasha-NOM along-

36


SCLC 2012 'Sasha ran pastPf the school.' (про- PATH Pf + мимо PATH Pp)

(5)

Саша

в-

бежал

в школу.

Saš-a

v-

beža-l

v škol-u.

Sasha-NOM

in-

runD -PAST.MASC.SG

in school-ACC.SG.

'Sasha ran intoPf the school (building).' (в- GOALPf + в GOALPp)

(6)

Саша

от-

бежал

в

тень.

Saš-a

ot-

beža-l

v

ten'.

Sasha-NOM

away- runD -PAST.MASC.SG in

shade-ACC.SG.

'Sasha ran awayPf into Pp the shade.' (от- SOURCEPf + в GOALPp) While prefixation is the most productive verbal perfectivization process in Russian, many Russian prefixes and prepositions are cognate with consistent similarities in their form and meaning (Gribanova, 2008; Tabakowska, 2003; Švedova et al., 1980). Russian motion verbs can be prefixed with up to five different prefixes denoting the GOAL of a motion event; prepositional phrases expressing GOAL also show variability. If prefixes and prepositions are cognate and show similarities in meaning, what guides their distribution in the expression of a motion event? Are there any restrictions on what prefix can coordinate with what preposition? The collocation patterns between prefixes and prepositions have been described either as doubling of cognates (e.g., (1), (2)), where cognate or "synonymous" prefixes and prepositions are understood to collocate in the expression of an event (Vinogradov, 2001; Zolotova, 1973) or a more complex multiple valency (e.g., (3)), where prefix-preposition collocation patterns are not limited to cognate of synonymous pairs (Ferm, 1990; Shull, 2003). I propose to start quantifying the patterns of prefix-preposition collocation on the basis of a 3,500-sentence corpus study of naturally occurring discourse from the Russian National Corpus by focusing on spatial contexts with the event expressing a GOAL-oriented motion. There are two specific questions that I intend to answer: (7) Generally, in a corpus of naturally occurring language, among five GOAL prefixes, are patterns of prefix-preposition coordination random? (8) More specifically, if we take away the variable of semantic compatibility and only observe prefixes and prepositions compatible by default (i.e., both denoting GOAL), is there any justification for the doubling effect? Do prefixes indeed collocate with cognate prepositions? I use statistical methods to identify patterns of associations between prefixes and prepositional phrases. Employing X2 -test and Cramer's V, I find that the pattern of distribution of prefixes in relation to prepositions is not random, and the association of distribution between the two classes is very strong. Furthermore, Pearson's residuals allow me to evaluate the strength of association between individual prefixes and prepositions. While it is not the case that prefixes collocated exclusively with cognate prefixes, the values of Pearson's residuals 37


SCLC 2012 show that — where available — the strongest preference of collocation for a given prefixes is associated with a cognate preposition. This suggests that the doubling effect has the status of a strong tendency in the collocation of prefixes and prepositions, while not barring the cooccurrence of non-cognate prefix-preposition pairs as predicted by the multiple valency. In this sense, both models capture important — while non-conflicting — patterns of prefixpreposition collocations: prefixes can generally collocate with a wide variety of prepositions but show strongest preference for cognate or synonymous prepositions. References Ferm, L. (1990). Vyraženie napravlenija pri pristavočnyx glagolax peremeščenija v sovremennom russkom jazyke: k voprosu prefiksal'no-predložnogo determinizma. [Expression of direction with prefixed verbs of motion in Modern Russian: a contribution to the study of prefixal-prepositional determinism]. PhD dissertation, Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, Sweden. Gribanova, V. (2008). Russian prefixes, prepositions and palatalization in stratal OT. In Chang, C. B. and Haynie, H. J., editors, Proceedings of the 26th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, pages 217-225, Somerville, MA. Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Shull, S. (2003). The experience of space. The priviledged role of spatial prefixation in Czech and Russian. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA. Tabakowska, E. (2003). Space and time in Polish: the preposition za and the verbal prefix za.In Cuyckens, H., Berg, T., Dirven, R., and Panther, K., editors, Miotivation in language, pages 153-177. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Philadelphia, PA. Titelbaum, O. A. (1990). Prefixed Russian verbs of transposition. Russian Linguistics, 14(1):37-46. Švedova, N. J., Arutjunova, N. D., Bondarko, A. V., Ivanov, V. V., Lopatin, V. V., Ulux- anov, I. S., and Filin, F. P., editors (1980). Russkaja grammatika, volume 1. Nauka, Moscow, Russia. Vinogradov, V. V. (2001). Russkij jazyk (Grammatičeskoe učenie o slove). [The Russian language (A grammatical study of the word)]. Izdatel'stvo Instituta inostrannyx jazykov, Moscow, Russia, 4 edition. Whibley, K. (1982). On prefix-preposition combinations with Russian verbs of motion. Papers in Slavonic linguistics, I:211-225. Zolotova, G. A. (1973). Očerk funkcional'nogo sintaksisa russkogo jazyka. [On Russian functional syntax]. Nauka, Moscow, Russia.

Maria Ovsjannikova and Sergey Say Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Science, St Petersburg 38


SCLC 2012

A valency alternation pattern in Russian reaction verbs In Russian, there is a group of verbs that display a pattern of valency alternation, which is shown in (1a-b, 2a-b). Examples from the National Russian Corpus are presented in a simplified fashion: (1a) (1b) (2a) (2b)

Я не обижаюсь [на него]1 [за эти слова]2… ‘I did not take offence at his words’. И не обижайся [на мои резкие слова]1… ‘And don’t take offence at my sharp words’ … согласиться [с Дарденом]1 [в его окончательных … выводах]2. ‘… to agree with Darden in his ultimate conclusions’ И Эйнштейн вынужден был публично согласиться [с выводами Фридмана]1. ‘And Einstein was forced to publicly agree with Friedmann’s conlclusions’

The defining properties of the group at issue are the following: A) Normally, these verbs take sentient (human) subjects and denote a certain experiential, mental and / or communicative situation. B) These verbs can be used with two syntactic objects, as in (1a) and (2a). The primary object (symbolized with 1 in subscript) in such uses prototypically denotes a human being, whereas the optional secondary object is semantically proposition-like (it can be a subordinate clause, a nominalization, etc.). Widening Paducheva’s (2004) proposal, the former is conventionally labeled ‘Target’ and the latter ‘Aspect’. The ‘Target’ participant is semantically related to the (hidden) proposition coded as the secondary object, though not necessarily syntactically represented in it, e.g. in (1a) the Target participant is by default understood as the person who uttered the words in question, though this is not syntactically expressed. C) Alternatively, these verbs can co-occur with proposition-like entities (roughly correspondent to Aspect) in the syntactic position of the primary object (1b, 2b). In these constructions the verb cannot take another object with the distinct role of Target, though this participant can be expressed elsewhere (e.g. as the possessor of the primary object). In a corpus-based study of the verbs at issue the following main results have been achieved. 1) The set of verbs that display the properties above was established. They appeared to show a good deal of heterogeneity in terms of thematic class and coding devices that are employed for their primary and secondary objects, as illustrated in the following Table: Verb обижаться согласиться осуждать поддерживать

translation ‘take offence’ ‘agree’ ‘condemn’ ‘support’

Primary object на + ACC c + INS ACC ACC

Secondary object за + ACC в + LOC за + ACC в + LOC

2) Notwithstanding this heterogeneity, it is shown that there are semantic properties that are common for the whole group of verbs as defined above. All these verbs denote a particular reaction on the part of a human being that is triggered by a certain state-of-affairs and that can manifest itself (or be construed) as directed towards another human being or an entity that is metaphorically interpreted as human-like. The very nature of human reactions accounts for the observed syntactic duality: all things being equal, human reactions are 39


SCLC 2012 directed towards the party that is understood as primarily responsible for the situation in question. Thus, in the cognitive schemata of these verbs the ‘Target’ participant, as defined above, can be represented twice: as part of the causing situation and the goal of the reaction. Another important property of the alternating verbs is the metaphoric transfer from PERSON to SITUATION. In some instances the directionality of this cognitive transfer can also be corroborated by diachronic data that show a significant increase in the ratio of situation-like primary objects. Based on the proposed semantic analysis we will try to explain why some verbs that are otherwise similar to the alternating ones do not conform to the criteria A-C above. For example, удивляться ‘be surprised’ is similar in that it can take both human and situationlike objects, but it can’t be used in a structure similar to a) variants above; this corresponds to the fact that удивляться doesn’t necessarily imply a directed manifestation of the emotional state. Like the alternating verbs (e.g. осуждать ‘condemn’), обвинять ‘accuse’ can be used in a structure similar to a) variants above, but its Aspect participant can never occupy the primary object position. This corresponds to the fact that обвинять is not necessarily a reaction; the fault being charged can be conjectured based on oblique evidence or even fakedup. 3) Some of individual constructional alternations at issue (e.g. the one exemplified in 1a and 1b) have been tangentially discussed in some previous studies (Arutjunova, Muravenko), especially as instances of possessor-splitting (Paducheva). Our data show, however, that there is a wider semantic mechanism behind alternations at issue, so that the analysis in terms of external possessor cannot capture the whole range of constructional variants. Jasňa Pacovská Charles University, Prague Dialogue in the Body Language and (Psycho)somatic Phraseology – specific Expressions in Czech The starting point of this paper is one of the main principles of cognitive linguistics – the interconnection of mental, physical and speech processes, the expressions of which are conceptual (image) schemes. The so-called (Inter)acting with the Inner Partner – a psychosomatic discipline developed at the Department of Authorial Creativity and Pedagogy at The Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (DAMU) – is based on the connection of mental processes with somatic experience. The essence of (Inter)acting is “the dialogue with an inner partner”, in which a person communicates (by body movement, voice, speech) with him or herself. People act and reflect their own actions spontaneously. They listen to the impulses of their body and mind and react to them. They react to them by body movement and different body expressions, gestic manifestation is usually noticeable, and by speech. The obvious interconnection of all those modalities captures the cognitive linguist’s attention. They are never manifested separately but they create a united communicating whole. We find evidence about this psychosomatic condition in (psycho)somatic phraseology, the underlying base of which are namely orientation metaphors and conceptual schemes. Orientation metaphors, in which our conceptualization of space is contained, give evidence about our mental processes and states. It is in (Inter)acting with the Inner Partner where the bodily motivated phrasemes are externalized by speech interconnected with a body action. A female participant encouraging herself, motivating herself to some action, calls out: 40


SCLC 2012 “I need to pull myself together, get up and go!” and simultaneously she straightens up quickly and raises her arms. Another participant expresses his negative emotional state of mind quietly pronouncing: "I am despondent, it goes down the hill with me..." and with a slow and languid movement he lays himself to the ground. References to Johnsonian schemes clearly show themselves in (Inter)acting with the Inner Partner, especially: CONTAINER, PATH, LINK, PART-WHOLE, CENTREPERIPHERY. It is obvious from the study of video recordings that a much frequented scheme is CONTAINER, which finds its use namely in the case of making contact with the inner partner. The appeal: “Lend me a helping hand!” is accompanied by the movement of the palm of the hand turned up, with fingers pointing forwards, by which gesture the palm creates a container into which the answer should be put. The contribution highlights (by means of specific examples of Czech phrasemes that are an expression of mental and somatic manifestations) the importance of a holistic approach to human being, whose essence is the interconnectedness of mental processes with the "body language". The speech is based on the physical foundation of our body, our generalized experience is handed down in it, and it can be understood as an expression of change of human movement. (Psycho)somatic phraseology, which works across nations, provides us with evidence about the relationship between the immediate, mostly subconscious, body activity and speech.

