Volume 70 (2019): Edizione 1 (June 2019)

The reconstruction of the Proto-Slavic vocabulary was and remains one of the priority tasks of comparative-historical Slavic studies. Different approaches to the solution of this problem are demonstrated by the monumental (although not completed) etymological dictionaries of the Proto-Slavic language, the hypothetical existence of which is recognized by most Slavists and Indo-Europeanists. Its reconstruction is performed almost exclusively on lexical material, and attempts to reconstruct the pre-Slavic phraseology are single. The method of such a reconstruction, based on a detailed account of the dialect material, was proposed in 1973 by N. I. Tolstoy. Studies in this direction make it possible to identify a zone of relative generality of Slavic phraseology, which, however, comes into contact with the Baltic and German-speaking zones. Inside such a Slavic massif, sub-zones of East Slavic-Polish phraseological interaction (often associated with the Baltic), West Slavic-Croatian-Slovenian (strongly influenced by German phraseology) and Bulgarian-Macedonian-Serbian (revealing traces of Turkic language influence) are revealed. In this general areal picture, there are many more concrete interactions, for example, a particular language specifics of the phraseology.

The study attempts to interpret meanings of the Slovak lexeme posledný [the last]. The study is based on the fact that the lexeme has two kinds of semantic valence; that of a sequence element and that of a sequence. In the language picture of the world, this lexeme anticipates ideas of a wide range of collocates and syncretism of several types of sequence. Analyses are based on the invariant meaning of the lexeme “the last” (‘such an X that is not followed by any other’) and on corpus data. The data are used in order to determine how types of collocates in the constructions with ‘last’ do reflect modifications of the invariant meaning, how they are being specified referentially, and how they develop semantic and pragmatic inferences, by means of which they facilitate realization of specific semantic occurrences. Since the lexeme has an anthropological basis, it is expected that various portions and efficiency of the subjective factor will be found. The aim of the study is to present the paradigm of the meanings of the lexeme posledný which are both context-bound and characterized by oscillation between description and qualification. Being a part of noun phrases, these meanings reflect linguistics of constructions as well as syntactic and communicative functions of the lexeme. The aim of the study is also either to confirm or disprove the equal position of the lexemes posledný and ostatný.

The paper discusses the intensifying functions of some lexical units derived from adverbs in a cross-linguistic Polish-Slovak perspective. The expression of intensification in Polish and Slovak has not been widely explored, which is why the present paper aims to point out a few aspects of this phenomenon in two closely related Slavic languages, which may contribute to help fill this gap. Intensification is without doubt a very interesting, pervasive and complex phenomenon in linguistics and is understood here as the process of quantitative change of a feature, activity or state. That change refers to the increase and decrease in intensity of a feature/activity/state according to an approved canon. The components of the category of intensification are therefore both, intensifying and deintensifying. Therefore, it is also postulated that a class of intensifiers/deintensifiers should be distinguished as means of intensification/deintensification. Intensifiers have also been a long fruitful topic of investigation in sociolinguistic research: on one hand intensification systems are unstable and tend to change rapidly in any speech community and on the other, the use of intensifiers tends to vary across demographic categories, especially age and gender. Intensification can also be researched due to ‘delexicalization’, which is defined as the reduction of the independent lexical contents of a word, or group of words, so that it comes to fulfil a particular function – the original meaning of the word is gradually lost as it evolves into a marker of intensification. The paper aims also to show that the more delexicalized an intensifier becomes, the more it will lose its lexical restrictions and increase in frequency. Through frequency of use and over time, intensifiers tend to lose their intensifying force and the renewal process occurs. This process promotes other adverbs, be they newly created adverbs or already existing ones, to the rank of intensifiers – it seems that the class of intensifiers may be an open class. The undertaken analysis has shown that there are a number of aspects which can be considered while describing intensifiers.

In the production of concise texts, several instruments are used, of which two can be considered as basic: intratextual referencing (anaphora/cataphora) and the simple or complex ellipsis (ellipsis/syllepsis). However, the use of these instruments affects the unambiguity and intelligibility of the text. Certain rules for and limits to the simplification and shortening of the primary text are needed to secure the possibility of an unambiguous reconstruction of the text by the language user. However, we show that the elimination of homonymy from these texts seems to require considerable skill in the given area. Some such texts may be unintelligible even to informed experts. We delineate some basic cases of application of instruments for the streamlining of texts, with paradigmatic examples from law, including its Anglophone variants. Partly due to the nature of modern English as used in law, Anglo-American linguistics was compelled to formulate, in cooperation with legal theorists, explicit rules for the production and reconstruction of concise texts. By contrast, neither Slovak, nor Czech linguistics offers a self-contained set of such explicit rules. Using examples from law, we therefore propose explicit formulations of several rules which are used implicitly. They are the rule of the last antecedent, the rule of serial antecedents, the rule of the nearest reasonable referent, the rule of the series qualifier, the rule of unchanged topic, the rule of focus development, and the rule of repetition dominance. We argue that in the reconstruction of certain concise legal texts, the syntactic and semantic rules provided by linguistics or logic do not suffice. Therefore, it is necessary to complement them with specific methods of interpretation of legal texts.

The subject of vagueness is discussed in analytical philosophy but from a linguistic point of view it is rather overlooked. We approached the issue of the concept definition and tried to find the cross point of two fields which is found in approach to vagueness using or violating of cooperative principle. The aim of the paper is to specify the criteria for the evaluation of vagueness, determine the motivation to use vagueness, defining its potential sources and describing the language means that typically make vagueness in persuasive texts specifically in politically oriented speeches. Based on the results of qualitative analysis, the occurrences of vagueness were found at lexical units’ level and semantic-pragmatic units. We have therefore focused on the linguistic manifestations of vagueness that is the appearance of evaluative adjectives, epistemic particles, metaphors, abstract word etc. Quantitative analysis of these linguistic categories has proven to be inadequate because not all of these occurrences can be labelled as vague. For this reason, we have been applied four types of vagueness based on violation of conversational maxima, which offers and partly clarifies conceptual difficulties and provide instructions for detecting vagueness in the text.

The methods of geolinguistics offer the possibility to study the geographical spread of dialect phenomena. The paper focuses on the presentation of the new Russian linguogeographic work Lexičeskij atlas russkich narodnych govorov [Lexical Atlas of the Russian National Dialects], namely the first volume – Planthood. Some aspects of the atlas conception are compared with other atlas works that are known and used or even prepared in the Slovak linguistic context: Atlas slovenského jazyka [Atlas of the Slovak Language], Český jazykový atlas [Czech Linguistic Atlas] and partially Slovanský jazykový atlas [Slavic Linguistic Atlas]. These works represent different periods in the development of linguistic geography methodology, so they represent different linguogeographic concepts.