Volume 14, Issue 1

On the basis of a general model of professional communication which differs from concepts of professional language, a new model is developed which consistently integrates their multilingualism. This takes into account various individual languages such as German, English or Chinese as well as professionally relevant varieties such as every day and educational language including various languages for specific purposes in individual professions or professional contexts as well as the corresponding competences of the people working in these professions or contexts. Such a model not only provides an exhaustive and detailed coverage of plurilingual professional communication for itself, it also allows for numerous applications in the fields of language planning, language policy and language didactics.

We use approaches from the theory of complex networks to analyze the Prologue to Moses , a poem by the Ukrainian writer and scholar Ivan Franko. The Ukrainian text (in the original orthography from 1905 and the modern one) and several translations into Polish, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Slovak, and Spanish are studied. Networks are built in a manner that links are drawn between words (considered network vertices) within a stanza. Seven network parameters are calculated: all-degree centralization, assortativity, average path length, betweenness, clustering coefficient, density, and transitivity. Their dynamics is analyzed as the vertices with the highest numbers of links are removed from the networks one by one. The data obtained for the human-made translations are compared to those based on machine translations generated by the Google Translate service. Peculiarities of certain translations are underlined. Tentative correlation between the values of parameters and levels of language analyticity/syntheticity are established. Prospects toward automatic lemmatization and related problems to be solved are briefly outlined.

In German (and Dutch), main clauses and dependent clauses differ clearly with respect to form. Main clauses are always V2 and autonomous (with speech act status) while dependent ones are verb-final/VL (V-last) and nonautonomous (without speech act status). This paper is about autonomous clauses with the form of dependent clauses (i.e. VL-form, also captured in the literature under the term insubordinate subordination , coined by Evans, Nicholas. 2007. Insubordination and its uses. In Irina Nikolaeva (ed.), Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations , 366–431. Oxford: Oxford University Press). In the recent literature, it has been argued that in order to explain the occurrence of autonomous dependent clauses in the historical development of German, the introducing main clause fell elliptically leaving behind a dependent form with autonomous status. The present paper argues that this account is false. Dependent forms can exist independently. Since speech act autonomy of dependent forms exists with certain (albeit not all) complementizers, a special account is provided. It is argued that this development typical of modern German, matches with the tendency toward an illocutionary semantics in its own right. Parallels for the latter path of grammaticalization are drawn from several languages other than German. The importance of the concerns for modern generative grammar is a twofold one: first, it provides insights into how independent (autonomous), but formally dependent sentences divide into several kinds of modality that are expressed in the left sentential periphery; and, second, it shows in which ways speaker-perspective is grammaticalized.

Grammatical cases of nouns are expressed by inflectional endings in Slovak. Therefore, nouns have several word forms, with the nominative considered the basic form. In addition to the endings, in some word forms there are morphophonological changes also in stems. The differences between the basic form and inflected forms are evaluated using the Levenshtein distance. We show that word forms more similar to the basic form occur more often. The category of animacy plays a very important role in the frequency behaviour of masculine nouns. The overall idea of the present paper is to give some insights into phenomena of noun inflection and to test various factors influencing and regulating the overall complexity of expressing certain required morphological information. It seems that word frequency, but also word length plays an important role. Moreover, it is shown that also gender and animacy has to be considered to understand noun declension in Slovak properly.

The article deals with the study of structural and semantic features of the German professional language of architecture and construction. The study is based on the main principles of structural-semantic linguistic paradigm and represents the modeling of terminology in the form of a thesaurus with its multilevel classification structure. Achieving the main goal involves the selection of various structural types of terms and phrases, the analysis of key terms and their semantic fields and the study of possible logical-semantic relations in the proposed German professional language. The study was conducted in four stages. The first stage included an explanation of the main approaches to the study of both terminological systems of professional languages and individual terms. The second stage consisted in the analysis of logical-conceptual relations between terms, such as hypero-hyponymy, subcontracting as well as relations concerning the localization of the object, its purpose, etc. At this stage, terminology is considered as a thesaurus, taking into account the specifics of the organization of the studied branch of knowledge and the lexical-semantic field of the key terms of architecture and construction. The third stage was based on the structural and morphological analysis of the terms and included a description of structural models of terms. The last stage concerned the formulation of the conclusions of our study.

Zusammenfassung Fachliche Kommunikation erfüllt zahlreiche Funktionen. Um diese systematisch zu erfassen, sind sie an einem allgemeinen Modell fachlicher Kommunikation festzumachen, indem jedem seiner Elemente eine eigene kommunikative Funktion zugewiesen wird. Nach dieser Methode, die (ohne besondere Berücksichtigung fachlicher Kommunikation) bei Karl Bühler zum Ansatz von drei und bei Roman Jakobson zum Ansatz von sechs kommunikativen Funktionen führt, können schließlich neun bzw. elf fachkommunikative Funktionen unterschieden werden, die letztlich auch auf den Bereich der allgemeinen Kommunikation zu übertragen sind: Eine symptomatische, eine appellative, eine referentielle, eine epistemische, eine poetische, eine phatische, eine semiotische, eine diskursive und eine situative bzw. soziale oder kulturelle Funktion. Diese Funktionen werden in diesem Beitrag vorgestellt und erläutert sowie am Beispiel einer Fortbildung im IT-Bereich veranschaulicht.