Synchronous Description of the Grammatical Structure of Modern Romani and Elaboration of Romani Textbook

The first outcome of this project was a synchronous description of the most widely spoken Romani dialect in the Czech and Slovak Republics, aimed at teachers and lecturers of the Romani language. This is intended to serve as a methodological guide for the demonstration of various grammatical phenomena, but may also assist people who want a basic knowledge of the linguistic structure of this neo-Indian language. The grammatical material is divided into 23 chapters, in a sequence which may be followed in teaching or studying. The book includes examples of the grammatical elements, but not exercises or articles. The second work produced was a textbook of Slovak Romani, which is the most detailed in the Czech or Slovak Republics to date. It is aimed at all those interested in active use of the Romani language: high school and university students, people working with the Roma, and Roma who speak little or nothing of the language of their forebears, The book includes 34 lessons, each containing relevant Romani tests (articles and dialogues), a short vocabulary list, grammatical explanations, exercises and examples of Romani written or oral expression. The textbook also contains a considerable amount of ethno-cultural information and notes on the life and traditions of the Roman, as well as pointing out some differences between different dialects. A brief Romani-Czech phrase book is included as an appendix.

Language Construction of Reality in the German Tabloid Press/on Materials of BILD Newspaper/

From the moment of their birth, a person's life is determined by their sex. Goroshko wanted to find out why this difference is so striking, why society is so determined to sustain it, and how it can persist even when certain national or behavioural stereotypes are erased. She believes there are both social and biological differences between men and women, and set out to analyse these distinctions as they are manifested in language. Certain general characteristics can be identified. Males tend to write with less fluency, to refer to events in a verb phrase, to be time-oriented, to involve themselves more in their references to events, to locate events in their personal sphere of activity, and to refer less to others. Goroshko therefore concludes that the male is more active, more ego-involved in what he does and less concerned about others. Women were more fluent, referred to events in a noun-phrase, were less time-oriented, tended to be less involved in their event references, located events within their interactive community, and referred more to others. They spent much more time discussing personal and domestic subjects, relationship problems, family, health and reproductive matters, weight, food and clothing, men, and other women. Computer analysis showed that female speech was substantially more emotional, using hyperbole, metaphor, comparisons, epithets, ways of enumeration, interjections, rhetorical questions and exclamations. The level of literacy was higher in female speech, and women made fewer grammatical and spelling mistakes in written texts. Goroshko believes that her findings have relevance beyond the linguistic field. When working on anonymous texts she has been able to decide on the sex of the author and so believes that her research may even be of benefit to forensic science.

