Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
This article presents an extended linguocultural analysis of the emotion of joy as expressed through the concepts of “smile” and “laughter” in English, Russian, and Uzbek. The study integrates approaches from cognitive linguistics, cultural linguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis to investigate how emotional experience is encoded, structured, and interpreted across languages and cultures. Special attention is given to lexical semantics, phraseology, metaphorical models, and communicative norms. The findings reveal that while smile and laughter are universal physiological and emotional responses, their linguistic representation is shaped by culturally specific values, social expectations, and communicative traditions. English tends toward conventionalized politeness and frequent smiling, Russian demonstrates emotional authenticity and restraint, and Uzbek reflects collectivist warmth and hospitality. The article contributes to cross-cultural linguistics by demonstrating that emotional concepts are culturally mediated and linguistically structured. The research also has implications for intercultural communication, translation studies, and language teaching.
The present study offers an original multi-level linguistic analysis of child speech in the 3-5 age group, combining a structured observational methodology with a qualitative-quantitative framework developed by the author. Unlike existing survey-based accounts, this paper proposes a three-tier Phonetic–Lexical–Grammatical (PLG) Developmental Profile as a practical diagnostic tool for assessing speech maturity in preschool children. The research was conducted on the basis of 120 spontaneous speech samples collected from 40 Kyrgyz-Russian bilingual children aged 3 to 5 years attending preschool institutions in Bishkek. The study identifies age-specific patterns of phonological simplification, lexical growth strategies, and syntactic complexity, and introduces a composite Speech Maturity Index (SMI) that integrates quantitative indicators across all three levels. The findings demonstrate that bilingual children in the studied cohort display a systematically accelerated grammatical development compared to monolingual norms while exhibiting specific phonological transfer patterns not previously described in the literature on Kyrgyz–Russian bilingualism at preschool age. The proposed PLG Profile and SMI are presented as replicable instruments suitable for use by preschool educators and speech therapists.
This paper develops a hierarchical account of concept formation that distinguishes the manifestation of originary qualitative feel from the public, norm-governed concepts through which subjects later articulate experience. Its central claim is not merely that concepts differ in abstractness, but that they differ in constraint profile: some remain tightly corrigible by recurrent felt manifestations delivered through relatively stable experiential channels, whereas others depend far more heavily on social reweighting, comparison, and narrative organization. To capture this difference, I distinguish four strata: (1) the manifestation of originary qualitative feel, (2) channel-bound concepts, (3) integrative judgments, and (4) narrative concepts. The pivotal case is smart. In some contexts, smart functions as a third-level integrative judgment anchored by a relatively stable cue-cluster such as rapid learning, flexible problem solving, and quick comprehension. In other contexts, the same lexical item is drawn into fourth-level use, where application depends on broader evaluations of which forms of knowledge, achievement, or tradition count as genuinely worthwhile. This shift shows that semantic drift does not abolish embodiment; it redistributes which embodied, affective, and inferential resources are recruited as operative sense changes. The paper then reorganizes its dialogue with contemporary theory around this problem of functional migration. Barsalou and Dove help explain embodied anchoring but do not sufficiently account for the reweighting of application rules within public evaluative space. Borghi and collaborators illuminate the role of language, sociality, inner speech, and conversational coordination in abstract concepts, yet their frameworks can be sharpened by distinguishing lexical stabilization from discursive reorganization and by connecting internal cue-stabilization with sentence-level and discourse-level renegotiation. Brandom and Jorem and Lohr clarify the public inferential dimension of concept use, but require a stronger account of differential experiential corrigibility. Searle helps explain how high-level concepts approach recognition and status, but not every narrative concept is thereby reduced to a full institutional fact. The conclusion is that the decisive issue is not whether a concept is social, but how lower-level cues, public norms, and narrative frames are combined in use.
