The Alphabet of Discord Selvelli, Giustina; Keil, Soeren; Dzankic, Jelena
2021, 20211020, 2021-10-20, Letnik:
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eBook
What is the relationship between writing systems and nationalism? How can different alphabets coexist in the same country? What is the destiny of the Cyrillic alphabet in Europe?
Giustina Selvelli’s ...original work provides detailed answers to these far-reaching and potentially divisive questions and many more by examining several intriguing debates on topics of alphabets and national identity in a number of countries from the Balkan area over the course of the last 100 years. Following an encompassing perspective on alphabetic diversity, Selvelli, an expert on Southeast European Studies, reconstructs the ideological context of national discourses connected to the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, also taking a look at the Arabic and Glagolitic scripts, and interweaving issues on the symbolism of the alphabet with the complex recent history of the region, marked by the parallel influences of the East and the West. She also sheds light on the impact of a range of alphabet policies on ethnolinguistic minorities, proposing a new definition of “alphabetic rights” with special regard to the multiethnic legacy of the former Ottoman and Habsburg empires.
This comprehensive book makes us discover the privileged role that writing systems played in the region’s delicate post-imperial and post-socialist transitions, leaving us captivated by peculiar stories such as that of the utopian “Yugoslav alphabet”.
The paper presents a research tool for studying semantic change and polysemy patterns in Russian adjectives and adverbs. It is based on a corpus analysis of high-freqency polysemous units. For each ...of them we describe the meanings it can have, assign to each meaning a corresponding taxonomic class, identify types of semantic shifts between individual meanings (metaphor, metonymy; besides, a full-scale approach reveals non-canonical cases of semantic shifts), describe context conditions of these shifts (semantic and grammatical restrictions on co-occurring words). The results gained from this analysis are implemented in a database, which allows for various generalizations on the regularities of change in adjective and adverb meaning. Several examples are given to illustrate what kinds of queries can be performed on the database. Keywords: polysemy; semantic shift; metaphor; metonymy; semantics of adjectives; Russian language; lexical database.
A textbook with a terminological dictionary, intended primarily for students of Ukrainian studies, but also for others interested in the Ukrainian language.
Taking data from contemporary press, this paper examines the meaning of the Slovenian connective pa ('and', 'but'), especially in relation to the connectives ker ('because') and sicer ('otherwise') ...with which it forms the compound connectives ker pa ('but since') and sicer pa ('anyway'). As a starting point, Zagar assesses a dictionary definition of pa, ker and sicer. Arguing that a more traditional, classificatory account is inadequate, Zagar focuses on two central issues: the first is an explanation of the meaning of pa in compound connectives, and the second is an account of the roles of ker and sicer when used independently and in concert with pa. To clarify these two issues, Zagar relies on the notions of topoi and polyphony as employed in the framework of argumentation theory.
The main goal of this study was to introduce the evaluation procedure in Verbal fluency task - clustering and switching - to the Czech public, to adapt this procedure to the Czech language and to ...judge its relevance. The review focuses on the way of arranging the words into the clusters (socalled clustering) and switching between them. This procedure is extended in foreign research but it has not yet been systematically adapted in the Czech context. In the article the theoretical background of clustering and switching in phonological verbal fluency (PVF) and also in semantic verbal fluency (SVf) is introduced and few classifications of clustering are described - e.g. Troyer et al. (1997), Abwender et al. (2001), Libon et al. (2009) and Tallberg et al. (2011). In Study 1, the most cited classification by Troyer et al. (1997) is adapted to the Czech language and the differences between the original version and Czech adaptation are discussed. In Study 2, ten protocols were rated by two raters and the inter-rater, reliability was calculated. The value of Cohen s kappa showed moderate to excellent agreement. This approach is very promising but it requires further research.
