Volume 67 (2016): Edizione 1 (June 2016)

The paper aims at giving a retrospective view of the presence of Czech in Slovakia through prism of the concepts language situation, communication situations and standardness.

Within the conditions of the feudal heterogeneity of the Hungarian Monarchy and without any distinct cultural and political centre of the Slovaks, in a situation of considerable dialectal variety, the Czech language fulfilled the role of a comprehensible and within the whole society (among educated Slovaks) valid and relatively unified written form of the “local language” (lingua vernacula). In the 14^th and the 15^th centuries this Czech got only relatively little Slovakized. During the 16^th and the 17^th centuries two mutually overlapping tendencies of the development of the written language of the Slovaks were being formed: 1. Slovakized Czech, or a Slovak-version Czech, and 2. Regional Variants of Cultural Slovak. Both tendencies found their place in the Catholic as well as in the Protestant environment. In the 2^nd half of the 18^th century, with continuation into the beginnings of the 19^th century, two directions that started to be formed already in the previous period, became crystalized: 1. Under the influence of the progressing re-Catholicization, the Slovakized Czech of the Protestants undertook the direction from diglossia towards “pure” Czech (at least in the sense of an intention), and the Protestant circles unequivocally accepted it as their standard language, sometimes denoting it as reč československá (Czechoslovak language) or českoslovenčina (the Czechoslovak); 2. In the Catholic environment, the cultural Western Slovak of the southern type and called bernolákovčina (Bernolák‘s Slovak) was codified, with the status of an autonomous standard language – a development away form diglossia towards Slovak. It was a period of two standard languages to which Štúr’s codification of Slovak put an end. His codification was based on the northern Central Slovak dialects, and after its modification in the so called opravená slovenčina (“corrected Slovak”) it was accepted by the representatives of both confessions.

For decades now, we are talking about that in science in general, and in linguistics in particular a structuralist paradigm is naturally complemented with an anthropocentric paradigm – with its inherent attention to human cognitive structures. Following the question “how?” we more and more often ask the question “why?”. This is a logical way of development of human thought in the process of cognition of reality: first, based on the differential and integral signs, organize, and then wonder why the system looks exactly the way it looks, with its tendentiousness and illogicalities. The aim of the article is to study the correlation between lexical phenomena of metonymy and metaphor and cognitive structure of perception. This study is in line with a new scientific approach proposed by evolutionary epistemology: cognitive and evolutionary. This approach implies increased attention to human perception and logic in their evolution. Based on the information of anthroponimic sciences related to linguistics about degrees of perception and logics quality, this approach allows to see the deep reasons of phenomena being studied.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the violations of the Rhythmic Law in the words with the suffix -ár related to the Ľubomír Kralčák’s inspiring paper On the Vocal Quantity Stability in the Slovak Suffix -ár (-áreň). I propose here a regressive rhythmic law according to which the Proto-Slovak roots of the AP (b) regularly shortened when followed by the suffix -ár. The proposed sound law operated in Proto-Slovak, before the definitive fixation of the stress on the initial syllable in Slovak and before the Slovak Rhythmic Law.

The study focuses on the research of concessivity in two centres; namely in the Petersburg typological school and in the Moscow school of semantics. It presents the methodology and the results of the analyses of main representatives of the schools. Both schools address concessivity from the perspective of the semantics of concessive operators. In Russian studies, the main attention is given to the conjunction хотя (‘although’) and its elaborations are based on two directions: a) from the perspective of the semantics of causes and effects; b) from the perspective of the semantics of condition. An interpretative basis of the causal relations is formed by the semantic components ‘because’ (‘потому что’), ‘therefore’ (‘поэтому’) and ‘it causes’ (‘влияет’). Interpretations of the aspect of condition corresponds to the semantic component ‘if…so’ (‘если…то’).

The article describes specific features of dictionaries of endangered languages from the perspective of their user. Dictionaries of the Saami language – the language of the indigenous minority of the North – are used to describe the anthropocentric, cognitive and pragmatic approach to lexicographical description of culture. The article shows that the focus on the dictionary user becomes especially critical for the endangered languages. It proves that the purpose of such dictionaries is not only to preserve the knowledge that the speakers of the endangered language and bearers of the culture still keep, but also to revitalize this knowledge. The article states that contemporary lexicography must consider several factors for making an endangered language dictionary: the present state of the language in the language community and the scope of background knowledge of a language speaker that represents everyday level of the world cognition by indigenous minority. The article shows that the most relevant type of dictionary for the endangered languages is both a learner’s dictionary and a linguoculturological dictionary (active type). We emphasize that on the one hand the Saami dictionaries describe a culture that is often unknown even to most Saami culture bearers and on the other hand, the dictionaries are also intended for Saami who have no command of the native language. The peculiarities of the relevant dictionary comprise the fact that alongside the translation in the basic part of the dictionary there is a culturological commentary that as fully as possible reflects the knowledge of language speakers.