The project Entangled Histories used early modern printed normative texts. The computer used to have significant problems being able to read Dutch Gothic print, which is used in the vast majority of the sources. Using the Handwritten Text Recognition suite Transkribus (v.1.07-v.1.10), we reprocessed the original scans that had poor quality OCR, obtaining a Character Error Rate (CER) much lower than our initial expectations of <5% CER. This result is a significant improvement that enables the searching through 75,000 pages of printed normative texts from the seventeen provinces, also known as the Low Countries. The books of ordinances are compilations; thus, segmentation is essential to retrace the individual norms. We have applied – and compared – four different methods: ABBYY, P2PaLA, NLE Document Recognition and a custom rule-based tool that combines lexical features with font recognition. Each text (norm) in the books concerns one or more topics or categories. A selection of normative texts was manually labelled with internationally used (hierarchical) categories. Using Annif, a tool for automatic subject indexing, the computer was trained to apply the categories by itself. Automatic metadata makes it easier to search relevant texts and allows further analysis. Text recognition, segmentation and categorisation of norms together constitute the datafication of the Early Modern Ordinances. Our experiments for automating these steps have resulted in a provisional process for datafication of this and similar collections.
This paper takes a short sample of student spoken interaction and analyses it in detail to identify some of the features of the talk which may be at variance with what would be recognized as more proficient and fluent interaction.The goal is to identify points of interactional practice that can be judged as areas for consciousness raising and explicit instruction by the teacher.Several of the points raised in the analysis are suggested to stem from a complex set of influences including transfer of lexical, grammatical, and interactional practices from the L1.There also may be a habituation to classroom discourse when speaking in the L2 which is then used unconsciously as a template for non-institutional mundane social interactions.Recognition of the special nature of learner interactions alongside an understanding of the possible causes of this kind of speaking can, it is suggested, inform focused and empirically based teaching that develops learners' interactional competence.The competence versus performance duality posited by Chomsky (1965) is based indirectly on a notion of native speaker intuition.That is, when a native speaker of a language hears an utterance in that language, they can make an immediate judgment of its acceptability in grammatical terms.Deviations from the norm in
This article deals with the study of similarities and differences in expression of the correspondence of the norm to English and Tatar linguistic cultures using the material of phraseological units with a gender component. The paper defines the concept of norm in language and phraseology. One singles out the main groups of phraseological units according to whether they conform to the norm or not. The gender direction in linguistics, the subject of which is the interrelation of language and gender as a social factor, considers the concepts such as “genderâ€, “femalenessâ€, “malenessâ€. Gender is expressed in semantics and in the grammar of the language, forming a linguistic image of the world, which in turn depends on the conceptual image. The gender image of the world is not biologically determined, and the concepts of femaleness and maleness are determined by cultural and historical factors, in particular, by language stereotypes in different cultures and language communities. Gender metaphor also influences the formation of a conceptual and linguistic image of the world. A gender metaphor is understood as “the transfer not only of the physical, but also of the totality of spiritual qualities and properties, united by the nominations of femininity and masculinity to the objects that are not connected with sexâ€. In different language communities, femininity and masculinity referents often do not coincide, which creates difficulties in intercultural communication and translation.
This article explores the relationship between language and gender identity in English and Uzbek social media discourse. It examines how linguistic choices, including lexical items, pronouns, and stylistic markers, reflect and construct gender identities in online communication. By analyzing social media posts, comments, and interactions, the study highlights patterns of gendered language use and the cultural influences shaping these practices. The findings suggest that social media provides a dynamic space where users perform, negotiate, and challenge traditional gender norms through language. Cross-linguistic comparison reveals both similarities and differences in how English and Uzbek speakers encode gender identities in digital communication.
The present article examines the content and linguistic features of the realization of the concept of “happiness” in the English language. Drawing on semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive approaches, the study explores how happiness is encoded through lexical units, phraseological expressions, and contextual usage. Special attention is given to the interaction between language and culture, as well as to the role of discourse in shaping the interpretation of emotional concepts. The findings demonstrate that happiness is a multifaceted concept that reflects not only individual emotional states but also cultural values, social norms, and communicative intentions.