Jelena Parizoska University of Zagreb Local constraints on idiom variation in Croatian Idioms are traditionally defined as units which have a stable form. Corpus-based studies have relativized this notion, showing that idioms may occur in one or more lexical and/or syntactic forms (Moon 1998; Cignoni, Coffey and Moon 2002). It has also been shown that a number of idioms are schematic (Croft and Cruse 2004), i.e. that they have a relatively flexible structure, with open slots which can be filled by a range of items. However, schematic idioms are not entirely flexible as they contain a stable core element (Langlotz 2006) which serves as the basis for variant realizations. Variants are constrained by the cognitive mechanism or mechanisms motivating the expression (Gibbs and Nayak 1989; Gibbs et al. 1989; Nunberg, Sag and Wasow 1994). Among those mechanisms are spatial schemas, which describe a relation between a trajector and a location. In many Slavic languages, including Croatian, the movement of a trajector towards a location or its interior is signalled by u ‘in’ + accusative (Janda and Clancy 2006; Šarić 2008). For example Croatian idioms containing a verb which designates object motion or self-motion and u + accusative invoke the CONTAINER and SOURCE -PATH - GOAL schemas (e.g. pasti u klopku (lit. fall into a trap) ‘get into a difficult situation’). Still, the spatial schema alone is not sufficiently detailed to describe the core of the idiom because some variants do not occur (e.g. doći u klopku (lit. come into a trap)). The aim of this paper is to show that Croatian idioms containing a verb which designates object motion or self-motion and u + accusative are schematic and that they vary systematically relative to a stable conceptual core, i.e. the (specific) relation between a trajector and a location expressed by the prepositional phrase. More specifically, based on a study of 75 idioms conducted in the Croatian National Corpus we will show that variants are subject to a local constraint: the state conceptualized as the location. 41


SCLC 2012 The results show two things. Firstly, the idioms share a common schematic core element (the trajector-landmark relation), which may be construed from different perspectives – as self-motion (pasti u klopku) or caused motion (uvući koga u klopku (lit. drag someone into a trap)). Secondly, there also seems to be a local constraint on variant realizations, restricting the variance of lexical items. For instance, an idiom may allow only verbs describing uncontrollable movement (e.g. pasti u depresiju (lit. fall into a depression); potonuti u depresiju (lit. sink into a depression)). Overall, the results indicate that idiom variation may be constrained on two levels: 1) conceptual motivation, and 2) lexically within a given set of idioms. Thus, different perspectivizations of the scene around the nominal element which makes up the conceptual core (Langlotz 2006: 277) seem to be inextricably tied to the constructional meaning of the expression. In other words, the core of the idiom is not the nominal expression alone (e.g. klopku ‘trap-ACC’), but the trajector-landmark relation (uncontrollable movement into a trap). Methodologically, this means that various constructional approaches seem most appropriate to deal with idiom variation. References Cignoni, Laura, Stephen Coffey, and Rosamund Moon. 2002. “Idiom Variation in English and Italian: two corpus-based studies.” Languages in Contrast 2(2): 279-300. Croft, William, and D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr., and Nandini Nayak. 1989. “Psycholinguistic studies on the syntactic behaviour of idioms.” Cognitive Psychology 21: 100-138. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr., Nandini Nayak, John Bolton, and Melissa Keppel. 1989. “Speakers’ assumptions about the lexical flexibility of idioms.” Memory and Cognition 17: 58-68. Janda, Laura A., and Steven Clancy. 2006. The Case Book for Czech. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers. Langlotz, Andreas. 2006. Idiomatic Creativity. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Moon, Rosamund. 1998. Fixed Expressions and Idioms in English. A Corpus-Based Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nunberg, Geoffrey, Ivan Sag, and Thomas Wasow. 1994. Idioms. Language 70(3): 491-539. Šarić, Ljiljana. 2008. Spatial Concepts in Slavic. A Cognitive Linguistic Study of Prepositions and Cases. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

Anita Peti-Stantić University of Zagreb Gradient Grammaticality, Information Structure and the Parallel Architecture In most contemporary formal models of grammar, it has often been assumed that there is a so called “context-free grammar”, that has „nothing to do” with how language is used. This is claimed to be the only way to objectively approach linguistics. As opposed to that, over the past decade or two it has become increasingly difficult not to observe that standard methods of judging grammaticality may be corrupted through estimation based on the frequency of usage, influence of the prescriptive norm, or specific lexical choices. This is true in particular when it comes to the existence of certain linguistic phenomena which obviously cannot be accounted for from the syntactocentric point of view, but they rather call to introduce a conceptual semantic tier into grammatical description. 42


SCLC 2012 Among the most interesting phenomena that help us see the need to bridge the gap between phonological, syntactic and conceptual tiers of grammatical description are clitic clusters in South Slavic languages. In order to be able to account for their role in the sentence phonology, as well as within the sentence information structure (IS), one needs to exercise an entirely new experimental approach. The starting point for this paper is twofold – one is methodological, the other one is theoretical. Methodologically, I distinguish between grammaticality, acceptability and acceptability judgments (Bard, Robertson, Sorrace, 1996). Theoretically, I follow the line of thinking that takes the information-structural properties to be part of grammar, and not extralinguistic (Lambrecht, 1994). By accepting these two premises, I reject the classical generative unidirectional input-output model of the relation between syntax and phonology, and take the IS to be the tier within semantics, which is connected both to syntax and phonology through interface rules. The main goal of my paper is to provide evidence that only an experimental research can resolve data disputes and, thus, open a path for a proper analysis of this phenomenon. In order to do this, experimental design will take into account the gradient data judgments in which the position of clitic cluster in Croatian should, according to syntactocentric theories, be accounted for as ungrammatical. For that reason, I am using magnitude estimation (ME). The second part of the paper will find a model of grammar in which the semantic combinatoriality that arises from the relative freedom of clitic cluster placement can be properly analyzed. To do that, I will use the framework of parallel architecture, and try to formulate interface rules that allow for this combinatoriality. References Bard, Ellen Gurman, Robertson, Dan, Sorace, Antonella (1996). Magnitude Estimation of Linguistic Acceptability. Language. Vol 72. No. 1, pp. 32-68. Jackendoff, Ray (2002). Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford University Press. Jackendoff, Ray (2010). Meaning and the Lexicon: The Parallel Architecture 1975-2010. Oxford University Press. Lambrecht, Knud (1994). Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge University Press. Sorace, Antonella, Keller, Frank (2005). Gradience in Linguistic Data. Lingua, 115: 11, 14951524. Ludmila PÜppel, Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij & Artem Sharandin Russian Academy of Sciences / Stockholm University / Austrian Academy of Sciences Russian constructions vot imenno and to-to i ono: corpus analysis and cross-linguistic perspective The purpose of our presentation is to clarify semantic differences between two Russian constructions vot imenno and to-to i ono and to find their functional equivalents in German and Swedish. The semantic structure of particles and constructions such as grammatical phrasemes and syntactic idioms is so intricate that it is often impossible to find appropriate equivalents in other languages. While translating utterances containing such constructions other means have to be used. However, while compiling bilingual dictionaries, a lexicographer has to find

43


SCLC 2012 equivalents on the lexical level. At present we are engaged in a Russian-Swedish lexicographic project. Such phrases as vot imenno and to-to i ono are very important for communication; nevertheless present-day Russian-Swedish dictionaries do not explain the difference between the Swedish near-eqiuvalents to Russian vot imenno (just det and precis), while to-to i ono is not considered at all. The starting point of our investigation is previous research of two German focus particles eben and gerade and their Russian near-equivalents imenno and kak raz (Dobrovol‘skij, Levontina 2012). The analysis of the German particle eben used as an independent utterance (Satzäquivalent) has shown that it has two near-equivalents in Russian – to-to i ono and vot imenno which are not quite synonymous. In the present study, we suggest the following working hypothesis: to-to i ono and vot imenno have different meanings but in some contexts they coincide pragmatically. Contextual synonymy of these constructions is possible in contexts in which some relevant semantic features are neutralized. The construction vot imenno expresses full agreement with the interlocutor’s statement. The meaning of to-to i ono can be roughly paraphrased as following: ‘a certain aspect in a situation, often considered to be secondary or unimportant by the interlocutor, is the central element for understanding the situation as a whole’. The pragmatic consequence is that the speaker often expresses disagreement with the interlocutor. The German particle eben points out that the focused aspect of the situation is the most important, central for understanding the whole situation. The pragmatic consequence is that eben may be used by the speaker to express both agreement and disagreement. Both vot imenno and to-to i ono may be used as separate utterances, this ability goes back to different semantic properties. The meaning of imenno is based on the idea of confirmation, of agreement with the interlocutor, while the German particle eben points to the most important, central element of the situation. Using relevant lexicographic information and large text corpora, among them parallel corpora, we are going to: (a) clarify the use of vot imenno and to-to i ono as independent utterances and matrix predicates (vot imenno, čto Р and to-to i ono, čto Р); (b) discuss their near-equivalents in German and Swedish.

Raisa Rozina Vinogradov’s Russian Language Institute, Russian Academy, Moscow From the Positive to the Negative in Colloquial Russian 13 The paper addresses the problem of meaning shift to the opposite in Russian everyday speech. In colloquial Russian there are a number of words having meanings with different evaluative components, e.g. обуть ‘to put shoes on smb’ and (colloq.) 'to rob smb'; поцеловаться 'to kiss' and (colloq.)‘to collide’. Russian terms of affection used as address, such as друг мой 'my friend', голубчик / голубушка lit. 'dove', дорогая моя 'my dear', дорогуша 'darling', милая моя 'sweetheart' and солнышко lit. 'sunnie', can be used in colloquial speech to express the negative attitude to the addressee, cf: 13

This research is supported by the Russian State Humanities Foundation, grant № 10-04-00275а.

44


SCLC 2012 (9) ― Я, дорогой мой, образованнее, чем вы дyмаете, - сказал гость. ― Это не Маяковский, а Евангелие (Dombrovski). 'I am better educated, my dear, than you think', the visitor said. 'It's not Mayakovsky, but the New Testament'. The question arises under which conditions words expressing the speaker's positive attitude to the addressee acquire just the opposite meaning. Our conclusions concern both their syntactic position and intonation with which they are pronounced. a) Whereas in the 'positive' (affectionate) meaning they tend to occupy the initial position in the utterance, it is not characteristic of their 'negative' (ironic or offensive) meaning, cf (1) with (2), in which the address is affectionate: (2) Милая / голубушка / да что ж вы плачете / дорогая моя? (the film Liuvbov'Morkov'). 'Honey /darling / why are weeping, my dear? b) In the 'negative' meaning these words are often preceded by the pronouns of the second person: (3) Если называть вещи своими именами, то в настоящий момент вы, дорогой мой, неплатежеспособны (Хазанов). 'To call things their names, you, my dear, are insolvent'. c) In the negative meaning these words are not able to function as predicates, i.e. the following utterance can be interpreted as positive only: (4)Ты – дорогая моя, любимая! 'You are my darling, my love! d) Other, not less important means distinguishing negative meanings from positive ones, are intonation and jestures. The word preceding the 'offensive' address is pronounced with a sharp rise, which is immediately followed by an abrupt fall, cf: (5) Вы , дорогая моя , совсем не знаете своего сына. You, my dear, have no idea of what your son is really like. The same address in the 'positive' meaning is pronounced with a falling tone continuing the tone of the preceding word, cf: (7) Пойдём , дорогой мой . Let's go , my dear. The 'offensive' intonation is accompanied by the speaker's head moving upward and the chin thrust forward, which might express the speaker's wish to dominate. The affectionate intonation is accompanied by the downward movement of the speaker's head in the direction of the addressee, by which the speaker might express her/ his compassion. In the rest of the paper I look at other categories of words capable of similar meaning shifts. The presentation is illustrated by fragments from Russian feature films.

