DIFFERENT GERMAN EXPRESSION MODELS OF THE OBJECT IN SPEECH

The article presents a comprehensive theoretical overview of modality as a multifaceted linguistic phenomenon. Modality is considered as a means of expressing the speaker's attitude towards the content of the utterance, encompassing evaluations of reality, veracity, possibility, necessity, and desirability. The study synthesizes key interpretations of modality from both Russian and Western linguistic traditions, laying the groundwork for comparative analysis. The main focus is on the classification of modal meanings, including deontic, epistemic, dynamic, bulletin, and affective modalities. The object of research is the linguistic category of modality in language. The subject of the study includes specific classifications, means of expression, and interlanguage realizations of modality, with a particular emphasis on a comparative analysis of Russian, English, and German languages. Objectives: to systematize the theoretical foundations of modality based on the works of leading Russian and foreign linguists; to define and illustrate the main types of modal meanings; to identify and compare grammatical and lexical means of expressing modality in Russian, English, and German languages. The study employs a comparative-descriptive method, theoretical analysis and synthesis of existing linguistic literature, comparative analysis of linguistic data from Russian, English, and German languages, contextual and semantic analysis of utterance examples to illustrate modal meanings, and componential analysis to distinguish modality from other grammatical categories. The study concludes that modality is a crucial component of semantics and pragmatics, necessary for culturally sensitive communication. By comparing examples from English, German, and Russian languages, the article highlights the grammatical, lexical, and contextual strategies used in these languages and differentiates modality from related grammatical categories such as tense and aspect. The novelty of this research lies in its synthetic and comparative approach, which integrates various classification systems of domestic linguistics (for example, V. V. Vinogradov's subjective-objective modality, A. V. Bondarko's six meanings) with established typologies of Western linguistics (for example, categories proposed by linguists such as D. Crystal and R. T. Lakoff). By applying this unified structure to the analysis of three linguistically distinct languages (Russian, English, and German), the article offers a unified perspective on universal and linguistically specific features of modality.

Introduction. In contemporary scientific discourse, gender issues are receiving increasing attention, driven by society's desire for equality and inclusion. One of the leading directions of such research is the study of lexical means of expressing gender, shaping the linguistic picture of the world, and influencing the perception of gender roles in society. In German, the use of feminine forms, gender-neutral forms, and new linguistic constructions, such as Gendergap or Gendersternchen, has been actively discussed over the past few decades. These phenomena reflect not only linguistic evolution but also deeper transformations in social consciousness, where education plays a key role in shaping tolerant and inclusive communication. Purpose. The study focuses on analysing the theoretical foundations and educational and methodological context of gender vocabulary in the German language. Methods. In the course of the study, the authors applied theoretical and cognitive methods such as analysis, synthesis, comparison, systematisation, and generalisation of studies by Ukrainian and foreign scholars exploring gender vocabulary of the German language. Results. The article examines the theoretical foundations and contemporary approaches to the functioning of gender vocabulary in the modern German language context. It presents a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the concept of ‘gender’ and the principles of forming gender vocabulary as a special linguistic phenomenon. The interdisciplinary nature of gender studies has been established, covering philosophical, sociological, psychological, educational, cultural, and linguistic approaches. Therefore, language is not only a way of communication but also an active factor influencing social relations. The use or avoidance of certain linguistic means can intensify or eliminate gender stereotypes, promoting or hindering gender equality. At the same time, it has been established that gender linguistics is undergoing a period of active development. A comprehensive review of scientific sources confirms the diversity and interdisciplinary nature of approaches to the study of gender issues in linguistics, determining the relevance of theoretical and applied studies in this area. The article proves that the analysis of the gender vocabulary in the German language covers a wide range of approaches, from feminist criticism to poststructuralist and corpus methods. Each of them provides unique tools for understanding how language reflects and forms gender relations in society. Originality. The originality of the article lies in a comprehensive analysis of the gender vocabulary of the German language, combining linguistic theory with an educational and methodological perspective. The study highlights the role of gender-sensitive vocabulary in promoting inclusive communication and outlines ways to integrate it into the process of teaching German as a foreign language. Conclusion. Thus, based on an analysis of current trends of using gender and gender-neutral vocabulary in the German language, a profound transformation of linguistic norms is evident, influenced by social requests for inclusivity and equality. The introduction of dual forms, alternative names for professions and social roles, as well as symbolic markers (e.g. asterisk, colon, Binnen-I) demonstrates a willingness to create a language that is sensitive to gender identities. The article concludes that contemporary linguistic changes in the German language reflect efforts to overcome linguistic asymmetry and promote the formation of a more equitable linguistic environment.