There has been a long felt need to investigate what the study of poetic language contributes to an understanding of ordinary language, and how posing the question in this way may indeed shift some of the assumptions about the way ordinary language works. Metaphor remains an important case in point: How do we get from “He kicked the bucket?” to “He died”? In this metaphorical idiom, the process is unavailable, without going into etymological hypotheses, because the meaning is already given – it’s lexicalized, a “dead metaphor” -- no semantic construal is involved and the literal meaning doesn’t play a role in understanding the meaning of the expression. A poet might break up the idiom and say, “He kicked the bucket and broke it to pieces” – defamiliarizing the automatic reading of the idiom as “he died” and opening up suggestions, for example, of overcoming death; thus lending plasticity to and making present both the figurative and literal meaning. But true access to the process of metaphorical meaning-making is only available in cases of novel poetic metaphor, where the domains brought together are often disparate. I argue that there are good reasons for seeing poetry, fiction and literature in general not as speech acts but as representations, or semblances of speech acts (Searle’s notion of a pretend speech act doesn’t do this justice). Poems stage dramatic situations in which both poetic speaker (that is, the lyrical “I,”) and addressee, if any, are part of a fictional world, rather than the biographical poets themselves addressing a reader. The often ironic gaps and dialogical tensions between the norms and values projected by the poem itself and those expressed by any one of the voices in the poem – including the lyrical ‘I’s perspective – have a crucial expressive force unto themselves. As Searle realized, the indirect speech act model for poetry does not work; whereas “Could you pass the salt?” is a request masquerading as a question, there is no such one-to-one relationship between the poetic utterance and a single determinate speech act hiding behind it. Searle’s and Austin’s approaches couldn’t fully succeed, on my view, because there are key aspects of the language-game of poetry that distinguish poetry from ordinary language speech acts. Let’s say these are three aspects of a Gricean poetic contract between speaker and hearer: 1) the distinction between the lyrical ‘I’ and the biographical poet; 2) what I call the "quasipropositionality" of utterance in poetry (and fiction as well); and 3) poetic form and the ways in which it makes meaning through textual strategies of mediation, like point of view, parody, irony, enjambment, rhyme, meter, rhythm, sound-play, allusion, and metaphor. These forms of aesthetic mediation make it very problematic to isolate the serious or not-serious utterance of a single-line as a primary semantic unit.
This paper presents the new Universal Dependencies tree bank for the Macedonian language, marking a significant step towards the comprehensive linguistic analysis of Macedonian within the UD framework.It briefly addresses dependency grammar from a theoretical perspective and moves on to describing the treebank development process, from sentence selection, word segmentation and lemmatization, to POS-tagging, morphological features, and dependency tagging.Given the mostly manual labor invested in developing the treebank, semiautomatic NLP tools specifically designed for this purpose have also been presented and commented.Based on the defined tagset, the paper provides examples and visualizations of annotated sentences.The creation of the first Macedonian UD treebank enhances Macedonian linguistic resources and provides valuable insights into the morphological and syntactic structures of this Balkan Sprachbund language.It also contributes to the broader understanding of language-specific challenges within the UD framework and facilitates cross-linguistic comparisons in the Balkan and broader region.
The paper explores the distortion of fundamental postulates regarding the gender category in linguistics by some of the key representatives of scientific, educational, and cultural institutions in Serbia, during the recent public debate on gender-sensitive language. The debate emerged after May 20, 2021, when the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia adopted the Gender Equality Law, which introduced the mandatory use of gender-sensitive language in administration, education, and media. The Committee for the Standardisation of the Serbian Language strongly opposed this law by misrepresenting knowledge about language and gender. To identify the link between the distortion of knowledge and the socio-political consequences of creating epistemic injustice, this paper combines linguistic methods (critical discourse analysis) with ignorance studies. The research findings are related to: a) the concealment and distortion of facts (from general linguistics and the history of the Serbian language); b) ignorance of new knowledge and issues (standardization of gender-related vocabulary; addressing problems in syntax and punctuation); c) the gradation of hurtful language used to spread hate speech and convey prejudices about gender identities.