Kinga Rudnicka-Szozda Społeczna Akademia Nauk, Warsaw 45


SCLC 2012

Introducing the agent: On some non-conventionalized uses of the transitive construction in Polish The study is basically aimed to present the concept of transitivity as a construal phenomenon that plays a major role in portraying events in a particular way. The article presents a conceptually based account of a selection of Polish data which illustrate the speaker’s dexterity with manipulating the well conventionalized transitive construction in order to achieve some semantico-pragmatic and rhetorical effects. The data collected for the analysis constitute novel instances of the transitive coding in Polish, which, as will be argued, should be seen as a visible manifestation of the speakers’ ability and also need to apply linguistic structures creatively. The unconventionalized uses of the transitive coding may involve the manipulation with regard to any element of the event, e.g. the entity performing the action or the entity that undergoes the action. The article focuses on those instances where a non-canonical agent is introduced on stage, as in the examples (a), (b) and (c) below. (a)

Jak wieś ma dwa domy to łatwo zniknąć ją z if village has two houses it easy disappear it: ACC from ‘If a village has two houses it is easy to disappear it from powierzchni ziemi. surface: GEN earth: GEN the earth’s surface.’

(b)

Wobec braku jakichkolwiek sukcesów przy indolencji ministrów ocierającej się o sabotaż albo kretynizm (…), trzeba na gwałt zanotować “cóś”. Co? Ano można np. “zachorować” pilota żeby Prezydent nie miał czym lecieć. Dobrze, że tylko “zachorować”, bo można byłoby go „zniknąć”… Jak Orwell, to Orwell. ‘In face of the lack of any success and the indolence of the ministers close to sabotage or cretinism (...), you urgently need to note “something”. What? Well, you can, e.g. “fall-ill” a pilot: ACC so that the President had nothing to fly with. Fine, if you only “fall-ill” him, as you could also “disappear” him: ACC... Orwell is Orwell’

(c)

Muszę wstać mamę. ‘I have-to stand-up mum: ACC’

In their prototypical use, the verbs znikać (‘disappear’), zachorować (‘fall ill’) and wstać (‘stand up’) are intransitive and characterize an action involving an internally caused change, where the change comes naturally in an entity due to its inherent properties or capacity. However, in (a), (b) and (c) the events are construed as if it were caused by some external causer that is assigned the responsibility for the change. Thus, the construal in (a), (b) and (c) differs from the prototypical use of the verb primarily with regard to the responsibility taken for the action and its results. The conceptual structure underlying such examples can be characterized in terms of the expansion of the profile. Hence, an intransitive verb can be employed with a causative predication, by means of which the profiled one-participant relationship is expanded into a two-participant event. Thus, participant B, which functions as the action-chain head, is selected as the subject. On the other hand, entity A, which undergoes

46


SCLC 2012 a change of state and is the tail of the action chain, is chosen as a direct object and receives the appropriate case marking. In Polish it is marked by the accusative case. Such data illustrate the semantic import of introducing an agent/causer into a oneparticipant event prototypically coded by an inherently intransitive verb. The process of transitivization and at the same time causativization of a construction involves a shift in the interpretation of the participants. The entity undergoing an internally caused change of state, can be portrayed in the transitive construction as affected by the action induced by an external agent/causer. Therefore, the participants are assigned the features of the patient and agent, respectively. The study shall present more examples of the non-canonical coding of events, which seem to be fairly common in colloquial Polish,as well as reveal certain conceptual motivation for such alternative structures.

Nezrin Samedova Azerbaijan University of Languages The semantic description of aspectual paradigms like prygat’ / prygnut’: what it contributes to cognitive linguistics (some thoughts) 1. “The deeper our understanding of the semantic structure of language, the greater the contribution that linguistics makes to cognitive science” (Zaliznjak 2004). The proposed approach to the semantic description of aspectual paradigms like the Russian prygat’ / prygnut’ (“jump”) illustrates this thesis. 2. First, it appears that two homonymous imperfectives prygat’ should be differentiated. They significantly differ regarding their behavior. Thus, unlike prygat’1, prygat’2 does not combine with phasal verbs. Nor does it correlate with the perfectives zaprygat’ (“to start jumping”), poprygat’ (“to jump for a while”), etc. Besides, prygat’2 is reluctant to combine with the word medlenno (“slowly”) and linguistic units indicating the duration of a process. Examples like 1 (from the Internet) are very rare, example 2 has been modeled by analogy with the one in [Chertkova 1996: 70]: 1) …Mногие поражались, как я умею так "медленно" прыгать…; 2) За долю секунды он прыгает к столу. We advance the following explanation for these differences. The thing is that, unlike prygat’1, prygat’2 refers to a very short physical action that does not last long. Language conceptualizes the action in full accordance with the feature. Prygat’2 possesses a peculiar meaning of a process, namely the meaning of a process that has a short (i.e. non-standard) duration. One can infer that we ascribe prygat’1 the meaning of a process of standard duration: prygat’1 prygat’2 ─────────────

─────

3. As for prygnut’, we face a paradox. One cannot deny that it possesses a meaning of process, cf. [Maslov 1959: 185, 227] and the illustrations: Волк медленно прыгнул…; За долю секунды он прыгнул к столу. On the other hand, in contrast to other perfectives, verbs like prygnut’ are traditionally treated as momentary (punctual), i.e. as having no meaning of a process. Indeed, cf. prygnut’ k stolu and doprygat’ do stola. The paradox is resolved if to agree that prygnut’ possesses the same peculiar meaning of a process having a short duration as prygat’2. However, the question arises: why do native speakers not perceive the meaning? 47


SCLC 2012

4. The answer proposed is based on S. Karcevski’s visionary idea. According to him, perfectivization is nothing else but the concentration of our attention on one concrete moment of a process that excludes all other moments. Consequently, we have the impression that the perfective process possesses no duration at all. Nevertheless, it is only an impression, for duration is an attribute of any process [Karcevski 2004: 89]. Thus, in both prygnut’ and doprygat’ our attention concentrates on the meaning of final limit (final moment) and thereby the essential attribute of a process, namely its duration, is overshadowed. However, in doprygat’, it is the meaning of a process of standard duration that is concealed, whereas in prygnut’ it is the meaning of a process having short duration: doprygat’ do stola prygnut’ k stolu ─────────────• ─────• Hence, the illusion arises that prygnut’ does not possess any meaning of a process at all. That is why the researchers compare the whole meaning of the verb to a moment or point. 5. What is the cognitive content of the introduced non-traditional concepts? What exactly is the cognitive mechanism behind the described interaction of semantic components? Is this worldview only specific to Russian? This is not a complete list of questions that the suggested semantic description contributes to cognitive science. References Chertkova, M.Ju. 1996. Grammatičeskaya kategorija vida v sovremennom russkom jazyke. Moscow: Izd-vo MGU. Karcevski, S.I. 2004. Système du verbe russe. Paris: Institut d'études slaves. Maslov, Ju.S. 1959. Voprosy grammatiki bolgarskogo literaturnogo jazyka. Мoscow: Izd-vo Akademii nauk. Zaliznjak, A.A. 2004. Fenomen mnogoznačnosti i sposoby ego opisaniya. In: Voprosy jazykoznanija. 2004, № 2. www.philology.ru/linguistics2/zaliznyak_anna-04.htm.

Ljiljana Šarić & Ivelina Tchizmarova University of Oslo / Simon Fraser University Space and Metaphor in Verbs Prefixed with od-/ot- ‘from’ and do- ‘to’ in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Bulgarian This paper analyzes verbs prefixed with od-/ot- ‘(away) from’ and do- ‘(up) to, towards’ from a cognitive linguistics perspective, focusing on spatial meaning extensions into non-spatial domains. The prototypical senses of these prefixed verbs involve a path, and are presented as a trajector (TR) moving away from a landmark (LM) and towards a LM, often a LM-boundary. These are called the from and to schemas, illustrated by Blg./BCS otnemam/odnijeti ‘take away’, otivam/otići ‘go (away)’, donasjam/donijeti ‘bring to’, dopălvam/dopuniti ‘fill up to’, and da dojda/doći ‘come’. Da dojda/doći and otivam/otići are among the highest frequency verbs and make up the prototypical deictic pair come and go, in which the LM is often a human agent (ego). Verbs with od-/ot- and do- often express (near-) opposite meanings and co-occur with the prepositions ot/od and do, from which the prefixes have been derived, reinforcing the core meanings of movement away from and towards the LM. 48


SCLC 2012 We examine the relations between spatial and non-spatial meanings of the two prefixes by focusing on metaphorical extensions such as: – – – – –

Movement in space → movement in time Spatial path → abstract, metaphorical path Spatial sources → metaphorical sources (e.g., states) Spatial goals → metaphorical goals (e.g., states) Movement in space → change of (emotional) attitude

We analyze metaphorical extensions common to both Blg. and BCS, and describe the differences and the reasons for them (e.g., ot- in some Blg. verbs vs. pri- in equivalent BCS verbs). For instance, movement away from a point in space transfers into movement away from a temporal point (e.g., Blg./BCS otlagam izpit/odgoditi ispit ‘postpone an exam’) via the metaphors TIME IS A MOVING O BJECT or TIME IS STATIONARY AND WE MOVE THROUGH IT (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 42–43; Lakoff et al. 1989: 76). Similarly, achievements of goals, often associated with a temporal timeframe (e.g., dovăršvam/dovršiti ‘finish, reach the end’), are motivated by the metaphor GOALS ARE DESTINATIONS. Most non-spatial meanings of prefixed verbs are derived by applying the idea of movement through space/spatial path to metaphorical or figurative movement/path (e.g., Blg./BCS otkazvam se ot/odustati ‘refuse, give up, otličavam se ot/odskočiti ‘stand out, be different from’, dostavjam (radost) / donijeti (srecu) ‘bring (happiness) to’, doprinasjam/doprinositi (za uspexa/uspjehu) ‘contribute (for success)’. A group of verbs with ot-/od- and do- expressing metaphorical rather than physical movement also imply an action in response to some action by the LM (e.g., Blg./BCS otgovarjam/odgovoriti ‘reply’, otplaštam/otplatiti ‘pay back’, or dokazvam/dokazati ‘prove’). These examples clearly show that meaning is construed not only by the verbal prefixes, but also by the verbal stem (and other contextual factors). The systematic and partially predictable association of abstract ideas with spatial locations illustrated by verbs prefixed with od/ot- and do- shows that the various meanings of these verbs are not random collections of senses, but networks of interrelated senses. References: Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, Jane Esperson, and Adele Goldberg [First Edition] 1989. Lakoff, George, Jane Esperson, and Alan Schwartz [Second Edition] 1991. Master Metaphor List. ftp://cogsci.berkeley.edu/pub/cogling/Metaphor/ [Jan. 2003] Cognitive Linguistics Group, University of California at Berkeley.