The Sociolinguistics of Hungarian Outside Hungary

This study describes the sociolinguistic situation of the indigenous Hungarian national minorities in Slovakia (c. 600,000), Ukraine (c. 180,000), Romania (c. 2,000,000), Yugoslavia (c. 300,000), Slovenia (c. 8,000) and Austria (c. 6,000). Following the guidelines of Hans Goebl et al, the historical sociolinguistic portrait of each minority is presented from 1920 through to the mid-1990s. Each country's report includes sections on geography and demography, history, politics, economy, culture and religion, language policy and planning, and language use (domains of minority and/or majority language use, proficiency, attitudes, etc.). The team's findings were presented in the form of 374 pages of manuscripts, articles and tables, written in Hungarian and English. The core of the team's research results lies in the results of an empirical survey designed to study the social characteristics of Hungarian-minority bilingualism in the six project countries, and the linguistic similarities and differences between the six contact varieties of Hungarian and Hungarian in Hungary. The respondents were divided by age, education, and settlement group - city vs. village and local majority vs. local minority. The first thing to be observed is that Hungarian is tending to be spoken less to children than to parents and grandparents, a familiar pattern of language shift. In contact varieties of Hungarian, analytic constructions may be used where monolingual Hungarians would use a more synthetic form. Mr Kontra gives as an example the compound tagdij, which in Standard Hungarian means "membership fee" but which is replaced in contact Hungarian by the two-word phrase tagsagi dij. Another similar example concerns the synthetic verb hegedult "played the violin" and the analytic expression hegedun jatszott. The contrast is especially striking between the Hungarians in the northern Slavic countries, who use the synthetic form frequently, and those in the southern Slavic countries, who mainly use the analytic form. Mr. Kontra notes that from a structural point of view, there is no immediate explanation for this, since Slovak or Ukrainian are as likely to cause interference as is Serbian. He postulates instead that the difference may be attributable to some sociohistoric cause, and points out that the Turkish occupation of what is today Voivodina caused a discontinuity of the Hungarian presence in the region, with the result that Hungarians were resettled in the area only two and a half centuries ago. However, the Hungarians in today's Slovakia and Ukraine have lived together with Slavic peoples continuously for over a millennium. It may be, he suggests, that 250 years of interethnic coexistence is less than is needed for such a contact-induced change to run its course. Next Mr. Kontra moved on to what he terms "mental maps and morphology". In Hungarian, the names of cities and villages take the surface case (eg. Budapest-en "in Budapest") whereas some names denoting Hungarian settlements and all names of foreign cities take the interior case (eg. Tihany-ban "in Tihany" and Boston-ban "in Boston). The role of the semantic feature "foreign" in suffix-choice can be illustrated by such minimal pairs as Velence-n "in Velence, a village in Hungary" versus Velence-ben "in Velence [=Venice], a city in Italy", and Pecs-en "in Pecs, a city in Hungary" vs. Becs-ben "in Becs, ie. Vienna". This Hungarian vs. foreign distinction is often interpreted as "belonging to historical (pre-1920) Hungary" vs. "outside historical Hungary". The distinction is also expressed in the dichotomy "home" vs. "abroad'. The 1920 border changes have had an impact on both majority and minority Hungarians' mental maps, the maps which govern the choice of surface vs. interior cases with placenames. As there is a growing divergence between the mental maps of majority and minority Hungarians, so there will be a growing divergence in their use of the placename suffixes. Two placenames were chosen to scratch the surface of this complex problem: Craiova (a city in Oltenia, Romania) and Kosovo (Hungarian Koszovo) an autonomous region in southeast Yugoslavia. The assumption to be tested was that both placenames would be used with the inessive (interior) suffixes categorically by Hungarians in Hungary, but that the superessive suffix (showing "home") would be used near-categorically by Hungarians in Romania and Yugoslavia (Voivodina). Minority Hungarians in countries other than Romania and Yugoslavia would show no difference from majority Hungarians in Hungary. In fact, the data show that, contrary to expectation, there is considerable variation within Hungary. And although Koszovo is used, as expected, with the "home" suffix by 61% of the informants in Yugoslavia, the same suffix is used by an even higher percentage of the subjects in Slovenia. Mr. Kontra's team suggests that one factor playing a role in this might be the continuance of the former Yugoslav mentality in the Hungarians of Slovenia, at least from the geographical point of view. The contact varieties of Hungarian show important grammatical differences from Hungarian in Hungary. One of these concerns the variable use of Null subjects (the inclusion or exclusion of the subject of the verb). When informants were asked to insert either megkertem or megkertem ot - "I asked her" - into a test sentence, 54.9% of the respondents in the Ukraine inserted the second phrase as opposed to only 27.4% in Hungary. Although Mr. Kontra and his team concentrated more on the differences between Contact Hungarian and Standard Hungarian, they also discovered a number of similarities. One such similarity is demonstrable in the distribution of what Mr. Kontra calls an ongoing syntactic merger in Hungarian in Hungary. This change means effectively that two possibilities merge to form a third. For instance, the two sentences Valoszinuleg kulfoldre fognak koltozni and Valoszinu, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni merge to form the new construction Valszinuleg, hogy kulfoldre fognak koltozni ("Probably they will move abroad."). When asked to choose "the most natural" of the sentences, one in four chose the new construction, and a chi-square test shows homogeneity in the sample. In other words, this syntactic change is spreading across the entire Hungarian-speaking region in the Carpathian Basin Mr. Kontra believes that politicians, educators, and other interested parties now have reliable and up-to-date information about each Hungarian minority. An awareness of Hungarian as a pluricentric language is being developed which elevates the status of contact varieties of Hungarian used by the minorities, an essential process, he believes, if minority languages are to be maintained.

