Volume 4, Issue 1

Figures and tables in DIN 2330 are analysed in respect to text extern and text intern factors and their correlations. There are several types of correlation between terminological information of text and terminological information of graphics: The function of graphics may be characterized as complementary, particular complementary, explicit exemplifying, and implicit exemplifying.

This study focuses on texts and words in translations as intermediaries to history, literature and culture. In the translation process, the texts should be made readable and understandable for their receivers, but there is also a special need for translations into secret cryptographic messages. This is discussed and exemplified by means of a sample of texts, dating from different centuries. The typology of translating, as presented by ROMAN JACOBSON ([1959] 1966) is also discussed. Here, the translation is put in a semiotic framework.

The aim of this paper is to show that the lengths of syllables in German abide by law. The findings lend support to the theory of length distributions of any linguistic entity ( WIMMER et alii 1994, WIMMER & ALTMANN 1996) once more.

Parallels of Zipf’s law of brevity, the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, have been found in bottlenose dolphins and Formosan macaques. Although these findings suggest that behavioral repertoires are shaped by a general principle of compression, common marmosets and golden-backed uakaris do not exhibit the law. However, we argue that the law may be impossible or difficult to detect statistically in a given species if the repertoire is too small, a problem that could be affecting golden backed uakaris, and show that the law is present in a subset of the repertoire of common marmosets. We suggest that the visibility of the law will depend on the subset of the repertoire under consideration or the repertoire size.

In the present study the interrelation of grapheme inventory size and the repeat rate, based on the grapheme frequencies from parallel texts in Slavic languages, is discussed in detail. The obtained law like interrelation between the inventory size and the repeat rate requires an in-depth linguistic discussion of the determination of the inventory size in the analysed Slavic languages, particularly in Slovene and Macedonian.

Phonetic composition of words denoting 24 polar concepts (big, little, strong, weak, hot, cold, light, dark, fast, slow, etc.) in 53 languages has been statistically investigated. Statistical universal connections between certain phonetic and semantic units, the correlation between scales, as well as the correlation between unrelated languages have been found. Factors causing phonetic symbolism, phonetic symbolism oppositions, the relation between objective and subjective phonetic symbolism, the coexistence of phonetic symbolism and arbitrariness of the linguistic sign are discussed.

The aim of the article is to introduce the measurement of “activity” and “descriptivity” of a text based on the proportions of adjectives and verbs. Functions based on interaction of forces, tests for significance of a property and for comparison of two texts are introduced. The methods are applied to the poetry of the Slovak poetess Eva Bachletová.

This study focuses on defining the relationship between the wording of the question, it coincides to some extent with the wording of the stimulus text, and the successful outcome of the reading literacy test of the international scale. Therefore, 8 of the 17 available English sample texts of the PISA framework and a total of 35 tasks are analyzed. Comparing the word lists of the stimulus texts and tasks their “closeness” is arrived at. The correlation between the percentage of words in the task coinciding with the words of the stimulus text and the percentage of successful answers is found out. It is shown that there is a statistically relevant correlation for at least two of the reading processes tested.

Based on the Chinese-English Sentence-Aligned Bilingual Corpus constructed by Institute of Automation and Institute of Computing Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences, this paper investigates the Chinese and English inter-textual type/token relationship and tests the fitness of BRUNET ’s model to the vocabulary growth curves of Chinese and English texts, and it also explores the growth patterns of hapax legomena in the two languages. Results of the study show that Chinese and English vocabulary growth displays a similar sharp-slow increasing tendency, but initially with the Chinese types rising more sharply than those of English; and BRUNET ’s model is powerful enough to match both Chinese and English inter-textual type/token relationship. This study also finds that there are far fewer hapax legomena in Chinese than in English, and with the increase of tokens, the hapax legomena in the two languages both display a growth pattern similar to that of their type/token relationship. But from the cross point (about 2,500,000 cumulative word tokens) downwards, the cumulative number of Chinese hapax legomena has become much smaller than that of English.