Katrin Schlund University of Heidelberg

49


SCLC 2012 The semantics of agent and patient in Russian impersonal constructions of the type lodku uneslo vetrom Russian impersonal constructions of the type lodku uneslo vetrom, henceforth referred to as "Adversity Impersonals", short "AI" (Babby 1994), accept only inanimate nouns as agents of the instrumental phrase: (1) a

b

Lodku uneslo vetrom. boat.ACC carried-away.NEUT wind.INST 'The boat has been carried away by the wind.' *Lodku uneslo matrosom. boat.ACC carried-away. NEUT sailor.INST intended: 'The boat has been carried away by a sailor.'

However, not any inanimate noun is admissible in the instrumental phrase. Different scholars (e.g., Sal'nikov 1977: 282; Lavine 2010: 111) have pointed out that the noun in the instrumental phrase must dispose of some kind of energy or force capable of initiating a transitive action. That is, however, no criterion to distinguish the instrumental agents of AI from regular nominative transitive agents, for agency necessarily implies that the nouns which can function as agents show at least some "agentive potential". That is why humans are the most prototypical agents, followed by animate nouns in general. Other potential transitive agents must be at least movable, i.e. not locally fixed, count nouns or mass nouns denoting natural forces such as wind, water, lightning, and the like. These kinds of inanimate nouns are exactly the agents to be found in the instrumental phrases of AI. The semantics of the patient in the accusative phrase of AI is usually not given any special attention in the literature. However, a closer look at the animacy properties of the patients of AI actually helps to find a more satisfactory explanation for the semantics of the agents as well. At first glance, one may be tempted to dismiss animacy as a useful explanation of AI patient semantics, since they can be both animate and inanimate: (2)

a

b

Rebenka razdavilo child.ACC ran-over.NEUT 'A child got run over by a truck.' Podval zalilo basement.ACC flooded.NEUT 'The basement got flooded with water.'

gruzovikom. truck.INST (Green 1980, 173) vodoj. water.INST (Green 1980, 46)

However, in examples 2.a and b, the patients rank higher in animacy than the agents if we assume that solid, countable objects are "more like" animates than uncountable nouns. In 2.a, we have an animate patient with a countable, yet inanimate agent. In 2.b, the patient is countable while the agent is not. In the paper proposed here it will be argued that AI are actually a means of mediating conflicting hierarchies of agentivity. These hierarchies can be perfectly accounted for on the grounds of Cognitive Linguistics as developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Laura A. Janda, Steven J. Clancy, and many others. References Babby, L. (1994). A Theta-theoretic analysis of adversity impersonal sentences in Russian, in: Avratin, S., Franks, S. and Lj. Progovac (eds.), Formal approaches to Slavic linguistics (FAS- 2). The MIT meeting 1993 (Michigan Slavic Materials, 36), Ann Arbor, pp. 25-67. 50


SCLC 2012 Green, Ch.M. (1980). On the syntax and semantics of impersonal sentences in Russian: a study of the sentence type "vetrom uneslo lodku ". Ann Arbor/London. Lavine, J. (2010). Case and events in transitive impersonals, Journal of Slavic Linguistics 18 (1), 101-130. Sal'nikov, N. (1977). Bezličnye predloženija tipa: "kryšu sorvalo vetrom", Russian Linguistics 3, 271-292.

Natalia Serdobolskaya Russian State University for the Humanities Discourse properties and semantics of mental verbs in subordinate constructions in Spoken Russian 14 The paper is focused on the subordinate constructions with mental verbs in Spoken Russian. These verbs can take complement clauses with the conjunction chto (that), as illustrated in (1)-(2), or head parenthetical clauses like kak ja schitaju (as I think), kak ja dumaju (as I believe), cf. Urmson 1970, Thompson 2002. A number of previous works have demonstrated that it is necessary to single out a third type of constructions, where the clause headed by the mental verb precedes the complement clause and appears without conjunction, as in (3)-(4) (Kobozeva 1999; Paducheva 1996 e.a.). These constructions have some properties of parenthetical ones (inability to include negation), however, can not be classified as such on the basis of their syntactic properties (cf. Paducheva 1996; Matvejeva, Serdobolskaya 2006). I give additional evidence showing that non-conjunctive constructions show different syntactic properties from complements with the conjunction, on the one hand, and from parenthetical constructions headed by mental verbs, on the other hand. I claim that the non-conjunctive constructions do not form a homogenous type, but are to be split into two different types, according to their syntactic and prosodic properties. I use the terms “the clause with mental verb” (either parenthetical or matrix) vs. “the associated clause” for the clause that denotes the content of the mental verb (expressed as a main or a complement clause). The data is taken from the National Russian Corpus, www.ruscorpora.ru (sub-corpus with multimedia resources (sound and video files), that consists of spoken texts) and the corpus of the Spoken Russian of (Kibrik, Podlesskaja 2009). The criteria that distinguish non-conjunctive constructions from complements with the conjunction are the following: the clause with the mental verb can not include negation and several types of adverbs and shows restrictions on the verbal inflectional categories of the mental verb. The criteria that distinguish non-conjunctive constructions from parenthetical constructions are the following: the mental verb can appear in the oblique mood (5), the clause with the mental verb can include discourse particles (4), probability adverbs and temporal adverbs.

14

The work is supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant № 10-06-00338).

51


SCLC 2012 In (Russkaja grammatica 1980) the non-conjunctive constructions are described as one and the same syntactic type, including the sentences traditionally written with a comma (3)-(4) and colon (6). I show that this view is unsatisfactory, on the basis of the following: 

the two non-conjunctive constructions differ prosodically;

in the “colon” constructions the clause with the mental verb can differ in illocutionary type from the associated clause:

in the “colon” constructions the mental verbs can be conjoined with the verb of position (as to sit, lie etc.).

The difference in prosodic and syntactic properties reflects the difference in semantics and discourse functions of the constructions in question. The semantics of the mental verb in the “colon” constructions is different: in “colon” constructions the mental verb denotes the process of thinking (to reflect, ponder, muse), while in “comma” constructions its meaning is close to “to find, suppose, believe”. Accordingly, the “colon” constructions belong to the discourse figure, while the “comma constructions” mainly belong to its ground. Examples (1) Ja dumaju, chto posle zavershenija nashej vstrechi predstaviteli pressy vpolne mogut zadat emu eti voprosy. [Russian National Corpus] ‘I think that after the end of our meeting the press can ask him those questions.’ (2) No togda ty znaesh, chto v sledujushij raz s toboj ne budut schitatsa. [Russian National Corpus] ‘But then you know that next time they will not take your opinion into consideration. ’ (3) A ty znajesh, nas vyseljajut! [Russian National Corpus] ‘You know, we are being moved from here! ’ (4) A ja ved dumal, drug, ty ko mne nexorosheje imejesh. [Russian National Corpus] ‘And I thought, my friend, you have something against me. ’ (6) Poka sam ne proveril, chto dazhe etot kod aPluginSpecific := FPluginSvc.PluginOptions(FPluginInfo.DllHandle); if Assigned(aPluginSpecific) then ...

mozhet ne srabotat iz-za nedochota v jadre, to dumal by eto nadjozhnaja proverka. (http://forum.qip.ru/archive/index.php/t-18123.html) ‘Until I found that even this code aPluginSpecific := FPluginSvc.PluginOptions(FPluginInfo.DllHandle); if Assigned(aPluginSpecific) then ...

can fail due to deficiency in the core set, I would think that it is a reliable test. ’ (5) S drugoj storony, ja dumala: a dejstvitelno, malo li detej, kotoryje boltajutsa po ulicam, po pojezdam, zanimajutsa chort znajet chem, a moj sidit doma i dazhe izredka uroki delaet … [Russian National Corpus]

52


SCLC 2012 ‘On the other hand, I thought: “There are so many kids running down the streets and trains, doing nothings, and my son is always at home and even does his homework from time to time…’ References Kibrik A.A., Podlesskaya V.I. 2009. Rasskazy o snovidenijax: Korpusnoje issledovanie ustnogo russkogo diskursa. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskix kuljtur. Kobozeva I.M. 1999. O dvux tipax vvodnyx konstrukcij s parenteticheskim glagolom // Tipologija i teorija jazyka: ot opisanija k objasneniju. K 60-letiju A.E. Kibrika. Moscow: Jazyki russkoj kultury, pp. 539-544. Matveeva N.S., Serdobolskaya N.V. Sintaksicheskije svojstva konstrukcij s mentalnymi predikatami v russkom jazyke // Tretja konferencija po tipologii i grammatike dla molodyx issledovatelej. Tezisy dokladov. Saint-Petersburg, 2-4 nojabra 2006. SaintPetersburg: Nestor – Istorija, 2006, pp. 120-125. Paducheva J.V. Kommunikativnyj status vvodnyx predlozhenij // Paducheva J.V. Semanticheskije issledovanija. Semantika vremeni i vida v russkom jazyke. Semantika narrativa. Moscow, 1996. Russkaja grammatika 1980. Institute of Linguistics. Moscow: Nauka. Thompson, Sandra A. ‘Object complements’ and conversation: towards a realistic account // Studies in Language 26:1, 125—164. John Benjamin Publishing Company, 2002. Urmson J. O. Parenthetical verbs // Ch. E. Caton (ed.) Philosophy and ordinary language, 220—240. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, London, 1970.

Svetlana Slijepčević Institut za srpski jezik SANU, Beograd Pojmovne metafore u frazeologizmima s komponentama oko i vid(eti) U skladu sa teorijom pojmovnih metafora, oličenom pre svega u radovima Lejkofa i Džonsona (u radovima poput Metaphors We Live By; The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason), ali i koristeći se teorijskom postavkom metonimije, koju daju Raden i Kevečeš (u radovima poput Towards a theory of metonymy; Metaphor: A Practical Introduction), Barselona (u knjizi Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads – A Cognitive Perspective) i dr. autori, u ovom radu bavićemo se pojmovnim metaforama uočljivim u frazeologizmima s komponentama oko i vid(eti). Budući da je čovekovo telo jedan od najčešćih izvornih domena, kao i da se utelovljenost pojmovnih metafora pojavljuje kao jedna od centralnih tema kognitivnolingvističke teorije o pojmovnim metaforama, brojnost frazeoloških jedinica čije komponente oko (oči) i vid(eti) stoje za apstraktne pojmove iz čovekovog emocionalnog, psihičkog, mentalnog i duhovnog prostora daje prostora za posebno istraživanje. U dosadašnjoj srbističkoj literaturi razmatrane su metafore tipa RAZUMEVANJE JE VIĐENJE, SHVATANJE JE VIĐENJE, UPOZNAVANJE JE VIĐENJE (Sada vidim da sam pogrešio, uviđati neke stvari, videli smo se prošle nedelje prvi put i sl.), što su metonimijski zasnovane metafore, stvorene na osnovu egzistencijalne (logičke) veze među pojmovima VIĐENJE i RAZUMEVANJE. Naime, da bi se čovek sa nečim upoznao, da bi shvatio određeni predmet ili pojavu, da bi razumeo njegovu ili njenu strukturu, neophodno je da najpre fizički osmotri taj predmet ili pojavu, što znači da je čulo vida primarno i najvažnije u tom procesu (eventualno, pored čula dodira). 53