Understanding how memories of past experiences shape subjective feelings is complicated by the fact that we constantly update our memories. These updates are particularly impactful when individuals are reminded of emotionally positive or negative attributes of the original event. Yet, it remains unclear how such memory updating influences subjective feelings. Here, we investigated how the reactivation of emotional information affects episodic memory, subjective feelings, and their interaction. Across three experiments, participants first learned both positive and negative attributes associated with unfamiliar individuals. Then, they were reminded of a single positive or negative attribute for each individual to reactivate the memory partially. Finally, we reassessed memory for and subjective feelings about each individual’s attributes. In Experiments 1 and 2, these procedures were distributed across three days, while in Experiment 3, they occurred on a single day. Across these three experiments, reminding with negative attributes shifted subjective feelings in a negative direction. Reminded attributes were also better remembered, particularly for negative ones, and changes in subjective feelings were more strongly associated with reminded attributes. However, positive reminders only influenced subjective feelings to change positively when all procedures occurred on the same day. Together, these findings support a model in which memory updating shapes both episodic memory and emotional experience in a valence-dependent manner.
These data contain three rows of data: 1. The unique identifier of the video and its order shown; 2. The subject's Likert rating of engagement, where 1-5 from least to most; 3. The subject's Likert rating of familiarity with the video's subject matter, also likert 1-5 from least to most.
Static concreteness ratings are widely used in NLP, yet a word's concreteness can shift with context, especially in figurative language such as metaphor, where common concrete nouns can take abstract interpretations. While such shifts are evident from context, it remains unclear how LLMs understand concreteness internally. We conduct a layer-wise and geometric analysis of LLM hidden representations across four model families, examining how models distinguish literal vs figurative uses of the same noun and how concreteness is organized in representation space. We find that LLMs separate literal and figurative usage in early layers, and that mid-to-late layers compress concreteness into a one-dimensional direction that is consistent across models. Finally, we show that this geometric structure is practically useful: a single concreteness direction supports efficient figurative-language classification and enables training-free steering of generation toward more literal or more figurative rewrites.
In the context of digital transformation, the development of electronic dictionaryplatforms includes an important software stage. However, after completing this stage, the primary task becomes the collection and systematization of the dictionary’s lexical database. Vocabulary is the most dynamic and changeable layer of a language. As society, science, and technology evolve, new words emerge while others gradually fall out of use. Therefore, the content of an electronic dictionary requires continuous updating
ABSTRACT Objectives This study examined therapist–client physiological synchronisation, indexed by heart rate variability (HRV), in meditation versus emotionally supportive sessions (control condition) and its association with clients' affective evaluations. Methods This was a randomised experimental study. Participants were assigned to a meditation session ( n = 20) or an emotional support session ( n = 20). HRV was assessed at baseline and post‐session; an additional mid‐session HRV assessment was obtained in the meditation condition immediately following the meditation segment. Clients reported positive and negative affect and evaluated the session. Results No significant therapist–client HRV correlations were observed at baseline or at the end of the session in either condition. However, in the meditation condition, changes in therapists' HRV from baseline to mid‐session and from baseline to post‐session were associated with clients' affective evaluations, whereas no such associations emerged in the control condition. Finally, a factor analysis revealed two non‐coherent factors of therapists' and clients' HRV before and after the session in controls, and a single factor including all HRV measures of therapists and clients in the meditation condition. Conclusions Therapist autonomic regulation during meditation may relate to clients' immediate emotional experience. Further research using longitudinal and dynamic designs is needed to clarify mechanisms of physiological synchronisation in psychotherapy.
