The article examines feminatives as a semantic and word-formation category.
In Slavic languages feminatives are mainly regarded as modificational
derivatives formed from masculine derivatives by the ...whole replacement of
the masculine suffix (bor-(-ec/-k?), partial replacement of the masculine
suffix (bra-l/(-ec/-ka), or by adding the feminine suffix to the masculine
suffix (miz-ar/-ka). Due to the expansion of global communication through
mass media, the inevitable broadening of vocabulary requires the adaptation
of borrowed words to the morphemic, morphological and word-formation
paradigms of the borrowing language. As a consequence, it comes as no
surprise that feminatives formed from the same masculine base often have two
or more variants of feminine suffixes (dekan-ica - dekan-ka - dekan-ja).
Three examples of variant feminine suffixes -ica and -ka added to masculine
nouns ending in suffixes -or and -ator, which are of foreign origin, are
examined in this paper. The purpose of the study is to establish which of
the feminine suffixes are more productive and how they conform to the
established patterns. The examined cases of masculine formations using the
borrowed suffixes -or and its variant -ator (in addition to -tor, -itor and
-utor) in the semantic category of living beings show variability in
languages such as Slovene, Serbian and Slovakian, which are dependent on the
existence of an appropriate nominal or verbal base in the language. In
Slovene, such formations are consistently deverbal, while in Serbian and
Slovakian they are either denominal or deverbal. The study focuses on three
masculine formations koordinator, selektor and senator, and examines how
their suffixes combine with the feminine suffix variants (-ka and -ica).
The established pattern in Slovene predicts that masculine formations in
-ator will form feminatives by adding the suffix -ka, while masculine
formations in -or will form feminatives by adding the suffix -ica. In the
example of the words koordinator- ka (from koordin-ator) and selektor-ica
(from selekt-or), the usage confirms this pattern. However, there is a
deviation from this pattern in the example of senatorka (from senat-or),
where the feminative senator-ica would be predicted. The study offers a
possible answer to the question of such deviations from the predictable
patterns in contrast to the actual use of feminative suffixes. It is clear
that language users are guided by different analogies when they form words.
Although these analogies may not be linguistically supported, they are
important in motivating the formation of many new words, especially those
from borrowed bases. The language user depends on the recognition of the
formal structure of the word to be able to choose a predictable
word-formation pattern. In borrowed words, such formal structure is less
clear, since it is based on foreign word-formation patterns with foreign
root and derivational morphemes.
The event-related potential method has proven to be a useful tool for studying the effects of gender information in language. Studies have shown that mismatch between the antecedent and the following ...referent triggers two ERP components, N400 and P600. In the present study, we investigated how grammatical gender affects the mental representation of the grammatical subject. A match-mismatch paradigm was used to investigate how masculine grammatical gender and gender-balanced forms (the explicit mention of masculine and feminine forms as word pairs) as role nouns affect the processing of the referent in Slovenian. The morphological complexity of Slovenian language required the use of anaphoric verbs instead of nouns/pronouns, on which previous research was based. The results showed that following both the gender-balanced and the masculine generic forms, P600 (but not N400) was observed in response to the feminine verb but not to the masculine verb. The P600 amplitude was smaller in the case of the gender-balanced form than in the case of the masculine generic form only. We have concluded that gender-balanced forms are more open to feminine continuations than masculine generic forms. This is the first ERP study in Slovenian to address the effects of processing grammatical gender, thus contributing to existing research on languages with grammatical gender. The great strength of the study is that it is one of the first ERP studies to test the mental inclusivity of gender-balanced forms.
This article is based on a case study of Slovene speakers in north-western Italy and their attitudes towards language use and policy. Although the legal protection and support for the development of ...minority, regional, and non-dominant languages in Europe have made a remarkable progress, minority language communities still face many serious challenges. On the one hand, the level of their respective legal protection is often not efficient enough. On the other hand, legal protection provides only formal conditions for language maintenance, which has nothing to do with motivation, proficiency, or improvement. Today, most minority speakers in Europe are allowed and encouraged to use their home language in the public; but the question is whether they are motivated to do so. By studying the speakers of Slovene in Italy, my aim is to point at importance of colloquial local and non-local (
) varieties in maintaining minority language and bilingualism.
Building on the cross-linguistic variability in the meaning of vague quantifiers, this study explores the potential for negative transfer in Italian-Slovenian bilinguals concerning the use of ...quantificational determiners, specifically the translational equivalents of the English “many”, that is the Slovenian "precej" and "veliko". The aim is to identify relevant aspects of pragmatic knowledge for cross-linguistic influence. The study presents the results of a sentence-picture verification task in which Slovenian native speakers and Italian-Slovenian bilinguals evaluated sentences of the form "Quantifier X are Y" in relation to visual contexts. The results suggest that Italian learners of Slovenian, unlike Slovenian native speakers, fail to distinguish between "precej" and "veliko". This finding aligns with the negative transfer hypothesis. The study highlights the potential role of pragmatic knowledge in cross-linguistic transfer, particularly in the context of vague quantifiers.
