Abstract The goal of this article is to introduce to the field a particular subtype of valency-reducing strategies, referred to as oblique anticausativization below. This subtype differs from more common and better known dependent-marking types, such as, for instance, the canonical anticausative. Instead, oblique anticausatives are characterized by the preservation of the object case of the transitive-causative

Abstract Since the pioneering paper by Emenau (1956) there have been many attempts (cf. Masica 1976, 2001; Ebert 2001; among many others) to select areal features which are shared among languages spoken in South Asia. However, there has been little consent on the number of such features and the possible direction of their spread. In this paper we are focusing on two selected isoglosses, namely alignment

Abstract Negation is an operator that reverses the truth value of a proposition and it is considered an universal category (Horn 2001: xiii) since all human systems of communication contain a representation of propositional negation. Therefore, one of the most important features of negation is its markedness that sets a contrast between affirmation and negation. Said markedness is carried out in various

Abstract In PIE, quality modifiers were expressed by stative verbs and nominal epithets, rather than by special adjectival lexemes. Adjectives did not form a separate lexical class. This made the encoding of the NP constituency less explicit. If we consider what I suggest calling “second-generation IE languages” we can observe a general tendency to create new, more explicit morphological means of dependency

Abstract The threefold division noun-verb-adjective is often considered a hallmark of the IE family from the remote PIE phase. However, Alfieri (2016, 2018, forth.) claims that this view is incorrect: while in Latin three major classes of lexemes are found (nouns, verbs and adjectives), in the Sanskrit language of the Rig Veda only two major classes are found (verbal roots and nouns) and the most typical

The last decades are marked with an increasing interest towards the study of isoglosses shared by some branches of the Indo-European language family. As is well-known, next to well-established branches such as Germanic, Greek or Indo-Iranian, there are larger subdivisions within Indo-European, grouping together several branches, in accordance with a number of features, traditionally called isoglosses

Abstract This paper offers a formal analysis of three constructions in English: locative inversion, central deictic inversion and directional inversion. These constructions constitute thetic statements with a locative intentional base which sets a scene that (re)introduces an entity in the discourse; syntactically, they display a non-canonical word order and have a number of unusual grammatical properties

Abstract Valency theory has been applied to investigate various languages, such as German, Chinese and English. However, most studies in this field were based on the linguistic materials produced by native speakers. The current research aimed to examine the valency structures in the interlanguage. Based on the English writing produced by L2 Chinese learners, we adopted the quantitative approach, trying

Abstract Motivated by an increasing use of social media for the expression of personal stance towards a certain target, we analyse the language used to produce such opinionated content with expressions of sentiment, which represents the main data source for sentiment analysis. We use the first manually annotated corpus for sentiment analysis of the Serbian language developed for the service sector

Abstract This paper represents a foray into the largely unexplored territory of the cognition of semantic approximations in first language acquisition. Current advances on cognitive modelling are applied to a corpus of 500 semantic approximations produced by 20 children between 1;06 and 5;00 years old. The results reveal that a large number of those semantic approximations are the output of a set of

Abstract This article is devoted to the problem of translating bad language in cases when the target audience recipient has direct access to the source text and the impact translational and editorial choices have on the overall meaning of the work. As an illustration of this point, it discusses a voice-over translation, in which case it is common practice to censor vulgarities, mainly by means of under-translating

Abstract Lin (2017), according to the author, “offers a refutation of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG) from a novel perspective”. Unfortunately, “novel” does not mean logical or valid. On the contrary, as I will show in this refutation of Lin’s refutation, there is a profound and fundamental misunderstanding in Lin’s interpretation of UG. His refutation only proves his superficial understanding of

Abstract This study sets out to examine how reportative evidentiality and attribution are achieved in Romanian fairy tales. By comparing and contrasting reportative and attribution expressions, the current research aims to determine the deictic function of these constructions, the pragmatic motivations of the speaker for evidential usage as well as the lexicalization, richness and functional diversity

Abstract The aim of this paper is to provide a pragmalinguistically inspired framework for analysing the relationship between linguistic forms and conventional and ritual behaviour. To date, no body of pragmalinguistic research has been dedicated to the relationship between conventional and ritual phenomena, which play a fundamental role in language use. Even more importantly, the examination of this

Abstract This paper argues that the Polish noun-pronoun asymmetry in which the intensifier sam ‘self’ precedes nouns and follows pronominals is not a simple case of configuration in the DP, whereby pronouns, unlike nominals, target D0 for referential reasons (cf. Rutkowski 2002, 2012). Such viewpoints, in the case of Polish, are unfortunate because they appear to underlyingly work on and draw from