The article examines „Georgian“ jokes as a speech genre in which the linguistic norm is violated through connotative reduplication and other forms of language play. Based on Bakhtin’s theory of speech genres and the study of humor, an anecdote is interpreted as a metalanguage practice reflecting social attitudes towards normality, deviation, and linguistic authority. The analysis is carried out in the context of the linguistically polyphonic urban space of Old Tiflis, where Russian historically served as the language of the empire, comparable to the role of French in Southeastern Europe. This sociolinguistic situation contributed to active language contact and the formation of hybrid speech forms, which later became a source of anecdotal texts. Special attention is paid to reduplication as a key mechanism for creating a comic effect in „Georgian“ jokes. Echo constructions such as shashlik-mashlyk, salad-malat, culture-multur do not have an independent denotation. However, they perform pragmatic and semiotic functions: they enhance the expressiveness of the utterance, mark irony, and refer to a conscious deviation from the norm. An analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet anecdotal empirical material, including the „Georgian“ typical characters Gogi and Givi, shows that reduplication serves to carnivalize the norm and symbolically explore the center-periphery relationship. At the end of the article, the author concludes that reduplication in „Georgian“ jokes is a key mechanism of the comic effect. The „echoes“ of main parts of words, such as multur, malat, and mashlik, lack independent denotation and serve to carnivalize linguistic norms and increase the expressiveness of speech. They assume knowledge of the normative code and turn deviation from the norm into a conscious language game and a form of collective language memory.
The article explores the value orientations typical of residents in monotowns, i.e., single-industry towns. The linguistic data were obtained from an indirect associative experiment through an analysis of stimulusresponse speech acts. The methods from corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics made it possible to identify the hierarchical framework of key values in the consciousness of respondents from the diamond mining town of Mirny, Republic of Sakha. The core values included health, family, love, friendship, and security, as well as their semantic associations. The methodology for calculating speech act characteristics included the intersection index (O – Number of Overlapping Associates) and intersection strength (OSG – Overlapping Associate Strength), which reflected the psychological proximity of value meanings in communicative practices. The method revealed the integrative and regulatory role of values based on parameters of speech acts as social actions. The results show how language captures and transmits value orientations, reflecting both universal and ethnocultural perceptions. The findings contribute to the development of interdisciplinary linguistics, enhancing the understanding of value system in single-industry settlements. The method can be used for social planning, academic programs, and cross-cultural studies.
This article examines the “Golden Age” of Arabic linguistics under the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258). It traces how Arabic evolved from a primarily religious and literary medium into a universal language of science. The study highlights the scholarly rivalry between the Basra and Kufa grammatical schools—especially their debates over qiyās (analogy) and samʿ (attested usage/auditory transmission)—and shows how these methodological differences contributed to the codification of linguistic norms. The article also analyzes the foundational role of Sibawayh’s Al-Kitāb and al-Khalīl ibn Aḥmad’s Kitāb al-ʿAyn in systematizing Arabic syntax, phonetics, and lexicography. Finally, it evaluates the Translation Movement at the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Ḥikma) and explains how the integration of Greek, Persian, and Indian learning enriched Arabic vocabulary and helped establish a broad scientific terminology.
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into daily life, in roles ranging from high-stakes decision support to companionship, understanding their behavioral dispositions becomes critical. A growing literature uses psychometric inventories and cognitive paradigms to profile LLM dispositions. However, these approaches cannot determine whether behavioral differences reflect stable, stimulus-specific individuality or global response biases and stochastic noise. Here, we apply crossed random-effects models -- widely used in psychometrics to separate systematic effects -- to 74.9 million ratings provided by 10 open-weight LLMs for over 100,000 words across 14 psycholinguistic norms. On average, 16.9% of variance is attributable to stimulus-specific individuality, robustly exceeding a statistical null model. Cross-norm prediction analyses reveal this individuality as a coherent fingerprint, unique to each model. These results identify individual differences among LLMs that cannot be attributed to response biases or stochastic noise. We term these differences machine individuality.
