Girl, you’ll be a woman soon : grammatical and/or semantic agreement with Greek hybrid nouns of the Mädchen type

Greek grammarians distinguished five gender classes: masculine, feminine, neuter, common and epicene nouns. Common nouns denote sexed beings and differentiate them accordingly, e.g. ὁ παῖς ‘the boy’ ~ ἡ παῖς ‘the girl’. Epicene nouns denote sexed beings as well but do not differentiate them according to sex, e.g. ὁ ἀετός ‘the (male / female) eagle’ ~ ἡ ἀλώπηξ ‘the (male / female) fox’. There is, however, another class not recognized by the grammarians and that is the class of hybrid nouns, defined by Corbett as “nouns […] whose agreement specification varies according to the agreement target” (2015: 191). The agreement specification is determined by the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1991: 226): “attributive > predicate > relative pronoun > personal pronoun”, of which he says: “For any controller that permits alternative agreements, as we move rightwards along the Agreement Hierarchy, the likelihood of agreement with greater semantic justification will increase monotonically” (2015: 193). One of the prototypical examples of a hybrid noun is German Mädchen, which always takes the neuter form of the article, but often the feminine form of the personal pronoun (Corbett 1991: 182, 227-8; 2015: 194). Corbett, following a personally communicated suggestion of Manfred Krifka, noted that “the older the girl in question, the more likely the feminine becomes (and conversely the neuter” (1991: 228). Braun and Haig confirmed this suggestion in their study of 302 native speakers of German and concluded that the choice depends on the “semantics of age” (2010: 70) as well as on the “semantics of femaleness” (2010: 82). In this paper I discuss the grammatical hybridity of Greek equivalents of German Mädchen: κόριον, κοράσιον, κορασίδιον, θυγάτριον, παρθένιον etc. I show that such nouns tend to follow the Agreement Hierarchy as well and that the semantics of age and of femaleness are as important in the gender assignment of Greek girls as they are in the case of German Mädchen. The Greek evidence confirms an important observation made by Braun and Haig in reference to the latter: “a natural boundary, that of puberty, appears to be relevant in the statistical distribution of feminine and neuter forms” (2010: 82). More specifically, they observed “a statistically valid preference to favour female forms when the Mädchen is presented as 18-years old, as opposed to twelve” (ibid.). Not surprisingly, the correlation between age, femaleness and semantic agreement differs significantly in the case of the Greek girls. References Braun, Friederike & Geoffrey Haig. 2010. “When are German ‘Girls’ Feminine? How the Semantics of Age Influences the Grammar of Gender Agreement”, in Markus Bieswanger, Heike Motschenbacher & Susanne Muhleisen (eds.), Language in its Socio-Cultural Context: New Explorations in Global, Medial and Gendered Uses, 69-84. Tübingen: Narr. Corbett, Greville C. 1991. Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corbett, Greville C. 2015. “Hybrid Nouns and their complexity”, in Jürg Fleischer, Elisabeth Rieken & Paul Widmer (eds.), Agreement from a Diachronic Perspective, 191-214. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Janse, Mark. 2020. “Sex and Agreement: (Mis)matching Natural and Grammatical Gender in Greek”, Keria: Studia Latina et Graeca 22(2), 25-55

Corpus-Based Approaches to Figurative Language: Metaphor and Austerity

Austerity is a by-product of the ongoing financial crisis. As Kitson et al (2001) explain, what was a \u201cNICE\u201d (\u2018non-inflationary consistent expansion\u2019) economy has turned \u201cVILE\u201d (\u2018volatile inflation, little expansion\u2019), and the economic and social fall-out is now becoming visible. Unemployment, redundancy, inflation, recession, insecurity, and poverty all loom, causing governments, businesses and individuals to reevaluate their priorities. A changing world changes attitudes, and the earliest manifestations of such change can often be found in figurative language. Political rhetoric attempts to sweeten the bitter pill that nations have no choice but to swallow; all are invited to share the pain, make sacrifices for the common good, and weather the storm. But more sinister undertones can also be perceived. In times of social and financial dire straits, scapegoats are sought and mercilessly pursued in the press. The elderly, unemployed, and disabled are under fire for \u201csponging off the state\u201d; and as jobs become scarcer and the tax bill rises, migrant populations and asylum seekers are viewed with increasing suspicion and resentment. Calls for a \u201cbig society\u201d fall on deaf ears. Society, it seems, is shrinking as self-preservation takes hold. Austerity is a timely area of study: although austerity measures have been implemented in the past, most of the contributions here address the current political and economic situation, which means that some of the studies reported are work in progress while others look at particular \u201cwindows\u201d of language output from the recent past. Whichever their focus, the papers presented here feature up-to-the-minute research into the metaphors being used to comment upon our current socioeconomic situation. The picture of austerity that emerges from these snapshots is a complex one, and one which is likely to be developed further and more widely in the coming future

