Tom 67 (2016): Zeszyt 3 (December 2016)

The paper is dedicated to Viktor Krupa, the famous linguist and orientalist as well as long-time friend and colleague of the author of the paper that celebrates his life anniversary – the eightieth birthday. The author deals not only with numerous book publications and studies of Viktor Krupa focused first of all on important linguistic theoretical, typological and orientalist works, but he also analyses his other books. Viktor Krupa is an author of numerous ethnological and folkloristic works, translator of more than 100 books from the world as well as oriental languages and he published many travel and adventure books. The author speaks also about some milestones in the life of Viktor Krupa and he tries to characterise the nature, which enabled Viktor Krupa to become one of the most significant authors of the contemporary Slovak and European oriental studies and linguistics as a whole.

This paper is intended to be a contribution to research of communication formations that are shaped by systematic communication. The approach of the author is based on the idea that the human being has a gift for making signs and people make use of this property if they are adapting to a situation of recurrent coexistence. This property enables the participants of such a situation to create social signs with the structure sociolect as the form of the sign: the semantic interpretation of this form as the meaning of the sign. One way of analysing this meaning is by looking at the foundation of the motivation of animal and human behaviour. The author argues that this meaning is based on a feeling of safety and the participants of potential communication formations follow the principle of coordination in order to sustain this feeling and to introduce the state of communication comfort.

This study aims to demonstrate the roles that domestic and foreign languages have played and play as signs of national or religious identity and social prestige and as tools of political and economic power in multilingual Pakistan and Bangladesh. Before the countries gained independence from the British Empire in 1947 and before the formation of the Indian Union and Pakistan (which was divided into Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1971), the role of an official language, remote to the majority of population in Indian subcontinent, had been gradually played by Sanskrit, Persian, and English. After gaining independence, the new countries decided to replace English as the official language with domestic languages. Their efforts encountered many problems and resulted in various solutions. Urdu became the state language in Pakistan, which caused resistance in local ethnolinguistic groups because the language had been imported by refugees from India. This resistance was the strongest in East Pakistan, where a strong national and language awareness eventually contributed to the formation of an independent Bangladesh with Bengali as the state language. Despite struggle for the dominance of domestic languages, English has preserved its prestigious position both in Pakistan and Bangladesh, as a symbol of higher social position, a language of education and science, and a tool of economic and political power.

The article is devoted to the anniversary of Professor Viktor Krupa – the known Slovak ethnographer and linguist. The object of the analysis was the name of one of the most popular books of Hero of the day – Za siedmimi morami („Over the seven seas“), which seems to be characteristic for the author’s biography. This excpression is included in the Slavic proverbs and sayings with the concept of „sea“. In this case, although the idiom za siedmimi morami is not fixed by any phrasebook or by the majority of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries of the Slovak language, it is widely known in colloquial speech and is often used in modern Slovak literature and the media. In the cited contexts, the expression retains its folk stylistic flavor, which often emphasizes the typical folk-poetic speech „increments“ to its meaning and rhythm, reinforcing the semantics of „remoteness“: za siedmimi ostrovmi a za siedmimi morami, za siedmimi horami a siedmimi morami etc. This variation suggested by the presence of Slovak folklore explicate version of our expression, where the numerical component of the „seven“ is replaced by „nine“ – za deviatimi horami, za siedmimi morami.

Expression za siedmimi morami is one of the many „sea“ – sayings and proverbs recorded in the Slovak language. Each of them has its own distribution area, and its own history, sometimes going back to the ancient European cultural heritage. And in all of them reflect the semantics of infinite space, symbolized by component more („sea“), which created also the idiom za siedmimi morami.

Linguistic analysis of the expression on the background of its Slavic correspondences shows that it has deep folkloric and mythological roots in the Slavic and Indo-European world. This ancient symbolism was explicated in the title of one of the many books of Professor Victor Krupa.

The study brings a brief view at the problem of cognitive association between the space perception and the categorization reflected in natural language from the linguistic point of view that is very close connected to the linguistic worldview and possesses the ethno-cultural specifics. The analysis is focused on the differences of the vertical and horizontal space models’ cognitive dominants in two relative Slavic languages – Russian and Slovak, and on the possible reasons of its existence. The study is devoted to the prominent Slovak philologist Viktor Krupa.

The study deals with lexical reduplication which has the status of a peripheral, yet legitimate way of how vocabulary is enlarged in the Slovak language. Its result is a reduplicate, a paradigmatically formed unit which – as a whole – is a reflection of its part. Reduplication (in a wider sense) is defined by a semasiological aspect, particularly in the context of structural isomorphism and distinguishing of a reproductive, replicative and reduplicative type (in a narrow sense) with the use of integrative and integrative-modificatory onomasiological categories. The core of the reduplicates is formed by a determinative type of appositional names. Reduplication is a rich source of mimémata and pragma-lexemes. Reduplicates bring a new quality into the lexicon, the quality with specific semantics and pragmatics which oscillates around the pragmatic principle of relevance and amplification. Ethno-significative model ‘X-neX’ is typical for the Slovak language; and the presence of vocalic and echo reduplicates points at the conceptual unification which is of a more universal nature.

Next to multiword lexemes, such as idioms, discrete units may be found on a lower, i.e. a morphological level in language. A notable, rather widespread but neglected field is represented by circumfixes. i.e. discrete combinations of morphemes, such as the German gesprochen standing before and after a lexical morpheme, a stable combination of a prefix and suffix having a stable and fixed meaning and or function. A few examples in various languages as a general classification of this are briefly shown to indicate that the phenomenon of circumfix is by no means rare. In what follows a detailed analysis of a single Czech case of the circumfix z--lý is offered (such as in zhrublý, zesinalý), relating to verb bases. Here, both the regular and anomalous cases is pointed at and commented briefly upon.

Possessive resultative constructions containing a HAVE-verb and a past passive participle have been used in West Slavic languages for centuries without showing a rapid grammaticalisation into a perfect (cf. evidence from Polish and Czech). The same holds for Slovak, where examples can be found at least from the 17^th century on without rapidly changing on the grammaticalisation chain. At the same time, Krupa demonstrated in 1960 a loss of congruence between object and past passive participle in possessive resultatives in colloquial Slovak distinguishing different types. Loss of congruence is often considered to be an important grammaticalisation step for emerging participial perfects. A sought in the Slovak National Corpus brought some evidence for such constructions in journalistic texts and from the Internet (the same types as used by Krupa), but their frequency is very low so far.