This paper examines the ability of language models to capture semantic relations between words in a low-resource language. We describe experiments on automatic prediction of lexical-semantic relations in Belarusian using models of Word2Vec, BERT, and LLM families which differ in neural architecture, feature types and NLP applications. Training and f ine-tuning of the models was carried out on the datasets compiled for our study: Belarusian corpora with UD POS tagging and a database of synonyms and antonyms extracted from Belarusian dictionaries. Model performance was evaluated by pseudo-disambiguation test (Word2Vec CBOW and skip-grams) as well as by expert assessments (roberta-small-Belarusian, Gemini 2.5 Pro). The results proved to be valid and can be applied to create and enrich lexical databases, to analyse word co-occurrence, to improve machine translation, paraphrasing, summarization, and other systems related to automatic processing of the Belarusian language.
This study investigates the influence of artificial intelligence on the evolution of language in modern society. It analyzes how AI-driven technologies—including machine translation, natural language processing, chatbots, and speech recognition systems—affect language use, transformation, and development. The research highlights that the growing integration of AI into everyday communication has accelerated multilingual interaction, contributed to the reshaping of linguistic norms, and facilitated the emergence of new vocabulary associated with digital environments. Furthermore, the article examines the dual impact of AI on language practices. On the one hand, it enhances linguistic diversity and expands access to global communication; on the other hand, it raises critical concerns regarding linguistic standardization, the erosion of cultural nuances, and increasing dependence on automated systems. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of AI in language education, where adaptive learning platforms and intelligent tutoring systems enable more personalized instructional pathways. The findings indicate that artificial intelligence should be understood not merely as a technological advancement, but as a significant sociolinguistic force that is reshaping patterns of communication, literacy practices, and cultural identity in the digital era.
The article examines the phenomenon of code-switching in Internet discourse as one of the key strategies of modern digital communication. Theoretical foundations from R. Jakobson to P. Blom, J. Gumperz, Sh. Poplack, and C. Myers-Scotton are discussed, along with their application in online interaction. Based on examples from Instagram, Telegram, and YouTube, it is shown that code-switching is not a deviation from linguistic norms but a means of expressing emotions, irony, and identity, adapting messages to multilingual audiences. The study concludes that a hybrid norm of online communication is emerging within English-, Russian-, and Uzbek-speaking digital spaces.
Le French Treebank: une ressource lexicale et syntaxique richement annotée (et validée manuellement) pour les linguistes, utilisable en TAL, dans sa version 2.0 Projet initié en 1997, avec le soutien de l'IUF, du CNRS et du CNRTL21 550 phrases (environ 664 500 tokens) du journal Le Monde (1990-1993)Métadonnées: auteur, date, domaine (par article)Annotations lexicales (catégories, sous-catégories, flexion, mots composés avec composants) et syntaxiques (constituants majeurs, fonctions grammaticales) validéesPlusieurs formats disponibles: XML, PTB, CoNLL, codage UTF-8 (ligature œ notée oe)Nouveautés de la version 2.0: plusieurs erreurs d'annotation ont été corrigées depuis la publication en 2016 de la version 1.0
This article examines the role and significance of language corpora and linguistic databases in linguistic expertise. It discusses the possibilities of conducting objective semantic, pragmatic, and stylistic analyses of texts through corpus-based methods. The study also highlights the contribution of linguistic databases and artificial intelligence technologies to improving the accuracy, reliability, and efficiency of expert conclusions. Furthermore, the relevance of developing specialized corpora and databases for forensic linguistics in Uzbekistan is substantiated.
This paper presents a direct framework for sequence models with hidden states on closed subgroups of U(d). We use a minimal axiomatic setup and derive recurrent and transformer templates from a shared skeleton in which subgroup choice acts as a drop-in replacement for state space, tangent projection, and update map. We then specialize to O(d) and evaluate orthogonal-state RNN and transformer models on Tiny Shakespeare and Penn Treebank under parameter-matched settings. We also report a general linear-mixing extension in tangent space, which applies across subgroup choices and improves finite-budget performance in the current O(d) experiments.
