LingBaW. Linguistics Beyond and Within, 2016, Vol. 2

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12153/7138

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    Exemplification in academic discourse structure
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Kucelman, Ewa
    The study examines the role that exemplification plays in academic discourse. As the latest approaches emphasize, discourse is an interactional activity involving as participants both the writer and the reader. In order to ensure the proper understanding of his/her message, writers make use of different discourse strategies such as reformulation, specification, generalization or elaboration. We focus on how exemplification, viewed as the satellite, contributes to the better recognition of the subject matter, which is understood as the nucleus. In the first two sections of the study, we present an overview of discourse relations which call for the use of constructions applied in exemplification. The second part, which is based on the linguistic material obtained from a close scrutiny of two classic articles from the field of linguistics and one linguistic textbook, is devoted to the description of how exemplification contributes to specification and elaboration. We try to find and describe the specific relations, for example set-member, whole-part, process-step and object-attribute which hold between the nucleus and the satellite. Finally, we attempt at listing discourse areas which call for exemplification. The study illustrates that what are known as separate discourse relations are in fact closely related.
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    Two steps backwards: A bibliometric analysis of L2 vocabulary research in 1984
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Mańczak-Wohlfeld, Elżbieta
    Although contrastive studies do not enjoy great prestige among linguists, they have a very long tradition dating back to ca. 1000 A.D. when Ælfric wrote his Grammatica, a grammar of Latin and English. Even then he must have been aware of the fact that the knowledge of one language may be helpful in the process of learning another language (Krzeszowski 1990). Similarly, it seems that throughout the history of mankind teachers of a foreign language must have realized that a native and foreign tongue can be contrasted. However, contrastive linguistics only came into being as a science at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The first works were almost purely theoretical, and it is worth emphasizing that among the first scholars working in the field was Baudouin de Courtenay, a Polish linguist, who published his contrastive grammar of Polish, Russian and Old Church Slavonic in 1912. The outbreak of the Second World War was a milestone in the development of applied contrastive studies since a need to teach foreign languages in the United States arose as a result. The 1960’s is considered a further step in the development of contrastive grammar since a number of projects were initiated both in Europe and in the U.S.A. (Willim, Mańczak-Wohlfeld 1997), which resulted in the introduction of courses in English-Polish contrastive grammar at Polish universities. The aim of the present paper is to characterize and evaluate the courses offered in the English departments of selected Polish universities and to suggest an “ideal” syllabus.
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    Some reflections on Chomsky’s notion of reference
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Cipriani, Enrico
    In this paper, I will focus on Chomsky’s interpretation of the notion of reference. I will summarize Chomsky’s criticisms against the externalist interpretation of such notion, and I will then focus on the internalist (and syntactic) interpretation that the MIT linguist provides. Then I will focus on the relation between the internalist interpretation and the notion of truth, discussing in particular Casalegno and Hinzen’s objections: I will point out that truth does not represent a particular problem for the internalized reference. Finally, I will show how Chomsky explains, inside the internalist perspective, the phenomenon of communication. In Conclusions, I will sketch two important points.
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    The influence of the language of new media on the literacy of young people in their school assignments and in leisure
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Filipan-Žignić, Blaženka; Legac, Vladimir; Sobo, Katica
    The authors of this research study try to explore the real literacy among young people of today resulting from the influence of the language of new media (especially Facebook and the mobile phone). The impetus for this study comes from frequent complaints that the language of young people has deteriorated due to the negative impact of the language that young people are using in the new media. The authors have done this through an analysis of the way students write in their school assignments and in writings done in their spare time in the new media with regard to (non) existence of the language of new media (such as abbreviations, emoticons and other iconic signs, capitals, dialecticisms, anglicisms, vulgarisms, etc.). In their analysis, the researchers used a computer programme WordSmith Tools 6.0 (Scott 2006). The authors aimed to find out whether or not students in their private language texts use the language of new media (written language with many elements of spoken language and with many abbreviations) and whether or not the students in their school assignments consistently use the standard language without the elements that they normally use in their own language in the new media. The results have shown that secondary school students do consistently write in the standard language in their school assignments, whereas in their leisure activities they use all the elements of the language of new media.
