Volume 55, Issue 3

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 function; more precisely, they perform the semantic-aspectual features of two types of adverbs: manner adverbs, which specify the mode of action, and state-of-mind adverbs, which describe a state of mind experienced by the agent of the action.

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 was collected by spontaneous and semistructured elicitation tasks. Then, questionnaires that involve felicity and grammaticality judgment tasks were carried out to explore the semantic and syntactic properties of these modal signs in more detail. A total of 29 TİD signers participated in the data collection. The results of this investigation show that (i) NECESSARY is a necessity modal sign which has both epistemic and deontic interpretations, (ii) NECESSARY has a restricted syntactic position in a clause, (iii) non-manual markers differentiate between the epistemic and deontic interpretations of NECESSARY, which indicates that non-manual markers in TİD have both syntactic and prosodic functions.

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 the part of speech, while the lexical approach relies on the creation of the new lexical unit. This paper is an effort to expanded approach and perspective, because conversion in Albanian occurs also within the same parts of speech, or without changing it. While in English and German conversion is one of the most productive ways of word formation, in French, Spanish and Slavic languages it hardly exists. Italian applies conversion in a slightly different way. Albanian, on the other hand, is extremely advanced in this respect, since we have identified more than 500 cases of undoubted conversion as well as hundreds of cases of polysemy with a tendency of dissolution with high chances of differentiation of meaning, making those words new lexical units.

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, beer, or music, in order to point to their specificity with respect to metaphorical productivity. This comprehensive study of metaphorical expressions and the statistical analysis of the corpus clearly show which source frames are predominant in the conceptualization of wine taste, and which frame elements are most frequently activated. Apart from lexicalized metaphors, which constitute a significant part of Polish metaphorical expressions in wine discourse, we have observed many instances of creative elaboration of basic metaphorical images. Polish wine discourse also abounds with atypical metaphors that cannot be fully accounted for in terms of cross-domain mappings. These textual phenomena include layered metaphors, mixed metaphors, and narrative metaphors. The results of the analysis undermine the attempts to create a universal model of synesthesia in language, and call into question the existing models of source-to-target mappings for synesthetic metaphors.