The paper presents a prototype of a web-app designed to automatically generate verb valency lexica based on the Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks.It offers an overview of the structure of the app, its core functionality, and functional extensions designed to handle treebank-specific features.Besides, the paper highlights the limitations of the prototype and the potential of its further development.
This paper presents a small-scale dependency treebank for Tunisian Arabic (TADT) developed within the Universal Dependencies framework, addressing the scarcity of linguistic resources for the Arabic varieties.The approach employs domain adaptation, leveraging a machine learning model (UDPipe 1.0) trained on Algerian Arabic data to annotate 100 Tunisian Arabic social media comments, followed by manual correction.This pilot study evaluates the feasibility of using machine learning-assisted annotation to scale resource development for spoken Arabic and identifies key challenges in cross-dialectal transfer for improving annotation quality and efficiency.This work contributes to more inclusive and fair representation of Arabic linguistic varieties in academic research and NLP applications.
Brain Treebank is a large-scale intracranial EEG dataset comprising 43 hours of iEEG recordings from 10 epilepsy patients watching naturalistic Hollywood movies, with 1,688 electrodes sampled at 2048 Hz. The dataset includes time-aligned linguistic annotations with word-level transcripts and Universal Dependencies syntax trees, providing a unique resource for studying neural language processing during naturalistic stimulation.
This article scientifically analyzes the development trends of linguistics and contemporary linguistic problems in the context of digital transformation. The study examines the impact of artificial intelligence, corpus linguistics, natural language processing technologies, digital communication, and globalization on language development. Particular attention is paid to the role of the Uzbek language in the digital environment, terminology issues, language policy, linguistic identity, and transformations in digital education. The article argues that modern technologies not only expand the functional capabilities of language but also generate challenges related to linguistic norms, preservation of national languages, and cultural identity. The research is based on international scientific literature, statistical data, and нормативe legal documents.
Language is a living organism that evolves alongside technological and social advancements. This paper examines the phenomenon of neologisms—newly coined words or expressions—and their pervasive role in contemporary English mass media. The study categorizes recent neologisms based on their morphological formation processes, such as blending, compounding, and functional shift. Furthermore, it analyzes how mass media acts as a primary catalyst for the popularization of these terms. By investigating digital journals, social media platforms, and news broadcasts, the research highlights the pragmatic functions of neologisms in creating concise, engaging, and culturally relevant communication. The findings provide insights into the current trends of English lexicology and the impact of the digital age on linguistic norms.
Respect plays a crucial role in successful interpersonal and intercultural communication. However, differences in linguistic norms and pragmatic conventions often lead to misunderstandings between speakers of different languages. This article examines pragmatic failures in expressing respect in English-Russian cross-cultural communication. The study aims to identify linguistic and cultural factors that cause misinterpretations of respect and to analyze how respect is pragmatically encoded in both languages. The findings suggest that pragmatic failures frequently arise from divergent politeness strategies, speech act realizations, and sociocultural expectations embedded in English and Russian communicative practices. The study emphasizes the importance of pragmatic awareness in developing intercultural communicative competence.
Abstract This paper examines the social contexts in Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks where the North German dialect Plattdeutsch is spoken. Beyond the technical challenges of translating these passages, the analysis focuses on the literary representation of code-switching that functions primarily as socially and symbolically charged act. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory, the study interprets deviations from linguistic norms and dialect use as instances of double negation – a strategy that appears to challenge social conventions but, in reality, affirms the most valuable social capital in classical bourgeois society: the certainty that one’s high status remains unthreatened. The difficulty of translating such passages stems from the specific cultural parameters embedded in the novel. Ultimately, the paper argues that culture is not an immediate given but requires analytical frameworks from the social sciences for proper understanding and interpretation.