SCLC 2012 Kao korpus za ovo istraživanje koristili smo Elektronski korpus savremenog srpskog jezika, a za potvrde primarnih oblika frazeologizama koristili smo Rečnik srpskohrvatskog književnog i narodnog jezika SANU i Frazeološki rječnik hrvatskog ili srpskog jezika Josipa Matešića. Izdvojili smo frazeologizme sa komponentama oko i vid(eti) i klasifikovali ih prema značenju metafora na kojima su zasnovani. Naš korpus pokazuje da postoje frazeologizmi koji se odnose na 1) čovekov emotivni svet, kakav je frazeologizam baciti oko na nekoga (sa značenjem „interesovati se za nekoga“), koji ilusturuje metaforu GLEDANJE JE ZAINTERESOVANOST; zatim, frazeologizmi koji se odnose na 2) čovekovo socijalno ponašanje, tako frazelogizmi tipa biti nekome trn u oku, bosti kome oči (sa značenjem „neprijatno, napadno delovati“) ilustruju metaforu u kojoj čovekova reakcija na IRITIRANO OKO stoji za čovekovu reakciju na IRITANTNO PONAŠANJE , a frazeologizam kopati kome oči (sa značenjem „učiniti nekome nešto loše, unesrećiti nekoga“) ilustruje metaforu ISKOPATI OČI JE POVREDITI NEČIJE DOSTOJASTVO/EMOCIJE, dok frazeologizam tipa imati budne oči (sa značenjem „biti pažljiv, oprezan“) ilustruje metaforu PAŽLJIVO GLEDATI JE BITI OPREZAN; takođe, postoje i 3) frazeologizmi koji se odnose na čovekov mentalni prostor tipa gledati svojim očima (u značenju „imati drugačije mišljenje“) kao ilustracija za metaforu GLEDATI JE ZAUZETI STAV itd. Ciljevi istraživanja su: a) dati pregled pojmovnih metafora na kojima se zasnivaju pomenuti frazeologizmi, b) uspostaviti klasifikaciju tih metafora, v) pokazati motivisanost datih metafora i potencijale za njihovu dalju razradu van ovih frazeoloških jedinica, dakle, pokazati njihove antiposlovičke transformacije, g) proveriti kulturološki aspekt metafora odgovornih za stvaranje datih frazeologizama.

Natalia Slioussar & Anna Punchenko Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (OTS), the Netherlands / St. Petersburg State University, Russia Outlining individual grammars: How different speakers evaluate Russian sentences with possessive pronouns Many authors coming from different frameworks agree that modern linguistics should be anthropocentric. However, there are still very few studies dedicated to the differences in individual grammatical systems – presumably, because in the majority of cases, variation in the grammar can be described by opposing the literary norm to a dialect or a vernacular. In this study, we conducted several questionnaires where native speakers of Russian were asked to evaluate various sentences with possessive pronouns. The results show a great variety of individual patterns that cannot be reduced to the more or less strict adherence to the literary norm. We identify several factors that might be responsible for this diversity by playing different roles in different speakers’ grammars. Our questionnaires included ‘NPNOM V NPACC’ sentences in different word orders (SVO, OVS, OSV, SOV), ‘NPDAT V NPNOM’ sentences with the verbs like nravit’sja ‘to appeal’ in the same word orders, and a number of other constructions. Nominative and nonNominative NPs were used with the possessive pronouns svoj ‘self’s’ or ego / ix ‘his / their’ in different conditions, and both quantificational and non-quantificational antecedents were tested. Several examples are given below. (1) a. Otličnikii ljubjat svoixi / ixi učitelej ‘A-studentsNOM like self’s / their teachersACC’. b. Otličnikii nravjatsja svoimi / ixi učiteljam ‘A-studentsNOM appeal self’s / their teachersDAT’. 54


SCLC 2012

c. Svoii / ixi učitelja ljubjat otličnikov i ‘self’s / their teachersNOM like A-studentsACC’.

Firstly, acceptability of such examples in the intended readings depends on several sentence-internal syntactic and semantic factors. E.g. svoj is supposed to be used with Nominative antecedents. However, this and other syntactic factors do not play the same role for all speakers. (1b) with ix is better than (1a) with ix for the majority of speakers, and many of them judge the former as only slightly degraded. Secondly, the ratings were influenced by several context-related factors, listed in (2ad). Notably, these factors are almost universally ignored in the formal syntactic tradition. They did not play the same role in different speakers’ answers. In our view, this is an expected result: if a sentence is degraded in zero context, some speakers would rate it as such, while the others would try to find the right context for it (usually unconsciously). To ensure that the relevant phenomena are indeed context-related, we introduced certain manipulations in our examples and checked whether they improved in various contexts. (2) a. Canonical word orders tended to receive higher ratings than non-canonical ones, which are normally not felicitous in zero context. b. Sentences where possessive pronouns preceded their antecedents tended to receive lower ratings. c. Out of sentences with backward anaphora, examples where the pronoun has the same referent as the focused constituent tended to receive especially low ratings. d. Verb-final orders tended to receive lower ratings, presumably because the narrow focus on the verb is rare and felicitous contexts are more difficult to conceive of.

Thirdly, in one of our questionnaires we enrolled participants from different social and age groups (schoolchildren, university students, school teachers, soldiers) and found no correlation between these factors and the tendency to adhere to the literary norm. Apparently, speakers are much less aware of the existence of the prescriptive norm in this domain than in many other cases.

Eun-Ji SONG Seoul National University Two texts in Dialogue: Metaphoric and Metonymic Cognitive Tools in the Presentation of Self The Old Believer Lives of Archpriest Avvakum and Monk Epifanij in the seventeenth century Russia have rarely been investigated in terms of their semantic and conceptual integrity and wholeness, other than instigating roles for each other’s text production. Especially Avvakum’s life has been mostly investigated in its own right due to its unusual ingenuity of the language and style. Seventeenth century Russia, a period of secularization and westernization, was a complex and contradictory period and yet provided an optimal 55


SCLC 2012 context for stimulating a search for individuality and selfhood. The two Old Believers autobiographical narratives reveal their attempts to express personal emotions, inner conflicts and contradictions, and to find their identities. This search for identity and individuality in the Lives of Avvakum and Epifanij is presented in complementary fashion: Avvakum’s life is portrayed through ‘life is a journey’ metaphor and he is depicted as a folkloric hero searching for the self through locational movements. His life is presented topographically through journey metaphor, specifically a sea voyage. Further in biblical terms Avvakum is also metaphorized as Christ under persecution or suffering Job. Thus Avvakum’s life yields complex meanings in blended space from those multiple input spaces according to ‘Conceptual Integration Network’ (Fauconnier 1994, 1997, Fauconnier & Turner 1996, 1998). Epifanij’ life is in sharp contrast with Avvakum’s in that the monk is interested in discovering self through introspective analysis and mental exploration. In Epifanij’s text, the body parts such as tongue, hand, eyes are metonymy of his ego and his search for self is through touch and physical contact with his own body parts. While Avvakum moves around in the real world, Epifanij moves across reality and dreams, his subconscious world. For Avvakum, life is metaphorically presented as a journey and his destiny as a ship, and for Epifanij body parts are metonymically himself, and for both writers the search for the true self and spiritual rebirth as saint are through their own bodies. Two texts form an organic and integral whole in employing ‘embodied’ methods of searching for individuality: for Avvakum, searching for inner self through different domains, which is a metaphor, and for Epifanij searching for self through his own subconscious world, i.e., one and the same domain, which is a metonymy. References Fauconnier, Gilles. 1994. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1997. Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 1996. Blending as a Central Process of Grammar. Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language, Ed by Adele Goldberg, 113-130. Stanford: CSLI. Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 1998. Conceptual Integration Networks. Cognitive Science 22, 133-187.

Matea Srebačić & Krešimir Šojat University of Zagreb Aspectual Verb Pairs in Croatian Driven by the Cognitive Process of Metonymy Metonymy has been pointed out by various cognitive linguists (Kövecses&Radden (1999), Panther&Thornburg (1999), Peirsman&Geeraerts (2006), Croft (1993)) as an omnipresent phenomenon resulting in various semantic shifts. Metonymy is defined as consisting of a source concept which provides mental access to a target concept in a given context (Janda, 2011: 360). Janda (2011:360) distinguishes lexical metonymy and metonymy in word-formation. In lexical metonymy, highly prevalent in languages with poor morphology, the source concept is the uttered word, the target is the actually accessed meaning whereas the context is the remainder of the utterance. In word-formation metonymy the source concept is the base word, the context is provided by affixes and the target concept 56


SCLC 2012 is the one associated with the derived word. It is especially frequent in morphologically rich languages, as e.g.Croatian. Metonymy via its indisputable connection to word-formation thus enters in the field of morphosemantics. In this paper we focus on the interplay between metonymy and word-formation on the example of Croatian aspectual verb pairs. Verbal aspect is the grammatical category inherent to all Croatian verbs that thus form a very complex system. Due to the lack to its uniformity it is very hard to capture and describe its regularities. Aspectual pairs are formed either by suffixation or prefixation. Although most verbs have three aspectual phases, e.g. pisati – ispisati – ispisivati ('to writeipf – to write outpf – to write outipf'), a large number cannot form second imperfective, e.g. micati – maknuti ('to moveipf – to movepf'), pisati – napisati ('to writeipf – to writepf'). In this paper we want: a) test whether the metonymy model as described in Peirsman and Geeraerts (2006:270) and applied to Russian perfective verbs by Janda (2008), could be applied to the word-formation of Croatian aspectual verb pairs, b) examine what is the nature of the relationship between metonymy and the aspectual phases derivation. In order to show whether Croatian perfectives fit this model, three characteristics of the metonymy model (strenght of contact, boundedness and domain) are taken into acccount. Firstly, all types of metonymy present in aspectual pairs fall into domain of actions, events and processes. Secondly, boundedness captures the main difference between perfectives and imperfectives, i.e. designation of bounded vs. unbounded actions (see Janda 2008: 81). Thirdly, the four types of contiguity in respect to strenght of contact (contact, adjacency, partwhole, containment) are directly related to the four types of perfectives in the cluster model of Russian aspect: Natural, Specialized, Complex Act and Single Act Perfectives Janda (2008: 81). We will show that these types fit almost perfectly to the Croatian aspectual pairs as well. Further, we argue that the impossibility of second imperfectives formation is a result of the specific metonymy type. E.g., on the one hand, the nature of contact relation between a process and its result (pisati – napisati, 'to writeipf – to writepf')) disables the formation of the second imperfective from natural perfectives (*napisivatiipf). On the other hand, the nature of the adjacency relation between an imperfective and more specific perfective action enables this kind of formation (pisati – potpisati – potpisivati, 'to writeipf - to write outpf – to write outipf'). Finally, in this paper we demonstrate that morphology and semantics (or grammar and lexicon) form a continuum (see Raffaelli&Kerovec 2008) in a way that metonymy on a semantic level drives word-formation on a morphological level, i.e. metonymy as a cognitive process either enables or blocks certain word-formation processes. References Croft, W. (1993) The Role of Domains in the Interpretation of Metaphors and Metonymies. Cognitive Linguistics. 4, pp. 335 – 370. Janda, L. (2008) Metonymy via Perfectivization of Russian Verbs. Slavica Helsingiensia. 35, pp. 77 – 85. Janda, L. (2011) Metonymy in Word-formation. Cognitive Linguistics. 22 (2), pp. 359 – 392. Panther, K.-U., Thornburg, L. (1999) The Potentiality for Actuality Metonymy in English and Hungarian. Panther&Radden (Eds.) Metonymy in Language and Thought. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Peirsman, Y., Geeraerts, D. (2006) Metonymy as a Prototypical Category. Cognitive Linguistics. 17 (3), pp. 269 – 316. Radden, G., Kövecses, Z. (1999) Towards a Theory of Metonymy. Panther&Radden (Eds.) Metonymy in Language and Thought. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Raffaelli, I., Kerovec, B. (2008) Morphosemantic Fields in the Analysis of the Croatian Vocabulary. Jezikoslovlje. 9 (1-2), pp. 141 – 169. 57