Motion events and the lexicon: a case study of Hindi

Reviewed by: Dieu à nostre commerce et société. Montaigne et la théologie ed. by Philippe Desan David M. Posner Dieu à nostre commerce et société. Montaigne et la théologie. Edited by Philippe Desan. [Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 444.] (Geneva: Librairie Droz. 2008. Pp. 312. $86.00. ISBN 978-2-600-01245-4.) Although avowedly not a professional theologian, Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) remained closely engaged with theological questions throughout his writing career. He could hardly have avoided such engagement, since he was also— his occasional protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—an active participant in public life in the midst of the French Wars of Religion. Montaigne’s contemporaries, beginning with the papal censors, certainly took an interest in what he had to say about theological issues, and the last century or so has seen no slackening of interest; there has been a steady stream of quality work on Montaigne and religion, ranging from the venerable studies of Maturin Dreano (Paris, 1936) and Henri Busson (Paris, 1962) to Malcolm Smith’s more recent work (Geneva, 1981, 1991) and the special issue of the Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne (1993) titled “La question de Dieu.” The present volume, the proceedings of a conference held in Paris in 2007, is a worthy contribution to this conversation. It re-examines Montaigne’s relationship to theology and religious practice in the context of his life and works, the latter including not only the Essais but also the Journal de voyage and his translation of the Theologia Naturalis of Raymond Sebond. It comprises nineteen essays by a range of distinguished montaignistes, including literary scholars, philosophers, and intellectual historians, and is divided into three sections: “Théologie et théologiens,” “Sebond et la Théologie naturelle,” and “Pratiques religieuses et pratique des textes.” The somewhat arbitrary divisions notwithstanding, the essays are, for the most part, in fruitful dialogue with one another. Following the editor’s general introduction, the first group of essays deals with the various ways in which Montaigne explores theological questions while simultaneously denying the adequacy of theological discourse as such to its subject. André Tournon, Jan Miernowski, Frédéric Brahami, and Bernard Sève variously address the latter issue, whereas Vincent Carraud and Emmanuel Faye discuss the essay “Des prières,” in which Montaigne seems to stake out a rigorist position on prayer and penitence at odds with the Tridentine position defended by the papal censors. Along with Sève and Tournon, Alain Legros shows how Montaigne gradually separates theological from human(ist) discourse so as to liberate his own writing. The second section focuses on Montaigne’s translation of Sebond and its complex relationship to the Apologie de Raymond Sebond. The Apologie in fact refutes the rationalist position of the Theologia Naturalis, and the essays in this section show how Montaigne negotiates the tensions among Sebond, the doctrines of the post-Tridentine Church, and his own potentially heterodox positions. Jean Balsamo, Philip Hendrick, and Thierry Gontier discuss Montaigne’s prudence in translating and then distancing himself from Sebond, whereas Olivier Millet looks at linguistic issues in the translation, showing how Montaigne moves beyond both [End Page 352] Scholastic Latin and the literary language of the Vulgate toward a new humanist literary ideal. Philippe Desan explores Montaigne’s interactions with the Congregatio pro indice librorum prohibitorum and usefully reproduces the Congregation’s censures of the Essais in an appendix. The essays in the third section are more diverse, while still having many points of contact with those of the first two sections. John O’Brien returns to the question of prayer, whereas Jesús Navarro-Reyes approaches the issue of confession via the late work of Michel Foucault. Amy Graves explores the social and geographical dimensions of religion in Montaigne’s Journal de voyage. Jean Céard’s characteristically lively contribution looks at Montaigne reading St. Augustine via Vivès and shows us Montaigne reveling in the digression that characterizes all three texts. Jean-Robert Armogathe, in a brief but pithy essay, situates Montaigne’s praise of Julian the Apostate in the larger context of a Renaissance rehabilitation of Julian, suggesting that he serves as...