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    Second Order Coherence: A new way of looking at incoherence in texts
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Ulbaek, Ib
    By using van Dijk’s concept of coherence and bringing it together with my Principle of meaning iconicity, we have a new way of looking at incoherence in texts. The principle says that closely related information is meaningfully related on a pragmatic level, an instruction to the reader to relate the information to each other. It is demonstrated by textual analysis that the concept of coherence can be used analytically by dividing it into first and second order coherence. First order coherence is the usual concept of coherence: sentences are connected by cohesive links and related by causality, time etc. Second order coherence is a way of organizing text by using incoherence as a way of organizing text into chunks of coherent parts. It is shown how readers can detect these structures in the text by detecting the incoherence even without the layout of the text to signal structure (e.g. indention of paragraphs).
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    Intensional profiles and different kinds of human minds. “Case studies” about Hungarian imperative-like sentence types
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Alberti, Gábor; Kleiber, Judit; Schnell, Zsuzsanna; Szabó, Veronika
    The paper offers such description of some imperative-like sentence types in potential well-formed Hungarian utterances which includes a parallel representation of the linguistically encoded intensional profiles of the sentence types and actual information states in potential interlocutors’ minds. In our representational dynamic pragmasemantics framework ReALIS, we demonstrate the intensional profiles of the five basic and two “fine-tuned” sentence types as members of a system enabling addressers’ of utterances to express their beliefs, desires and intentions concerning the propositional content of the given utterances as well as the addressees’ and other people’s certain beliefs, desires and intentions (concerning the propositional content, too, or each other’s thoughts). We also provide “case studies” in which actual beliefs, desires and intentions in potential interlocutors’ minds are compared to the linguistically encoded intensional profiles of Hungarian imperative-like sentence types. In this context, the listener’s task is to calculate the speaker’s intentions (and hidden motives) on the basis of the mismatches that this comparison reveals. The paper concludes with an insight into our attempts to model the mind of individuals living with Autism Spectrum Disorder. This latter subproject is relevant since our framework provides solutions to pragmaticosemantic phenomena “at the cost” of undertaking the complex task of actually representing the structure of the human mind itself – which is not impossible but requires an adequate decision of the level of abstraction and the components to be used.
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    Text rhythmic system: Its energetic and subliminal potentials
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Kalyta, Alla
    The article introduces scientific considerations concerning the energetic nature and origin of rhythm subliminal potential in a spoken text as well as the mechanisms of its impact on the recipient. The paper advances the idea that rhythm energetics and its subliminal potential is based on such postulates: (1) rhythm is generated in the speaker’s psyche at the levels of his/her unconscious (or existential being) and subconscious (or mental and transcendental beings) spheres; (2) the text rhythmic system has a definite emotional and pragmatic potentials that realize a latent manipulative and subliminal influence; (3) generation of the spoken text tempo-rhythm is carried out by means of integrating micro-rhythms of all levels of the speaker’s inner speech into the internal macro-rhythm, which is materialized in the form of an outer tempo-rhythm as a complex means of achieving a subliminal effect of speech. The article also outlines the prospects of studying a subliminal nature of rhythm.
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    Prosodic organization of English folk riddles and the mechanism of their decoding
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Taranenko, Larysa
    The paper advances a cognitive model representing a creative mechanism of riddle decoding by its recipient, which serves as a theoretical and methodological ground for the experimental phonetic study of prosodic means that organize the text of a riddle. Within the process of cognitive model formation the author performs a conceptual analysis of the riddle compositional structure, presented as a systemic algorithmic scheme. It is confirmed that a characteristic feature of a folk riddle is its division into two elements: the first one is the description of an object, further differentiated into “topic” and “commentary”, while the second one is the riddle answer, or solution, generated directly in the recipient’s mind as a result of his/her mental activities. The carried out auditory analysis proves that such a limitation of the riddle’s structure is compensated by a set of prosodic means and their specific interaction, which trigger creative and cognitive processes in the recipient’s mind aimed at searching for the riddle solution.