SCLC 2012

Mateusz-Milan Stanojević & Renata Geld University of Zagreb The Croatian future tense: immediate, directed and non-subjectified The future tense in Croatian is formed using the present tense of the auxiliary htjeti ‘want’ (which may be cliticized; e.g. hoću ‘I will’ > ću, etc.) and the infinitive, as in igra će trajati ‘the game will last’. It may refer to the future (e.g. Sutra ću te nazvati ‘I will call you tomorrow’), general truths (Dok je novca, bit će i prijatelja ‘While there is money, there will be friends’) and has some other minor uses (Silić and Pranjković 2005: 193-194). It has been suggested that the Croatian future tense is epistemically immediate (Stanojević and Geld 2011), which is cross-linguistically plausible (cf. e.g. Dahl 2000; Langacker 2011). The aim of this paper is to show that the Croatian future tense expresses a non-subjectified futuredirected epistemic immediacy. This is in line with mixed tense/aspect view of the Croatian TAM system. There are several pieces of evidence for this. Firstly, the future tense may be used in the protasis of actual hypotheticals much like the present tense (which is epistemically immediate; cf. Geld and Zovko Dinković 2007), but it cannot be used when the ground is shifted to a counterfactual virtuality (cf. (1) and (2)): (1) Ako će ovako igrati, onda će izgubiti. ‘If they play like this, they will lose’ But not: (2) *Da će ovako igrati, onda bi izgubili. The Croatian present tense may be used in both of these – expressing epistemic immediacy with ako ‘if’, (Ako ovako igraju, onda će izgubiti) and a virtual (epistemically immediate) point from a surrogate ground with da ‘if’ (Da ovako igraju onda bi izgubili ‘If they played like this, they would lose’). The future tense is impossible in (2) because the counterfactual context would require a suspension of its future directedness. No such directedness appears in the present tense, which simply refers to immediacy. Secondly, the future tense is not completely grammaticalized in form or meaning. Thus, it has different forms for different persons, and clitics are used alongside full auxiliary forms (unlike, e.g., Bulgarian, with its single clitic šte). Semantically, it has not (completely) developed towards subjectified modal meanings on the future tense grammaticalization cline (Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1991: 26-29), which suggests that it is not extremely subjectified. Thirdly, a corpus study (random sample of 1000 tokens each of the future and the present tense from the Croatian National Corpus) suggests that the future tense is generally used once a “contextual baseline” is established. In most cases, it tends to be introduced by a complementizer (cf. objavljeno da in (3)) or another space builder: (3) Iako je potkraj prošlog tjedna objavljeno da će se … pokušati riješiti pitanje. ‘Although it was announced last week that they will attempt to resolve the issue…’

58


SCLC 2012 Moreover, it rarely appears in simple SVO structures (e.g. Borussia će ugostiti Arsenal ‘Borrusia will host Arsenal’). In the present tense, simple SVO structures predominate. Thus, the future tense requires scaffolding connecting it to the ground, and the present tense does not, because of its subjectification. In terms of Cutrer (1994: 89-90), the future space is necessarily viewed from a parent space (which is the viewpoint), whereas the present is not. On a more general scale, this analysis is in line with a mixed tense/aspect-based view of the Croatian TAM system, situating Croatian into the transitional zone among Slavic languages (cf. e.g. Dickey 2000). References Geld, Renata, and Irena Zovko Dinković. 2007. “Perfectives, Imperfectives and the Croatian Present Tense.” In Cognitive Paths into the Slavic Domain, ed. Dagmar Divjak and Agata Kochańska, 111–148. Cognitive Linguistics Research. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110198799.2.111. Stanojević, Mateusz-Milan and Renata Geld. 2011. 'Croatian conditionals and epistemic stance’. Paper presented at the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Conference 2011. Washington, DC, SAD, October 14.-16., 2011 Cutrer, Michelle. 1994. Time and Tense in Narratives and Everyday Language. Ph. D. dissertation, San Diego: University of California, San Diego. Dahl, Östen. 2000. “The grammar of future time reference in European languages.” In Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe, ed. Östen Dahl, 309–328. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Dickey, Stephen M. 2000. Parameters of Slavic Aspect: A Cognitive Approach. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information. Langacker, Ronald W. 2011. “The English present: Temporal coincidence vs. epistemic immediacy.” In Cognitive Approaches to Tense, Aspect and Epistemic Modality, ed. Frank Brisard and Adele Patard, 45–86. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Silić, Josip, and Ivo Pranjković. 2005. Gramatika hrvatskoga jezika za gimnazije i visoka učilišta. Zagreb: Školska knjiga.

Sabine Stoll University of Zurich On the psychological reality of frequency measures In a number of linguistic areas such as historical linguistics, corpus linguistics and language acquisition research it has been standard to take frequency as a key indicator of development. Usually, the measure is the frequency of an item in relation to its opportunity of occurrence, e.g. the frequency of a certain case marker in relation to all syntactic contexts in which the case marker can occur. The main issue of discussion has mostly been the different role of types and tokens for development. The psychological reality of frequency has not been discussed yet so far although it is often far from clear to which extent opportunities of occurrence are well-chosen reference for measuring frequencies and their development over time. At least for language acquisition research, the choice of relevant opportunities of occurrence makes implicit assumptions about the child’s structural knowledge of these opportunities. It is doubtful whether these assumptions are justified. In this paper I propose as an alternative approach to measure frequency not in relation to opportunities of occurrence but in relation to time windows. Time windows make no assumptions about the structural 59


SCLC 2012 knowledge of any units in relation to which a feature of interest is parsed or processed other than memory and recognition of the feature. I will illustrate this method with a number of features in a longitudinal corpus of 4 Russian children.

Dejan Stosic Université d’Artois Space, Manner and Evaluative Morphology Too many theoretical and experimental studies have been carried out over the last decades on the expression of motion events across languages. The main impulse that motivated this research came from the well-known Talmy’s typology distinguishing “Satellite-framed” and “Verb-framed languages” (see Talmy 1975, 1983, 1985, 2000). This typology is based on how two crucial semantic components of motion/location descriptions – path and manner – are encoded across languages. In Verb-framed languages (e.g. French, Turkish, Japanese, Basque, Hebrew), the “path of motion” is encoded by the verb so that the manner generally appears as optional information expressed by marginal, adverbial elements. In Satellite-framed languages (e.g. Slavic, English, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian), the path component is encoded by various particles or “satellites” associated with the verb, such as prepositions, prefixes, postpositions, etc., which makes it possible to express the manner in the verb: 1. FR Jean est entré dans la maison en courant. (Verb-framed language) ‘John entered the house in running’ 2. ENG John ran into the house. (Satellite-framed language) Scholars inspired by this typology have brought to the fore a wide variety of options for encoding each major semantic component of directed motion events (see Talmy 2000, Slobin 1987, 1996, 2004, Strömqvist &Verhoevent (eds) 2004, Beavers et al. 2010). However, most of them have focused on lexical and syntactic resources and on how they are combined in a single clause. The morphological means are mentioned when talking about the encoding of path but hardly ever when talking about expressing manner of motion. In my paper, I will argue that many affixational and non-affixational processes of evaluative morphology must be taken into account when studying cross-linguistic diversity in the expression of the manner component. I will mainly focus on data from Serbian, but I will also offer a comparative look to the issue in order to highlight the widespread use of such morphological means in encoding manner. Evaluative morphology is a sub-field of derivational morphology that forms lexems expressing some deviation from the “norm/standard” fixed by the basis. More precisely, lexical items and constructions are traditionally considered to be evaluative if they carry such values as BIG, SMALL, GOOD, BAD, that is diminution, augmentation, endearment, contempt, etc.: booklet, aunty, sweetie (see Scalise 1986, Stump 1993, Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994, Grandi 2002, 2009, Grandi & Montermini 2005). So, in many world’s languages, verbal evaluatives encode a particular way of taking action expressed by stem. It’s what happens with Serbian motion verbs: ska-kuta-ti ‘to hop (around), to skip along’, trč-kara-ti ‘to run around’, hram-ucka-ti ‘to limp slightly’, kas-ka-ti ‘to trot around, to jog’, po-skoči-ti ‘to hop’ which all highlight some deviation from a prototypical way of running, jumping, hoping and trotting. In order to express these meanings, other languages use such morphological processes as apophony (e.g. Chechen), reduplication (e.g. Hebrew), and so on. As many 60


SCLC 2012 works both on evaluatives and on pluractionality have shown, these word formation processes generally involve a substantial modification of the internal structure of events described by verb stems (see among others Cusic 1981, van Geenhoven 2005, Greenberg 2010, Grandi 2009, Amiot & Stosic 2011). Because of this modification, the action is conceived as being taken in a specific way, not in conformity with its prototypical representation but not enough autonomous for being distinguished and encoded in a lexical level. This deviation from the norm is what generates manner interpretation of verbal evaluatives (see Stosic & Amiot 2011 for French). I conclude with some more general considerations about possible typological and cognitive implications of taking into account morphological resources that may encode manner in various languages. This way of expressing manner is all the more important because it directly operates on the verb, which is the only “clause-obligatory category” in the most of motion descriptions across languages (see Beavers et al. 2010). The availability of the verb for expressing manner in Satellite-framed languages is the reason for Slobin (2004, 2006) to argue that the concept of manner is linguistically and cognitively much more salient in Satellite-framed (e.g. English, Slavic) than in Verb-framed languages (e.g. French). So, one can ask whether evaluative morphology makes manner of motion more salient and what is its impact on the distinction between “high-manner-salient” and “low-manner-salient” languages. References Amiot, D. & Stosic, D. (2011), Sautiller, voleter, dansoter : évaluation, pluriactionnalité, aspect, in E. Arjoca-Ieremia, C. Avezard-Roger, J. Goes, E. Moline & A. Tihu (eds), Temps, aspect et classes de mots : études théoriques et didactiques. Arras, Artois Presses Université, 277-297. Beavers, J., Levin, B. & Tham, S.W. (2010), The Typology of Motion Expressions Revisited. Journal of Linguistics 46. 331-377. Cusic, D. (1981), Verbal Plurality and Aspect. PhD dissertation, Stanford University. Dressler, W. U. & Merlini-Barbaresi, L. (1994), Morphopragmatics. Diminutives and Intensifiers in Italian, German, and other Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Grandi, N. (2002), Morfologie in contatto. Le constrizioni valiative nelle lingue del Mediterraneano. Milan: FrancoAngeli. Grandi, N. (2009), Restrictions on Italian Verbal Evaluative Suffixes: The Role of Aspect and Actionality. York Papers in Linguistics Series 2 10. 46-66. Grandi, N. & Montermini, F. (2005), Prefix-Suffix Neutrality in Evaluative Morphology. In G. Booij, E. Guevara, A. Ralli, S. Scalise & S.C. Sgroi (eds), Proceedings of the 4th Mediterranean Meeting of Morphology Morphology and Language Typology. Greenberg, Y. (2010), Event Internal Pluractionality in Modern Hebrew: A Semantic Analysis of One Verbal Reduplication Pattern. Brill’s Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 2/1, 119-164. Scalise, S. (1986), Generative morphology. Dordrecht: Foris. Slobin, D. I. (1987), Thinking for speaking, Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society. 435-444. Slobin, D.I. (1996), From 'thought and language' to 'thinking for speaking'. In J.J. Gumperz, Levinson, S.C., Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 70-96. Slobin, D.I. (2004), The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. In S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds), Relating Events in Narratives: Typological and contextual perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 219-257.