Despite the skepticism of a number of linguists towards the valency theory it should take an important place in foreign language teaching. Valency theory is closely related to the phenomenon of verb rection. The valency of a verb refers to its ability to control the number and type of the arguments that can appear in its environment. Valency is a syntactic (and a semantic) notion. The rection of a verb refers to its ability to determine the morphological form of the words that appear in its environment. Since the verb is in control of the declension of the neighbouring words (nouns, adjectives, pronouns, etc.), that is to say, it requires a word to be modified to express different grammatical categories such as number, case, definiteness, etc., rection could be considered a morphological notion. Due to the interface between this two phenomena, in other words, due to the interaction between syntactic and morphological features of the words a morphosyntactic approach is applicable in foreign language teaching, and in particular in teaching Bulgarian as a foreign language. Valency and rection are among the major sources of grammatical errors in foreign language learning. Consequently, a good approach for learners of Bulgarian is to learn new verbs simultaneously with their valency and rection.

Like modern Greenbergian typology, traditional dialectology has assumed a functional perspective in its morphosyntactic research. In this view, syntactic doubling phenomena in dialects have been mostly understood as means of extending either clarity and/or emphasis. The functional perspective has its merits and is justified: in the field of dialect syntax, there are many older studies which have revealed plenty of very interesting data. In colloquial and dialectal German, there exists a possessive construction which shows a kind of double marking. DP-internal prenominal possessor construction (DPIPPC) seem to occur in all Germanic languages, as well as in many non-Germanic and non-European languages. DPIPPCs exhibit a kind of double marking which is restricted to the surface, whereas there is no doubling in narrow syntax proper. The traditional analysis of DPIPPCs as possessor doubling is based on the assumption that possessive pronouns are all of the same syntactic category 'pronoun'. Keywords: dialectal German; DP-internal prenominal possessor construction (DPIPPC); morphosyntactic research; non-European languages; syntactic doubling phenomena

The aim of this study is to compare the Aktionsarten expressed by morphological means in Hungarian and Italian. Similar to the rich Hungarian Aktionsart system is found in Slavic languages. It is no coincidence that the concept of Aktionsart appears for the first time in the context of a work dealing with the Polish language (Agrell, 1908) in the sense of the course of the action, process or event denoted by the verb. Before Agrell, aspect was used as an umbrella term including Aktionsart, which is now considered a separate category. Aspect and Aktionsart are closely related linguistic phenomena, they are both associated with the internal temporal constituency of situations. Actionsart is also called lexical aspect in the literature, as it refers to features already present in the meaning of the verb (e.g. continuity, durability, telicity) which are similar to those expressed by the grammatical aspect, but which, unlike the grammatical aspect, are not chosen by the speaker to express a specific, subjective point of view regarding an event included in a given utterance; they are the inherent, objective attributes of the verb. Actionsart is therefore a lexical category, while aspect is a grammatical category. We will see that in contrast to the system of Hungarian counting thirteen Aktionsarten expressed by preverbs and the suffix -gat/-get, in Italian we cannot speak of productive Aktionsart. It happens that certain Aktionsarten can be displayed, but this language category can be expressed mainly phrasally, because the appropriate morphological tools are not available, since inflecting languages are always poorer than agglutinating ones. In Italian, the morphologically marked Aktionsarten are also closely linked to the aspect, both in terms of their semantics and their formal expression.