Abstract We examine the complex nominal classification system in Nepali (Indo-European, Indic), a language spoken at the intersection of the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan language families, which are usually associated with prototypical examples of grammatical gender and numeral classifiers, respectively. In a typologically rare pattern, Nepali possesses two gender systems based on the human/non-human

Abstract In this article, we present a corpus-based analysis of two major types of the Polish Complete Path (CP) construction in which a source-PP, headed by od+GEN, is immediately followed by a goal-PP, headed by do+GEN or po+ACC, as in od jesieni 1920 do jesieni 1921 ‘from autumn 1920 to autumn 1921’ and od kreskówek po rysunki techniczne ‘from cartoons to technical drawings’. The aim of the study

Abstract This article is an attempt to investigate theoretically and empirically how the emotion of anger is used in political discourse. The descriptive analysis is centred around the conversational analysis of anger, as present in the verbal exchanges in the UK parliamentary debates, correlated with the variables of power (P), social distance (D), and the concept of valence. The key idea underbracing

Abstract Of Arabic verbal nouns’ various functions, this article focuses on their taking the position of ḥāl ‘circumstantial accusative’. Arab grammarians claim that a plain infinitive may replace a participle in the accusative, assuming the same meaning as the participle. I argue, however, that from the point of view of modern linguistics, these verbal nouns might be interpreted as having an adverbial

Abstract Conversion is a unique way of forming new words, when derived word has the same shape as the original word. In traditional grammars, quite dominant is the definition that during conversions there is a change in the belonging of the part of speech or at least the change of the syntactic category of the word, without any change in the shape. The morpho-syntactic approach is based solely on changing

Abstract This study investigates two flavors of the necessity modal sign NECESSARY in TİD and investigates their semantic and syntactic properties and how these properties interact. First, the modal flavors of this modal sign were identified through the contexts they occur in, based on the analysis by Kratzer (1981, 1991). Epistemic and deontic flavors of modality were searched for in the data, which

Abstract This paper presents various types of metaphors within the emergent wine discourse in Polish. The analysis is corpus-based and it employs examples excerpted from Synamet – a semantically and morphosyntactically annotated corpus of Polish synesthetic metaphors. Polish wine discourse is juxtaposed against other thematic types of discourse included in the corpus, e.g., texts devoted to perfume

Abstract Automatic word sense disambiguation (WSD) has proven to be an important technique in many natural language processing tasks. For many years the problem of sense disambiguation has been approached with a wide range of methods, however, it is still a challenging problem, especially in the unsupervised setting. One of the well-known and successful approaches to WSD are knowledge-based methods

Abstract The article presents current research on coreference resolution for Polish, from development of a sufficiently general model of reference relations to implementation of tools using this model to automatically detect coreference in written texts. The task is accomplished using corpus approach, with manual annotation of reference structures, verification of the proposed theory on the corpus

Abstract In this article we discuss the current state-of-the-art for named entity recognition for Polish. We present publicly available resources and open-source tools for named entity recognition. The overview includes various kind of resources, i.e. guidelines, annotated corpora (NKJP, KPWr, CEN, PST) and lexicons (NELexiconS, PNET, Gazetteer). We present the major NER tools for Polish (Sprout, NERF

Abstract This article addresses the problem of automatic summarization of press articles in Polish. The main novelty of this research lays in the proposal of a three-step summarization algorithm which benefits from using coreference information. In related work section, all coreference-based approaches to summarization are presented. Then we describe in detail all publicly available summarization tools

Abstract The predicate-argument structure transparently encoded in dependency-based syntactic representations supports machine translation, question answering, information extraction, etc. The quality of dependency parsing is therefore a crucial issue in natural language processing. In the current paper we discuss the fundamental ideas of the dependency theory and provide an overview of selected dependency-based

Abstract Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has recently achieved promising results for a number of translation pairs. Although the method requires larger volumes of data and more computational power than Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), it is believed to become dominant in near future. In this paper we evaluate SMT and NMT models learned on a domain-specific English-Polish corpus of a moderate

Abstract This paper describes an automatic transcription system for the Polish Newsreel, which is a collection of mid to late 20th century news segments presented in audio and video form. They are characterized by their use of archaic language and poor audio quality, which makes them a demanding problem for speech recognition systems. Acoustic and language models had to be retrained using data from

Abstract Several natural languages have undergone a great deal of processing, but the problem of limited textual linguistic resources remains. The manual creation of parallel corpora by humans is rather expensive and time consuming, while the language data required for statistical machine translation (SMT) do not exist in adequate quantities for their statistical information to be used to initiate

Abstract This article is a comprehensive review of freely available tools and software for sentiment analysis of texts written in Polish. It covers solutions which deal with all levels of linguistic analysis: starting from word-level, through phrase-level and up to sentence-level sentiment analysis. Technically, the tools include dictionaries, rule-based systems as well as deep neural networks. The