61


SCLC 2012 Slobin, D.I. (2006), What makes manner of motion salient? Explorations in linguistic typology, discourse, and cognition. In M. Hickmann & S. Robert (eds), Space in languages: Linguistic systems and cognitive categories. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 59-81. Stosic, D. & Amiot, D. (2011), Quand la morphologie fait des manières: les verbes évaluatifs et l’expression de la manière en français. In Amiot, D., De Mulder, W., Moline, E. & Stosic, D. (éds), Ars Grammatica. Hommages à Nelly Flaux. Bern: Peter Lang, 403-430. Stump, G. (1993), How peculiar is evaluative morphology? Journal of Linguistics 29. 1-36. Strömqvist, S., Verhoevent, L. (ed.) (2004). Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Talmy, L. (1975), Semantics and syntax of motion. In J. Kimball (ed.), Syntax and semantics. New York: Academic Press, 181-238. Talmy, L. (1983), How language structures space. Language 1. 225-282. Talmy, L. (1985), Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. New York: Cambridge University Press. 57-149. Talmy, L. (2000), Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. van Geenhoven, V. (2005), Atelicity, Pluractionality, and Adverbial Quantification. In H. Verkuyl, H. de Swart & A. van Hout (eds), Perspectives on Aspect. Dordrecht: Springer, 107-124. Goran Tanacković Faletar University of Osijek Spatial Basis of Case Coding: The Concept of Parallel Motion and Instrumental Case in Croatian Language The roots of studying the category of case in Indoeuropean languages can be found in the works of the first known linguists, so that even in the studies by Indian (Pānini), ancient (Dionysius Thrax, Varro, Remmius Palaemon) and medieval grammarians (Maximus Planudes, Simon and Martin of Dacia) up to present times we can see a long stream of data tackling with case categories. Still, some fundamental questions about the category remain debatable. Hjelmslev (1935, 1937) and Jakobson (1936, 1958), according to the firm structuralist belief in the constant correlation between form and meaning, suggested that each manifestation of a case always indicates the same invariable "semantic import" to various sentential contexts. This approach remained operative for more than four decades when some essentially different answers to the same questions were offered within the framework of transformational-generative grammar and in line with the hypothesis of autonomy of syntax. In its initial phases of development this theory showed very low interest in semantics, not much less so in the category of case. Not until later did N. Chomsky (1981, 1982) take a much clearer position on the issue, claiming that cases are predetermined by syntactic structure, so that they do not import any semantic interpretation to the sentence, implying that they are without any meaning or merely repeating the meaning already realised in their immediate context. Simultaneously, in the second half of 20th century numerous different approaches appeared, focusing on the issue of case and sharing the reawakened interest in semantics in the study of cases. This approach accounts for Fillmore's (1968) case theory, Anderson's (1971, 1977) localistic theory, semantic primitives theory by A. Wierzbicka (1972, 1980, 1988), and for the cognitive semantic approaches by R. Langacker (1987, 1991, 1999, 2008), L. Janda (1993), E. Dąbrowska (1997) and others. Assuming the cognitive basis of grammatical categories as radially organised phenomena and the results of Gestalt psychology about the perceptual priority of the whole in 62


SCLC 2012 relationship to its parts, this paper will systematically and thoroughly present the spatial foundation of the meanings of the instrumental in Croatian language. It will point at the conceptual motivation behind case coding, as well as at the inappropriateness of structuralist, i.e. componential approach to case meaning as a plain set of distinctive features, i.e. parts which, in that case, are given precedence over describing meaning as a coherent whole. The meaning of company is thus taken to be the basic meaning of the instrumental, which is very frequently realised precisely within the frame of a spatial concept of parallel motion of nominal referents (e.g. Ja šetam s prijateljem), and in the sense of an instrument, for which it is characteristic to have harmonious movements of the agent and the instrument along the same path (e.g. Ona reže kruh nožem). Other instrumental meanings and functions (such as e.g. temporal instrumental, instrumental of origin, predicative instrumental etc.) are seen as metaphoric and metonymic extensions of the basic spatial concept, and are motivated more or less directly by the spatial prototype. In the second part of the paper a superchematic concept will be defined and described, which will abstract the common features of different spatial and non-spatial meanings of Croatian instrumental, unifying them in what is to be called the concept of sameness. This paper will thus present case meaning as a complex, but at the same time unique three dimensional structure whose horizontal dimension is realized as a relationship between prototypical spatial meanings and the derived, peripheral meanings motivated by them. All of them are unified on a vertical level by the construal of the already mentioned superschematic concept of sameness. Finally, regarding the independence of syntax from the semantic and pragmatic factors, this paper can be viewed as a contribution to the hypothesis on the weak autonomy of syntax, , i.e. it should be viewed as an attempt of negating its strong autonomy as suggested in Langacker's (2005: 103-104) definitions. References Anderson, J. M. (1971). The grammar of case: towards a localistic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, J. M. (1977). On case grammar. London: Croom Helm. Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris. Chomsky, N. (1982). Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding. Cambridge – Massachusetts – London: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dąbrowska, E. (1997). Cognitive semantics and the Polish Dative. Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fillmore, Ch. (1968). The Case for Case. Bach, E., Harms, R. (ur.), Universals in Linguistic Theory. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, str. 1-88. Hjelmslev, L. (1935). La catégorie des cas: Etude de grammaire générale I. Copenhagen: Munksgaard (Acta Jutlandica: Aarsskrift for Aarhus Universitet 7.1). Hjelmslev, L. (1937). La catégorie des cas: Etude de grammaire générale II. Copenhagen: Munksgaard (Acta Jutlandica: Aarsskrift for Aarhus Universitet 9.3). Ivić, M. (1954). Značenja srpskohrvatskog instrumentala i njihov razvoj (Sintaksičkosemantička studija). Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka. Janda, L. A. (1993). A Geography of Case Semantics: The Czech Dative and the Russian Instrumental. Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Jakobson, R. (1936). Beiträge zur Allgemeinem Kasuslehre: Gesamtbedeutungen der russischen Kasus. Travaux du Cercle lingvistique de Prague, 6, str. 240-288. Jakobson, R. (1958). Morfologočeskie nabljudenija nad slavjanskim skloneniem: Sostav russkih padežnyh form. American Contributions to the Fourth International Congress of Slavists. Haag: Mouton.

63


SCLC 2012 Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, G., M. Johnson. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago – London: The University of Chicago Press. Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 1. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Vol. 2. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Langacker, R. W. (1999). Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin: Mouton. Langacker, R. W. (2005). „Construction Grammars: cognitive, radical and less so“. Ruiz de Mendoza, F. J., S. M. Peña Cervel (ur.), Cognitive Linguistics, Internal Dynamics and Interdisciplinary Interaction; Cognitive Linguistics Research 32, Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Langacker, R. W. (2008). Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Silić, J., I. Pranjković (2005). Gramatika hrvatskoga jezika za gimnazije i visoka učilišta. Zagreb: Školska knjiga. Šarić, Lj. (2008). Spatial Concepts in Slavic, A Cognitive Linguistic Study of Prepositions and Cases. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Volume I. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Taylor, J. R. 2002. Cognitive Grammar. New York: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1972). Semantic Primitives. Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag. Wierzbicka, A. (1980). The case for surface case. Ann Arbor: Karoma. Wierzbicka, A. (1988). The Semantics of Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Irena Vaňková Charles University, Prague Word and Thing in Poetry: Poetic Definition in the Light of Phenomenology and Cognitive Semantics Victor Šklovskij writes that art exists “to give us back the ability to experience life, perceive things, [...] to make the stone really stony for us” (in Mukařovský, 1971). It reminds us of the call of phenomenologists for the return “back to things” or of Heidegger’s reflections on “thingness of things”, reflections on what distinguishes a thing in its real thingness from an “indifferently existing object” or from an object as it is seen from the perspective of science (Heidegger, 1993). Things must be seen in the horizon of the natural world (Patočka, 1992). But what makes a stone “really stony”? By the stony-ness of stone is – maybe – meant what, with regard to the linguistic expression, has the nature of semantic connotations. These thoughts return insistently also in a different framework than the considerations of phenomenological philosophy: in the context of cognitive semantics, in connection with the study of meaning as potencionality. For reasons which we want to explain in this paper, we understand poetry as a prototypical sphere of effect of connotations – that is references to somatic-sensory and generally experientially-grounded experience of reality. As Pajdzińska and Tokarski (2010) state, after all, poetry is – even though linguists often consider it an area

64


SCLC 2012 inappropriate for research of language phenomena – a unique source of grasping the so-called weak connotations, i.e. those that are not supported by system data. This paper will focus on one specific phenomenon enabling us to get through to the conceptual potentialities of certain notions (and viewed from the opposite side, to the connotation potentialities of certain expressions): poetic definitions. Polish literature about the linguistic picture of the world engages in their reflection (Pajdzińska, 1993, Korpysz, 2009). These expressions have a formal shape of definitions (“X is Y”), but they differ substantially from the dictionary definition. On the basis of texts of 20 th century Czech poetry we can say that abstract notions, such as life, death, time or love, are most frequently subject to definition, comp: “Death is a lute of lamentations, / torch of burning blood, / urn of beauty / and a gateway to nowhere” (J. Seifert). However, in particular, in poetry stylizing children’s perception we encounter also poetic definitions of concretes: “Rakes are a big comb for combing earth” (V. Nezval), “The sun is a great poet” (J. Wolker), “A tear is water / that is alone” (F. Halas). The paper will draw attention to some aspects of poetic definitions, referring to Heideggerian “thingness of things” and useful for the formulation of semantic connotations. References Heidegger, Martin: Básnicky bydlí člověk. Prague 1993. Korpysz, Tomasz: Definicje poetyckie Norwida. Lublin 2009. Mukařovský, Jan: Cestami poetiky a estetiky. Prague 1971. Pajdzińska, Anna: Definicje poetyckie. In: O definicjach i definowaniu. Ed. J. Bartmiński, R. Tokarski. Lublin 1993, 221 – 236. Pajdzińska, Anna – Tokarski, Ryszard: Jazykový obraz světa a kreativní text. Slovo a slovesnost, 71, 2010, 288 – 297. Patočka, Jan: Přirozený svět jako filosofický problém. Prague 1992. Vaňková, Irena: Kognitivní lingvistika, řeč a poezie. Předběžné poznámky. Česká literatura, 2005, 609 – 636.