The aim of this research will be to conduct a comparative study of the category of aspectuality; that implies defining and analysing the whole complex of general and distinctive properties, characteristic of the languages under consideration, that is, Russian and German, revised in the comparative aspect. The research methods include descriptive method, distributive and introspective analyses. The authors indicate that today contrastive studies are especially relevant to identify common and distinctive features in systems of different languages. It is noted that actional and aspectual semantics, as well as the means of its expression, have become objects of study by linguists at the beginning of the 20th century. Attention is drawn to the actual domestic and foreign significant research in the field of aspectology of genetically unrelated languages, as well as languages that are in a distant genetic relationship. The form and tense of a verb are characteristics of temporality, since, for example, in the Slavic languages, the form organizes and determines temporal relationships. In contrast to the Slavic languages, in the Romance and Germanic languages, species relations are structured on the basis of temporal forms. The comparative approach to the study of time and species in languages belonging to different groups makes it possible to better understand the specifics of species-temporal relations. It is pointed out that the grammatical category of the species as a binary category is represented only in some languages. The need to distinguish between species as a grammatical category inherent in the Slavic languages and as a broad functional and semantic category that exists in all languages is emphasized, since it represents the entire complex of linguistic means that express the nature of the course of action. In the process of analyzing some texts, it was concluded that the absence of a grammatical category of the species in the German language does not indicate the absence of a corresponding concept. During the research, the authors came to the conclusion, that when studying the verb tense, it is necessary to take into account several other factors, apart from the verb forms: the context, the lexical, lexical-grammatical, grammatical and syntactic components, considered within the framework of their interaction in speech, since the functional-semantic field includes interacting means, united by the common function of expressing the semantic attribute of aspectuality, namely, grammar, lexical-grammatical and lexical means.

Up until now, several studies have shown that a speech interface system giving verbal suggestions with beeping sounds that decrease in pitch conveyed a low system confidence level to users intuitively, and these beeping sounds were named "artificial subtle expressions" (ASEs). However, all participants in these studies were only Japanese, so if the participants' mother tongue has different sensitivity to variations in pitch compared with Japanese, the interpretations of the ASEs might be different. We then investigated whether the ASEs are interpreted in the same way as with Japanese regardless of the users' mother tongues; specifically we focused on three language categories in traditional phonological typology. We conducted a web-based experiment to investigate whether the ways speakers of German, Portuguese (stress accent language), Mandarin Chinese (tone language) and Japanese (pitch accent language) interpret the ASEs are different or not. The results of this experiment showed that the ways of interpreting did not differ, so this suggests that these ways are language-independent.

Please pass me the skin coloured crayon! Semantics, socialisation, and folk models of race in contemporary Europe

Word classes (‘parts-of-speech’, ‘syntactic categories’, ‘lexical categories’) are the fundamental building blocks of linguistic expressions in all natural human languages. They have been investigated since antiquity and continue to play a central role in modern linguistics. Today an increasingly important role is assigned to the information that is specified in the lexical entry of a word in the lexicon (including, of course, information about its category membership), both in formal and in functional approaches to grammar. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness that the traditional set of word classes is biased towards the better studied European languages and needs to be revised to accommodate unfamiliar word classes in nonEuropean languages.

The research is devoted to a multi-level study of the essence and role of text creation comprehension in teaching a foreign language. Capturing motivational and logical mental structures along with recognising communicative and cognitive aspects of a person's identity in a text are key linguopsychological elements of studying text activities. The scientific value of the research is in specifying the operational approach to describing a concrete level of a person's consciousness, on which cognitive structures acquire language realisation in the process on communication. Existence of a person's concsiousness is considered on three levels of abstracrion within the conscious: sensory field, associative field, motivational field. The contents of a person's language consciousness can be described through its thesaurus and presented as a filter that sifts through incoming meaningful information expressed in the sign form. The process of first language acquisition by a child is closely related to the apprearance of the correlation between dynamic and static systems of sound production (syllable production and articulation). Tranfer to foreign language acquisition will then be connected only with changing the characted of the correlation in each specific case. Foreign language teaching is connected with the learners' using the language skills they already possess. Peculiarity of language consciousness is revealed both when comparing lexical and grammatical categories in several languages, in which the forms of the same category have different meanings, and when comparing a limited set of such linguistic meanings with an unlimited number of linguistic features and relations between the objects.