Feminitives in Contemporary Slovene Music This article focuses on the use of feminine forms derived from masculine nouns in contemporary Slovene music. Feminine nouns denoting persons were extracted ...from selected song lyrics and analysed in terms of their word formation. Based on the analysis of feminine forms derived from masculine nouns it is suggested that in music women are often sexualised – their overall image implies sexuality and is clearly based on male fantasies; linguistic reality often reflects social reality. Feminatywy we współczesnej muzyce słoweńskiejNiniejszy artykuł skupia się na wykorzystaniu form żeńskich pochodzących od rzeczowników rodzaju męskiego we współczesnej muzyce słoweńskiej. Rzeczowniki żeńskie oznaczające osoby wyekstrahowano z wybranych tekstów piosenek i zanalizowano pod względem słowotwórczym. Analiza form żeńskich pochodzących od rzeczowników rodzaju męskiego wskazuje, że w muzyce kobiety są często seksualizowane – ich ogólny wizerunek implikuje seksualność i jest wyraźnie oparty na męskich fantazjach; rzeczywistość językowa często odzwierciedla rzeczywistość społeczną.
Abstract In the first part of the article, a critical commentary is given on the response of the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia to the statement of the ...Commission for Slovenian Language in Public at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The second part of the paper presents a draft contribution regarding the relationship between philosophy and mother tongue delivered at the conference "Linguistic Self-Consciousness-Existence and Development of Mother Tongue Depend upon Us Ourselves," which was held on June 14, 2019, at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Pogost ocitek raziskovalcem in raziskovalkam najrazlicnejsih raziskovalnih polj in znanstvenih podrocij, ki se zavzemajo za razvijanje znanstvene rabe slovenscine, je, da so »zaostalezi v 19. stoletju«. Znanstvene rabe slovenskega jezika zato ne moremo omejiti in omejevati zgolj na t. i. nacionalne vede (glede te oznake se ni bil sprejet strokovni konsenz, kaj naj bi se pod njo uvrscalo, in je nasploh neoperativna!), niti ne zadeva zgolj oblikovanja terminology, marvec celotno znanstveno dejavnost, ki je povezana z medijem slovenskega jezika in se na njegovi podlagi siri tudi na podrocja kulture, izobrazevanja in javnega obvescanja.
The rapid growth of social media, news sites, and blogs increases the opportunity to express and share an opinion on the Internet. Researchers from different fields take advantage of nearly limitless ...data. Thus, in the past decade, opinion mining or sentiment analysis has become an important research discipline. In this paper, we focus on the target-level sentiment analysis, wherein the task is to predict the sentiment concerning specific (multiple) entities that appear as coreference mentions throughout the document. We created a new annotated dataset of Slovene news articles, additionally annotated with named entities and coreferences that are the basis for the proposed task. Using entity-document representation, we compared the task with the traditional sentiment analysis, evaluating traditional machine learning and deep neural network approaches. According to existing approaches, the proposed task represents a challenging problem. The results show that we can achieve the best results using a customised BERT adapter (a minor improvement over a standard text-classification adapter). We outperformed existing aspect-based state-of-the-art approaches by 13%, reaching up to 77% accuracy and a 73% F1 score.
Both language systems, spoken Slovene and Slovene Sign Language, are composed of basic word formation or sign formation elements, which act as cornerstones for compounded words and signs. The ...formation of new words in Slovene language is realised by adding suffixes after the base or stem of a word, linking together two or more bases with infixes, or adding prefixes before the base or stem of a word. To express these word formation types, sign formation adopts visual elements: facial expression, hand- and finger shape, signing speed, signing orientation and signing space.
Pri obeh jezikovnih sistemih, v verbalnem jeziku oz. ubesedeni slovenščini in slovenskem znakovnem jeziku, se srečujemo tudi z osnovnimi besedotvornimi oz. znakotvornimi prvinami, ki so v ...nadaljevanju gradniki tvorjenih besed in kretenj. V slovenskem jeziku tvorimo besede po besedotvornih postopkih, kot so izpeljava, zlaganje, sestavljanje, ki so hkrati predstavljeni tudi kot besedotvorni tipi. Za izražanje teh besedotvornih tipov so pri znakotvorju na voljo vizualne prvine: mimika, oblika roke in prstov, hitrost gibanja, smer gibanja in kretalni prostor.
In the discussion, we are dealing with a sample of textbooks for Slovene language as school subject in elementary school from the point of view of critical discourse analysis and the visual grammar ...of Kress and van Leeuwen (2020), focusing primarily on the use of gender sensitive language. Despite the fact that in the Slovene (school subject) the emphasis is on the verbal, school texts are multimodal. It means that they consist of verbal and pictorial codes, and make meaning in the interaction of both. The signs of both semiotic codes connect with each other and the reader of the school texts can easily undersand the meaning and the message. The analysis focuses on the concept of genders and the relationship between them.