Vida Vukoja Staroslavenski institut, Zagreb Hope, One Cannot Dispair in Croatian Church Slavonic Croatian Church Slavonic (acr. CCS) is a bookish idiom primarily used for liturgical purposes in medieval Croatia, with documents dating from XII to XVI c. The CCS lexis of mental-sentient dynamics seems to be an example of the paradigm of passions and affect, best represented by Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1a.2ae.22-48), which has been almost forgotten or unwarrantably mixed with the paradigm of emotions, nowadays usually perceived as being universal. Several criteria can be used in sistematization of passions, one of them being evaluation of the object that arouses feeling as good or bad. Good passions are pronounced to be love, desire, hope, courage, joy; and bad ones: hate, abomination, dispair, fear, anger, sorrow. In CCS some passions are lexicalized by one root (such as love, hate, abomination), some by two roots (such as hope, joy or fear), and some by several roots (such as anger or sorrow). The concept of hope in the CCS texts is lexicalized by two groups of lexems: one being derived from upv- and the other being derived from nad-. This contribution focuses on several features considering the two groups of lexems, their mutual relations, as well as their relations with the lexems derived from the roots used 65


SCLC 2012 for lexicalization of other passions. One of the features regards origin of the two CCS roots in question: (vernacular) Croatian and/or Old Church Slavonic. The next one addresses two complementary tendencies previously noticed in lexicalization of good passions: if a mental sentient concept is lexicalized by stems derived from two different roots (as hope is lexicalized by upv- and nad-), then the relation of the two roots concerning the ratio of nouns and verbs derived from them will be rather balanced, but the group of lexems derived from one root will highly surpass the group of lexems derived of the other root in number of examples: upv- derives only one noun and one verb, and nad- derives not more then two of each afore-mentioned parts of speech, but upv- has five times as many examples as nad-. (If a bad passion is lexicalized by two roots, then nouns will be predominantely derived from one root and verbs from the other one, but the ratio of the examples of lexems derived from one and the other root will be rather balanced.) Another interesting feature is that the concept of dispair, as opposite of hope, is lexicalized only by adding negating element to a lexem derived from either upv- or nad- (neupv-, nenad-). Unlike any other of the ten remaining passions, despair doesn't »have its own« root for lexicalization. The afore-mentioned features are presented in the context of the Aquinas' system of eleven passions, as by their structural relations with the features of other passions lexicalizations they seem to corroborate the hypothesis that lexicalization of mental-sentient dynamics in CCS is better understood and more adequately interpreted through the paradigm of passions (and affect) then through the paradigm of emotions.

Jana Willer-Gold & Ines Skelac University of Zagreb Dynamic Approach to Croatian Conditional Clauses In Croatian grammars (Barić et al., 2003; Silić&Pranjković, 2007), conditional clauses fall into three or four categories: factual, potential (eventual and potential) and hypothetical, based on the conditional markers, i.e. the conditional operator and the tense or mood (indicative or conditional) of the verb. Katičić (1986) has already observed that the classical four way classification is well formed as an unambigous example can be given for each type. However, he concludes that there is still a great number of ambigous examples left unclassified. By focusing on the ambigous examples like (1) we provide a new approach that would encompass the unambigous as well as the ambigous examples without making any clear cut classification. The ambiguity of the example in (1) provides evidence for the hypothesis that, in certain circumstances regardless of the given conditional marker, the type of a conditional clause can be determined only based on accommodating a presupposition consistent with the common ground. Consequently, here, we will argue for the hypothesis by which in Croatian it is not possible to classify the conditional clauses uniquely in the traditional manner; rather, conditionals should be classified by taking into account their presuppositions, i.e. the common ground (Stalnaker, 1975). If the conditional markers are further understood as presupposition trigger, the traditional account would become included into the dynamic account. In order to provide arguments for a comprehensive account of Croatian conditionals, we concentrate our attention on making precise the characteristics of factual, potential and hypothetical conditionals that in their truth-conditional evaluation also have to accommodate the propositions from the common ground (Stalnaker, 2002). Guided by the data sampled from the grammars and the electronic corpus (Croatian Language Repository), first, we verify 66


SCLC 2012 whether the truth-conditional equivalent of the conditional clauses is the implication in the classical sense, i.e. correspond to the value of conditional operator in propositional logic. Secondly, we will inquire whether the projection principles given in Karttunen (1973), and later developed in the dynamic semantics framework (Beaver, 2008; Karttunen, 1974; Stalnaker, 1974; Heim, 1990; Schlenker, 2009), can be effectively used to give an adequate and exhaustive account of Croatian data. We conclude by providing a classification of Croatian conditional clauses with respect to their presuppositions. This approach to the analysis of conditionals can account for a conditional clause (1) ambiguous with respect to three different conditional interpretations (1a, 1b, 1c) depending uniquely on its presuppositions, and, hence, on the common ground, as shown by the following example: (1) Ako me bacite u more, plivat ću. (1a) If you throw me into the see, I will swim. (Factual) Common ground: We are sitting in a bar in the middle of Dubrovnik. (1b) When you throw me into the see, I will swim. (Potential) Common ground: We are sitting on a beach in Dubrovnik. (1c) If you were to throw me into the see, I would swim. (Hypothetical) Common ground: We are sitting in a bar in the middle of Zagreb. References Barić et al. (2003). Hrvatska gramatika (Croatian Grammar). Školska knjiga: Zagreb. Beaver D. I. (2001). Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic semantics. CSLI. Heim, I. (1990). Presupposition Projection. In R. van der Sandt (ed.), Reader for the Nijmegen Workshop on Presupposition, Lexical Meaning, and Discourse Processes. U. of Nijmegen. Karttunen, L. (1973). Presuppositions of compounds sentences. Linguistic Inquiry 4, 169– 193. Karttunen, L. (1974). Presupposition and Linguistic Context. Theoretical Linguistics 1: 181194. Reprinted in Davis 1991. Katičić, R. (1986). Novi jezikoslovni ogledi. Vrste pogodbenih rečenica u standardnom jeziku srpskom ili hrvatskome. Školska knjiga: Zagreb. 218-221 Lewis, D. (1973). Counterfactuals. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Schlenker, P. (2009). Presuppositions and Local Contexts. Manuscript, Institut Jean-Nicod and NYU. Silić, J., I. Pranjković (2007). Gramatika hrvatskoga jezika za gimnazije i visoka učilišta (2. izd.). (Croatian Grammar for the Use of High Schools and Universities). Zagreb: Školska knjiga. Stalnaker, R. (1974). Pragmatic Presuppositions. In Munitz, M. and Unger, P. (Eds.), Semantics and Philosophy. New York: New York University Press. Stalnaker, R. 1975. Indicative conditionals. Philosophia 5, 269-286. Stalnaker, R. 2002. Common ground. Linguistics and Philosophy 25(5-6), 701–721. http://riznica.ihjj.hr. Hrvatska jezična riznica (Croatian Language Repository) 20.03.2012.

67


SCLC 2012 Nataliya Zanegina Charles University, Prague Локальный смысл, реализуемый концептом «семья» (к вопросу об использовании «Русского идеографического словаря» для описания концептов) К настоящему времени разработаны различные способы описания концепта как основой единицы когнитивной лингвистики (их классификацию см. в [Прохоров 2008]). При этом Ю. Н. Караулов еще в 1981 г. отметил, что современной лингвистике свойственно стремление к «лексикографической параметризации», т. е. закреплению результатов исследования в виде словаря определенного типа [Караулов 1981]. Одним из последних словарей, описывающих концепты русского языка, можно считать опубликованный в 2012 году обширный (представлено более 50 концептов) фундаментальный «Русский идеографический словарь», созданный под руководством академика Н.Ю.Шведовой [Русский… 2012]. Концепт представлен в этом словаре в виде речений (коротких типичных предложений или словосочетаний) и цитат из художественной и публицистической литературы XIX-XX веков, сгруппированных в 19 зон словарной статьи так, что каждая зона объединяет в себе способы реализации определенного смысла (предварительно теоретическая концепция словаря была опубликована в [Проспект 2004]). Эти зоны озаглавлены следующим образом: Быть; Кто. Что; Каков; Какой; Чей; Действие. Состояние. Отнесённость (связанность); Необходимость. Должность Возможность. Желаемость; Каково; Как; Сколько; Насколько; Который; Где; Куда; От — До (в пространстве); Когда; От — До (во времени); Зачем; Почему (принципы выделения этих опирающихся на местоимения и другие дейктические слова смыслов, составляющих смысловую парадигму концепта, описаны в [Шведова 1998]). Собранный и расклассифицированный таким образом языковой материал можно считать самодостаточным описанием концепта исключительно языковыми средствами, а можно подвергнуть дальнейшему анализу. В докладе будет представлен анализ зон словарной статьи концепта «семья», отражающих локальные смыслы. Локальные смыслы объединяют в себе смысл отнесенности к месту, положению в пространстве (где, в каком месте), смысл направления в пространстве (куда) и смысл движения или расположения в пространстве (откуда и докуда) [Проспект… 2004: 3637]. При выражении данного смысла концепт «семья» может выступать как субъект, который сам характеризуется данным смыслом (семья живет в доме), либо как носитель указанного смысла для характеристики другого субъекта (жить в семье). Тексты, в которых «семья» соотносится с локальными смыслами, достаточно разнообразны, но обычно в них обсуждаются такие состояния или действия семьи как единого целого, для которых соотнесенность с местом особенно важна. Это жизнь семьи в каком-либо месте, ее происхождение из какого-либо места (московское семейство); перемещения семьи (семья вселилась в новый дом) и прочие действия. Выступая как носитель локального смысла для характеристики другого субъекта, концепт «семья» интересно раскрывает собственную сущность: семья сама оказывается таким местом, в которое можно попадать (вошел в семью как родственник), из которого можно исходить (он из семьи инженеров) или в котором могут происходить какие-либо события (в семье стряслась беда). При этом могут одновременно сообщаться разнообразные дополнительные характеристики семьи.

68


SCLC 2012 О «семье» как о месте часто говорят при необходимости сообщить о принятых в семье нормах, сложившихся в семье традициях, о том, как заведено в конкретной семье (В нашей семье мы умеем молчать и терпеть (Тургенев)). Конкретная семья, неся в себе локальный смысл, может характеризоваться как место существования, жизни (родиться в дворянской семье), как место, среда какихлибо других действий или состояний (в семье его любили), как пространственное направление для таких событий (война принесла в семью горе). Описанные выше характеристики может нести не конкретная семья, а семья вообще или семейная жизнь вообще (В семейной жизни главное — терпение (Чехов)). Литература Bartminski J, Niebrzegowska-Bartminska S. (eds.) 1996, 1999 Slownik stereotypow i symboli ludowych, I: Kosmos. Lublin. Караулов Ю. Н. Лингвистическое конструирование и тезаурус литературного языка. М., 1981. Проспект: Русский идеографический словарь (Мир человека и человек в окружающем его мире). Под ред. Н.Ю.Шведовой. М., 2004. Прохоров Ю.Е. В поисках концепта. М., 2008. Русский идеографический словарь. Мир человека и человек в окружающем его мире / Под общей ред. Н.Ю.Шведовой. М., 2012. Шведова Н. Ю. Местоимение и смысл. Класс русских местоимений и открываемые ими смысловые пространства. М., 1998.

69


Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.