Abstract This article introduces the issue of recognition and normalisation of temporal expressions for the Polish language. We describe what temporal information is and we present TimeML specification, adapted to Polish as a model for the description of temporal expressions. Classes of temporal expressions are presented as well as guidelines for annotation, normalisation of these expressions and our

Abstract In this paper we discuss the current state of the art in part-of-speech tagging for Polish. We introduce the problem of POS tagging and point out the key issues in tagging inflected languages, which make this task more difficult in the case of Polish than e.g. English. We also discuss the most important language resources connected with POS tagging, as well as the task of morphological analysis

Abstract Adopting a functional view of language, this study critically explores clausal patterns in lawyers’ opening address in an American criminal trial. Underpinned by the assumption that no linguistic options are value-free, the quantitative and qualitative analysis uncovers the syntactic choices employed by the opposing sides and accounts for them in terms of the presenters’ ideological positions

Abstract The present article reports a comparative study of interactional metadiscourse markers in English and Persian research articles. Drawing on Hyland’s (2005) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, this study investigates the employment of “hedges”, “boosters”, and “attitude markers” in a corpus composed of the post-method sections of 100 research articles (50 English and 50 Persian) in the field

Abstract The article offers a non-cartographic approach to the syntax of the left-peripheral particle to in Polish and Czech. It is claimed here that to is neither a topic nor a focus head. Instead, it has a status of a neutral Relator, a head of Relator Phrase, operative in the formation of the non-directional Structure of Predication. This structure serves the needs of Information Structure in providing

Abstract In this paper it will be argued that the difference between existential and locative sentences is primarily structurally encoded at the vP/VP level (at the first phase of a derivation). The crucial question is which argument of the verb BE (the Location or the nominal argument (“Theme”)) is projected as the “external argument”, i.e., which argument is the subject of inner predication. In the

Abstract The contrast between the Russian čto and the Polish co ‘what’ is syntactic and reflects the way in which an identical sequence of features in the syntactic representation becomes realized as morphology. Specifically, I argue that this scenario follows from a spell-out mechanism outlined in Starke (2018), where prefix formation, as in the Russian tri-morphemic čt-o but not in the Polish bi-morphemic

Abstract The goal of this study is to argue for a more widespread application of a uniform representation of Numeral Noun Constructions (NNCs) which captures both patterns with higher numerals (≥5, NumH) agreeing in case with the modified noun (case matching pattern) or bearing a distinct case from a noun (case independence pattern) in Polish and in other languages. Our account draws on the analysis

Abstract This paper aims to account for peculiar binding properties of non-nominative arguments of Polish psychological predicates focusing on accusative Object Experiencers (hence, OE). It has been observed that although Polish anaphors are subject oriented, they can be bound by accusative experiencers (Bondaruk and Szymanek 2007; Tajsner 2008; Wiland 2016). At the same time, these arguments, unlike

Abstract The paper addresses the question whether Subject Experiencer (henceforth, SE) verbs can form the stative and eventive passive in Polish. The analysis shows that SE verbs in Polish only sporadically give rise to the stative passive, and whenever this is possible, the stative passive derived from an SE verb can be classed as the target state passive in Kratzer’s typology (2000). Polish SE verbs

Abstract Our paper focuses on binding relations in the Polish piacere-type psychological verb podobać się ‘to please’. In particular, we aim to test the make-up of the argument structure of this verb, which is taken in the literature to be of a double object unaccusative verb (Belletti and Rizzi 1988; Miechowicz-Mathiasen and Scheffler 2008; Jiménez-Fernández and Rozwadowska 2016; a.o.). To this end

Abstract This paper is concerned with the forms of expression of occupational terms in contemporary Croatian institutional practice, typical of the changes in language policy and public language usage. Predominant in Croatian language was the androcentric practice of using masculine occupational terms as unmarked, gender-neutral. However, due to various reasons, it has changed in past years. The 2008

Abstract This paper presents an eye-tracking study in which number processing in simultaneous interpreting was investigated. Interpreting accuracy and eye behaviour were studied together to unveil the processing and rendering of numbers by interpreting trainees (N = 22) and professional interpreters (N = 26). While professional interpreters rendered numerals and the context in which they appeared with

Abstract Recent work suggests that Ukrainian represents a typologically rare bidirectional stress system with internal lapses, i.e. sequences of unstressed syllables in the vicinity of primary stress (Łukaszewicz and Mołczanow 2018a, b). The system is more intricate than the hitherto known bidirectional systems (e.g. Polish), and thus interesting from the theoretical perspective, as it involves interaction