Reviewed by: The diachrony of grammar by T. Givón Bernd Heine The diachrony of grammar. By T. Givón. (2 vols.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Pp. xi, 818. ISBN 9789027212207. $225 (Hb). The text cover describes this publication as containing case studies spanning a lifetime of research into the diachrony of grammar. This characterization strikes me as being largely, though not entirely, appropriate: the main focus of the publication, as I see it, is less on the diachrony of grammar and more on how to use diachronic linguistics in order to understand language structure. The publication consists of two volumes with thirty-two chapters, and the chapters are grouped into six parts. Part I (‘Perspective’) relates mainly to Givón’s early contributions dating back to the 1970s. In Part II (‘Out of Africa’), an analysis of data mostly taken from Bantu and other languages of the Niger-Congo family, as well as from Biblical Hebrew, is provided. Part III (‘Voices’) presents diachronic accounts of passive constructions in a range of different languages, proposing a general typology of passives in the final Ch. 17. Part IV (‘High up in the mountain’) introduces the second volume with a reconstruction of various grammatical patterns in the Uto-Aztecan language Ute—a language and a society that has accompanied the author throughout his personal and academic career. A topic that became a [End Page 727] major theme in the later phase of his work, namely linguistic complexity, is highlighted in Part V (‘Complexity’), which contains case studies on phrasal and clausal syntax. In the final Part VI (‘Prospective’), various threads of analysis surfacing in the preceding parts are combined in search of a general explanatory account—an account that G characterizes as ‘a frontal assault on F. de Saussure’s corrosive legacy in linguistics’ (x). This part of the publication also includes a chapter on internal reconstruction where G sketches a methodology based on general principles of grammaticalization. The concluding part of the publication contains a thirty-two-page bibliography (unfortunately, no information on the page range of articles is provided) and two indices, namely a language and a topic index, the latter also including an author index. Throughout the two volumes, the reader is exposed to data from languages from many parts of the world. Most of the languages discussed are taken from North America, in particular Ute and Tolowa Athapaskan; Central America, including a number of Chibchan languages of Panama and Costa Rica (Ch. 24); and Africa, with Bantu languages such as Swahili, Bemba, and Lunda from the southern half of Africa and a range of West African Niger-Congo languages such as Ijo, Yoruba, and Efik (especially in Ch. 7). In addition, G is also concerned with creole and pidgin languages such as Krio of Sierra Leone and Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea. The vast majority of languages covered are predominantly or exclusively spoken languages, but G’s analysis also includes languages with a long tradition of writing, most of all English, Spanish, and Biblical Hebrew. The topics covered in the publication include most parts of language structure, showing in detail how features characterizing grammatical categories in modern languages can be traced back to earlier morphosyntactic constructions that may have served quite different functions from the ones they express in the modern languages. A topic that surfaces in many chapters is that of basic word order, especially shifts from one word-order type to another. This interest in the arrangement of clausal participants leads G to hypothesize that the earliest forms of languages must have been verb-final (SOV) (Ch. 4). This hypothesis, for which he also finds support in many languages that are not (or are no longer) verb-final, has been influential beyond linguistics in discussions on the genesis of human language or languages. G not only has shaped much of functional linguistics as we know it today, but can also be considered to be the founder of modern grammaticalization studies. His ‘archaeologist’s field trip’ (Givón 1971), reprinted in Ch. 1, marked the beginning of work on the rise and development of grammatical (or functional) categories as a distinct field of research, and...

<b>Grammatical categories in Australian languages</b> . Edited by R. M. W. Dixon. (Linguistic series, 22.) Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1976. Pp. 776. Cloth $30.00, paper $17.50.

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