While language enables meaning, constituting knowledge in courts, schools, or parliaments, who gets to decide what can be known? Is meaning only use or a result of power too? Pitting Wittgenstein's forms of life against Foucault's regimes of discourse makes linguistic norms appear as instruments of exclusion. Marginalised speakers – subaltern, indigenous, and non-normative are often rendered unintelligible. Epistemic justice demands more than inclusion; it demands considering how rules are set, who enforces them, and how meaning is being contextually built. A discourse-sensitive, epistemic theory of justice is proposed, based on Kripke's rule-following paradox and Dijk's discourse analysis, to show that language is not neutral but a battleground of struggle over meaning, recognition, and epistemic authority.
This article explores the dynamics of linguistic norms in the Russian literary language within the context of social media communication. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that digital platforms create new communicative conditions that reshape traditional language norms. The paper analyzes variability, simplification, and expressive tendencies in syntax, lexicon, and orthography. Furthermore, it demonstrates that linguistic norms in social media are not static but dynamic and context-dependent. The findings suggest that these processes reflect not the degradation of the literary language, but its adaptation to digital discourse.
The study is devoted to the analysis of the impact of globalization and digital technologies on the transformation of language norms in modern digital discourse. The relevance of the work is due to the growing role of digital communication, in which language becomes a key factor of cultural identity and social integration. The goal is to identify interdependencies between the level of digital maturity of states, the intensity of language hybridization and the dynamics of sociolinguistic variability. The object of the study is the digital language space of the global communication environment. The methodology is based on a combination of systemic, institutional, econometric and corpus-linguistic approaches using official statistical databases and corpora of digital texts for 2015–2024. The results show that during this period ICT Development Index increased from 5.32 to 7.41 points, DESI Index – from 48.7 to 70.4 points, and the share of Internet users – from 58.2% to 84.3%. At the same time, the number of languages with digital representation increased from 312 to 387, and the share of English-language content decreased from 55.1% to 49.3%. The hybridization index increased from 0.42 to 0.61, clearly indicating the establishment of a polycentric mode or multi-node digital discourse. Hybridization is both method and degree: different languages or their structural elements used in the same message (verbal or symbolic), as well as fully/partially mixed code messages; hashtags expressed in different linguistic forms/fonts, etc. (multimedia message). This means how various linguistic components are arranged within one structural unit up to multimedia messages comprising codes written with different fonts‐forms on various levels of hybridity. The econometric model registered a very high positive correlation between digital maturity and hybridization (r=0.82).
This study aims to examine how non-dominant languages challenge the current language hierarchy in Greek public administration and encourage reconsideration of the status quo. The data are drawn from a broader research project aimed at examining multilingualism within Greek public administration. A questionnaire, specifically designed for the purposes of the research, was administered across all Greek ministries and interviews were conducted with civil servants from various ministries. A total of 1,156 responses along with qualitative data from interviews reveal a notable discrepancy between the languages employees speak and those they consider most useful for their work. The analysis shows that while English remains the most frequently cited language for professional use, there is a growing recognition of the importance of other languages, including Middle Eastern, Balkan, Afghan – Pakistani and Southern European languages. The findings suggest that the rigid focus on English and other ‘prestigious’ languages fails to acknowledge the practical needs of a multilingual public sector. The study advocates for a more inclusive approach to language policy and planning in Greek public administration, one that promotes linguistic diversity and addresses the diverse needs of both citizens and civil employees.
This article examines the role of advertisements and signboards in shaping and reflecting public attitudes toward language. In modern society, linguistic culture is not only preserved in literature and education, but also manifested in everyday public texts such as commercial advertisements, street signs, shop names, and information boards. The study analyzes the linguistic quality of advertising texts, the influence of globalization on language use, and the social consequences of neglecting linguistic norms. Special attention is given to the relationship between language accuracy and cultural identity. The article also discusses the responsibility of businesses, media representatives, and educational institutions in maintaining linguistic standards in public communication.