Audiovisual translation has become a common subject of a number of scientific articles, special issues of translation journals or conferences. It may seem that this fascinating area of research has been examined thoroughly and may only be investigated further from the point of view of technological improvements in human communication. However, there are certain modalities of AVT which may appear to

Abstract This paper describes a perception experiment with Polish listeners involving vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) in L2 English. A forced-choice rhyming task employing the Silent Center (SC) paradigm revealed relatively uniform effects of stimulus type (SC, Initial, Middle, Final) on accuracy across two proficiency groups, despite greater overall accuracy on the part of the more proficient

Abstract The aim of this article is to examine the meaning potential of images in the enactment or creation of gender stereotypes in a corpus of contemporary British TV commercials. The dimensions outlined in Goffman (1979) and some aspects of Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2006) metafunctions are taken as a starting point to quantitatively and qualitatively analyse a sample of 155 ads which depict

Abstract This study focuses on the differences in pitch register and pitch span across five accents of English, and investigates their potential effects on judgements of speech. We recorded two male middle-aged speakers for each of the following accents of English: Brighton, Manchester, Perth, New Jersey and Edmonton. Then, we modified pitch register in selected spontaneous speech recordings by raising

Abstract Prepositions encode various causal forces when expressing emotion causality in emotion constructions. This study investigates two pairs of prepositions, the zerodimensional at and by, and the two- or three-dimensional with and about, which show contrasting collocation patterns in emotion constructions. Through a corpus analysis of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this study claims

Abstract Spanish dialects show substantial variation in coda s weakening. Yet, to provide a comprehensive treatment of this phenomenon, a bigger prosodic constituent than just the coda position should be analysed. Crucially, two aspirating varieties of Spanish are considered. The Granada dialect weakens s to [h] inside words, at word edges and at prefix edges. The process may be either transparent

Abstract A large body of academic literature (e.g. Fishman 1977, 1999; Giles and Johnson 1981; Romaine 2000, among others) claims that language is one of the most significant markers of ethnic identification and that it plays a crucial role not only in the external perception of an ethnic group by outsiders but also in the selfidentification of an ethnic group. In a minority environment, sense of ethnic

Abstract This paper discusses the issue of the influence of personal epistemological tendencies in native speakers of Polish on their perception of non-standard Polish. We argue in favor of taking into consideration the interpersonal differences concerning the way one conceptualizes the reality through the lenses of language as valid factors in of language perception. The essentialist factor in personal

Abstract The purpose of our current research is to see how Relevance Theory can handle one specific translation problem, namely strategic ambiguous structures. Concisely, we aim to provide a conceptual framework as to how the translator should cope with a pervasive ambiguity problem at the discoursal level. The point of departure from probably all previous models of analysis is that a relevance-theoretic

Abstract Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) investigates the relationship between language, power, and society. Corpus linguistics (CL) is the study of language based on examples of real life language use. Over the last two decades, various scholars have combined some approaches and notions of CDA with the analytical framework of CL to examine the representation of several phenomena in relatively large

Abstract In this paper, we take up the challenge of exploring the relationship between markedness and frequency in phonotactics. The study is based on word-initial and word-final consonant clusters in Polish and English. The aim of this study is threefold. First, we establish logarithmic frequencies for word-initial and final consonant clusters compiled from two resources, a dictionary (or paradigm)

Abstract Stripping is a phenomenon whereby a full clause is coordinated with a phrase (XP) and an adverb, typically NEG(ation) (e.g. John read Hamlet but not Othello). As noted previously in the literature (e.g. Bosque 1984), while in English NEG must precede XP, Spanish allows the reverse order as well (XP-NEG). This paper examines these two strings (i.e. XP-NEG and NEG-XP) in Spanish and compares

Abstract There is a consensus in the literature that a negative polarity item is an expression that requires a licenser varying from overt negation to questions or conditionals (see Benmamoun 1997; Kelepir 2001; Kumar 2006; Kural 1997; Laka 2013; Mahajan 1990; Vasishth 1999). However, the licensing conditions of NPIs might have different accounts, which has not been fully discussed within the literature

Abstract There is a widespread criticism of the use of linguists’ introspective judgments as data in syntactic generative research. The critics point to a few major inadequacies of this type of data. First of all, data from introspections are claimed to be unreliable and heavily biased, but also simply irrelevant by not representing real utterances produced in real situations. In view of some critics

Abstract Despite the vast body of research on communication strategies (CSs) and the way L2 learners manage to get their message across via these mechanisms, there is little research on Spanish as L2 in an interactional context and between different types of dyads. This is why this study attempts to examine a possible relationship between Spanish L2 learners’ use of communication strategies and the