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    Being at home: Global citizenship in Norwegian schools. A study of children’s poems
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Erdmann, Susan; Gawronska, Barbara
    The paper addresses the question of self-perceived identity in children attending international schools in Norway. In this population, the distinction between “home culture” and “host culture” is no longer relevant, since most of the children represent “hyphenated” (e.g. Asian-British or American-Scandinavian) or merged nationalities and cultures. The goal of the study is to investigate how these pupils define themselves and the notion of “home”. To achieve at least a preliminary picture of the children’s self-perception, the authors have analysed poems on two topics: Me and Home, written by pupils of an international school and a Norwegian school, both informant groups aged 11-13. A semantic analysis of the poems indicates that the international school children present strong assertions of individual identity as defined against societal roles, while the Norwegian school pupils do not conceptualize identity formation as a struggle and their poems reflect a high degree of social, familial and national integration.
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    Two steps backwards: A bibliometric analysis of L2 vocabulary research in 1984
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Meara, Paul
    This paper is the fourth instalment in a series of studies which attempt to plot the way research in L2 vocabulary acquisition has developed over the last fifty years. Earlier papers have analysed the research for 1982, 1983 and 2006 (Meara 2012, 2014, 2015). This paper follows on directly from my analysis of the 1983 research, and it uses the same bibliometric techniques that were used in the earlier papers: the co-citation methodology, first developed by Small (1973) and White and Griffith (1981). The analysis of the 1984 data shows some consolidation of the main research themes, but for the most part the L2 vocabulary research published in this year continues to be made up of small research clusters, sharing few common points of reference.
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    Asking and answering: A contrastive study of English and Swedish basic communication verbs
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Viberg, Åke
    This article presents a contrastive study of the English verbs ask and answer and their Swedish correspondents based on data from the English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC), which is bi-directional and contains Swedish and English original texts and their corresponding translations. As a background, a short overview is given of Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) in general with brief discussions of speech act theory (Searle), direct and reported speech and conceptual frames (FrameNet) and their syntactic realizations. The contrastive study is concerned with networks of polysemy and the relationships of various senses with differing syntactic realizations across languages. The senses of ask are primarily distributed between two verbs in Swedish: fråga ‘ask a question’ and be ‘request (politely)’ but even some verbs with more specific meanings are involved. The concept of answering forms a conceptual network which is similar in English and Swedish but contrasts with respect to the way meanings are divided up between various verbs. English has a number of verbs such as answer, reply, respond, correspond, retort and rejoin, whereas Swedish to a great extent relies on one verb (svara) and its morphological derivations: besvara, ansvara, motsvara, försvara. In the Conclusion, pedagogical applications of the study are briefly discussed.
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    Do they understand more? Turkish EFL speakers perception of sentence stress in English
    (Wydawnictwo KUL, 2016) Buczek-Zawiła, Anita
    As one of the most prominent elements of intonation sentence stress frequently contributes to the meaning expressed by speakers. It most typically signals details of an utterance information structure, but it also performs a contrastive or emphasizing function, thus expressing focus in the spoken discourse. In English and many other languages its location, while exhibiting certain regularities it additionally determined by extra relevant or relative information. As such, either alone or in combination, it may communicate certain additional shades of meaning that, similarly to the contribution of sentence intonation, may escape the attention of EFL speakers. The paper explores the comprehension sensitivity of Turkish speakers of English when it comes to identifying meaning details contributed by sentence stress. It investigates their awareness as detected through perception of variable sentence stress location. The target group are Turkish advanced speakers of English, with various levels of competence, and only sporadic phonetic training in English for part of them. In a perception-based experiment they were asked to identify the details they perceive. Their results were then compared and analysed, also in relation to what their native language (with a distinction into sentential and focal stress) adds in terms of this module of utterance intonation. Finally, their results were correlated with those achieved by Polish advanced speakers of English as investigated in a similar study conducted earlier. The interpretation of the results reveals that Turkish EFL speakers are more sensitive to the highlighting or contrastive function of sentence stress, achieving overall better result here than when they are to judge its contribution to notion such as politeness or impatience. They are also rather competent at detecting the prominent element in an utterance.