A Robust Parser of Czech

Mr. Kubon's project was inspired by the growing need for an automatic, syntactic analyser (parser) of Czech, which could be used in the syntactic processing of large amounts of texts. Mr. Kubon notes that such a tool would be very useful, especially in the field of corpus linguistics, where creating a large-scale "tree bank" (a collection of syntactic representations of natural language sentences) is a very important step towards the investigation of the properties of a given language. The work involved in syntactically parsing a whole corpus in order to get a representative set of syntactic structures would be almost inconceivable without the help of some kind of robust (semi)automatic parser. The need for the automatic natural language parser to be robust increases with the size of the linguistic data in the corpus or in any other kind of text which is going to be parsed. Practical experience shows that apart from syntactically correct sentences, there are many sentences which contain a "real" grammatical error. These sentences may be corrected in small-scale texts, but not generally in the whole corpus. In order to be able to complete the overall project, it was necessary to address a number of smaller problems. These were; 1. the adaptation of a suitable formalism able to describe the formal grammar of the system; 2. the definition of the structure of the system's dictionary containing all relevant lexico-syntactic information, and the development of a formal grammar able to robustly parse Czech sentences from the test suite; 3. filling the syntactic dictionary with sample data allowing the system to be tested and debugged during its development (about 1000 words); 4. the development of a set of sample sentences containing a reasonable amount of grammatical and ungrammatical phenomena covering some of the most typical syntactic constructions being used in Czech. Number 3, building a formal grammar, was the main task of the project. The grammar is of course far from complete (Mr. Kubon notes that it is debatable whether any formal grammar describing a natural language may ever be complete), but it covers the most frequent syntactic phenomena, allowing for the representation of a syntactic structure of simple clauses and also the structure of certain types of complex sentences. The stress was not so much on building a wide coverage grammar, but on the description and demonstration of a method. This method uses a similar approach as that of grammar-based grammar checking. The problem of reconstructing the "correct" form of the syntactic representation of a sentence is closely related to the problem of localisation and identification of syntactic errors. Without a precise knowledge of the nature and location of syntactic errors it is not possible to build a reliable estimation of a "correct" syntactic tree. The incremental way of building the grammar used in this project is also an important methodological issue. Experience from previous projects showed that building a grammar by creating a huge block of metarules is more complicated than the incremental method, which begins with the metarules covering most common syntactic phenomena first, and adds less important ones later, especially from the point of view of testing and debugging the grammar. The sample of the syntactic dictionary containing lexico-syntactical information (task 4) now has slightly more than 1000 lexical items representing all classes of words. During the creation of the dictionary it turned out that the task of assigning complete and correct lexico-syntactic information to verbs is a very complicated and time-consuming process which would itself be worth a separate project. The final task undertaken in this project was the development of a method allowing effective testing and debugging of the grammar during the process of its development. The problem of the consistency of new and modified rules of the formal grammar with the rules already existing is one of the crucial problems of every project aiming at the development of a large-scale formal grammar of a natural language. This method allows for the detection of any discrepancy or inconsistency of the grammar with respect to a test-bed of sentences containing all syntactic phenomena covered by the grammar. This is not only the first robust parser of Czech, but also one of the first robust parsers of a Slavic language. Since Slavic languages display a wide range of common features, it is reasonable to claim that this system may serve as a pattern for similar systems in other languages. To transfer the system into any other language it is only necessary to revise the grammar and to change the data contained in the dictionary (but not necessarily the structure of primary lexico-syntactic information). The formalism and methods used in this project can be used in other Slavic languages without substantial changes.

Weak Senses as a Type of Semantic Information

'Weak senses' are a specific type of semantic information as opposed to assertions and presuppositions. The universal trait of weak senses is that they assume 'if' modality in negative contexts. In addition they exhibit several other diagnostic properties, e.g. they fill at least one of their valency places with a semantic element sensitive to negation (i.e. with an assertion or other weak sense), they normally do not fall within the scope of functors, do not play any role in causal relations, and resist intensification. As weak senses are widespread in lexical, grammatical and referential semantics, this notion holds the clue to phenomena as diverse as the oppositions little - a little, few - a few, edva ('hardly') - cut' ('slightly), where a little, a few, cut, convey 'weakly' approximately what little, few, and edva do in an assertive way, the semantics of the Russian perfect aspect, and the formation rules for conjunction strings. Zeldovich outlines a typology of weak senses, the main distinction being between weak senses unilaterally dependent upon the truthfulness of what they saturate their valency with, and weak senses exerting their own influence on the main situation. The latter, called, non-trivial, are instantiated by existential quantifiers involved in the semantics of indefinite pronouns, iterative verbs, etc.