Computational approaches to semantic change (Volume 6)

Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans

Present-day Spanish fashion lexicon dresses up in English

Lexical borrowings can be regarded as one of the clearest and most direct consequences of any language contact situation. However, not all the borrowings that enter a language are alike. Since their entrance in a given language is motivated by different reasons, two general kinds of borrowings must be distinguished: necessary borrowings which name ideas and concepts for which the recipient language does not have any equivalent term; and superfluous borrowings which, on the contrary, refer to realities for which the recipient language already has equivalent terms. This paper focuses on the latter type. Specifically, it presents a diachronic corpus-based analysis of 14 English fashion terms with a clear Spanish lexical counterpart —blazer/‘chaqueta’, celebrity/‘famoso’, clutch/‘bolso de mano’, cool/‘de moda’, fashion/‘moda’, fashionable/‘de moda’, fashionista/ ‘adicto a la moda’, jeans/‘vaqueros’, nude/‘color carne’, photocall/‘sesión de fotos’, shorts/‘pantalones cortos’, sporty/‘deportivo’, trench/‘trinchera, gabardina’, and trendy/‘moderno’— in four Spanish corpora: the Corpus del Español, and the CORDE, CREA and CORPES XXI corpora. My objectives are twofold: firstly, to demonstrate to what extent these unnecessary Anglicisms are increasingly becoming part of the everyday contemporary Peninsular Spanish fashion lexicon; and secondly, to account for the three reasons that underlie their alleged constant entrance in twenty-first century Peninsular Spanish: (i) globalization and the impact of English on Spanish; (ii) the highly visible presence of English in the field of advertising; (iii) and the selling power of English

New Technologies and Innovative Solutions in the Development of Multimedia Corpus of Mezen Robinsons Texts

Objective: New Technologies and Innovative Solutions in creating a multimedia corpus of texts about the "Mezen Robinsons" aims to preserve the memory of an event that occurred in the 18th century and to study the history of Spitsbergen development. This article presents a multimedia corpus of Russian-language texts about the "Mezen Robinsons" written in 1766–2022. Observations show that the history of the survival of the Mezen hunters on Edge Island in 1743–1749 has repeatedly attracted the attention of specialists from various fields of knowledge: historians, archaeologists, publicists, professional writers, translators, etc. The corpus unites texts, audio, video, and multimedia resources. Methods: continuous sampling was used to collect the material; when analyzing and describing the data, we applied a descriptive method, a biographical method of studying literature, statistical data processing, philological analysis, observation, assessment, and corpus modeling methods. Findings: the methodology and technology of building an independent multimedia corpus, its architecture, and its design are described. Novelty: the multimedia corpus is a contribution to the development of a new approach to studying the subjectology of Russian literature. Practical significance:the findings can become the basis for studying the biographies and creativity of various authors who built their works on the plot of the Mezen industrialists and for further comparison of various interpretations of one event from the history of the development of the Arctic. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2023-04-01-07 Full Text: PD

Identifying English gerunds and their translation equivalents in an English-German translation corpus

The gerund is a peculiarity of English grammar that has no exact equivalent in German. It displays both nominal and verbal properties. Finding a clear-cut definition of gerunds is challenging and still the subject of debate. This diploma thesis aims to identify English gerunds, to compare them to other -ing forms and to take into account in what historical context gerunds emerged. It briefly compares them to gerund-like forms in other Indo-European languages and looks at typical patterns and functions that are associated with English gerunds. By providing a systematic analysis of corpus passages containing gerunds that are identified via corpus queries and by analysing their frequencies and their German equivalents in an English-German translation corpus, this thesis aims to identify the most common strategies that translators use in different textual registers for translating gerunds into German.Gerunds sind eine Besonderheit der englischen Grammatik, für die es keine exakt vergleichbare grammatische Struktur im Deutschen gibt, welche alle Funktionen der englischen Gerunds erfüllt. Gerunds sind gekennzeichnet sowohl durch nominale als auch verbale Eigenschaften. In dieser Arbeit werden englische Gerunds beschrieben und von anderen -ing-Formen abgegrenzt unter Berücksichtigung des historischen Kontextes, in dem Gerunds in der englischen Sprache entstanden. In einer Untersuchung in einem englisch-deutschen Parallelkorpus werden Gerunds durch gezielte Korpusabfragen identifiziert und in Bezug auf ihre Häufigkeiten in den jeweiligen Korpusregistern und die gewählten Übersetzungsstrategien und Entsprechungen in den jeweiligen deutschen Korpusdaten ausgewertet

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo