Category
Topic
Year
The form of asking questions, epistemic status and epistemic stance
One of the central problems in the analysis of asking questions is how the tools of asking (interrogative utterances in various forms and declarative questions pronounced with various intonations) might relate to asking questions as a social action.
The model and approach underlying the present study come from John Heritage, US sociologist and conversation analyst. Heritage trusts that in a general case the interactants have a different access to the topic of current conversation. This difference is termed as epistemic status. Heritage argues that when a question is formed, epistemic status prevails over morphosyntax and intonation, ultimately determining whether the given…
The model and approach underlying the present study come from John Heritage, US sociologist and conversation analyst. Heritage trusts that in a general case the interactants have a different access to the topic of current conversation. This difference is termed as epistemic status. Heritage argues that when a question is formed, epistemic status prevails over morphosyntax and intonation, ultimately determining whether the given…
Foreign Accent Corpus and studies of non-native speech
The article begins with an overview of the nature and theoretical models of foreign accent, then the Foreign Accent Corpus developed at the Laboratory of Phonetics and Speech Technology, Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, is introduced, and finally some research results are discussed. As a rule, adult language learners are faced with difficulties in the pronunciation of foreign sounds and these difficulties result in a foreign accent. In order to study different aspects of foreign accent our accent corpus was initiated in 2006. The aim of the Estonian Foreign Accent Corpus (EFAC) is to provide systematic and…
Bias of affect in Estonian lexis and what to do with it
A practical need to make Estonian synthetic speech more natural and easier to follow has directed researcher attention to human emotions as reflected in natural speech. The article contemplates how the emotion or, more generally, affectivity of the author of a written sentence could be recognized from lexical cues. It appears that it is not only content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) that deserve attention in this respect, but also various function words (pronouns, deictics, intensifiers etc.) Five classes of the lexical bias of affect are distinguished: descriptive emotion vocabulary, expressive emotion vocabulary, evaluative markers, presence markers and intensity markers; also,…
The beauty (and use) of the study of language contacts
The article clarifies the importance of contact linguistics in the Estonian context. It is argued that the current sociolinguistic situation is highly relevant for a general contact linguistic research (small size of the country, different linguistic communities, post-Soviet changes in language policies and, subsequently, bilingualization of Russian-speakers, and arrival of English as a new agent on the contact scene). Two recent contact-induced language change models are introduced and compared: the code-copying framework by L. Johanson and the PAT- and MAT-replication model by J. Matras and J. Sakel. The former has been used in the Estonian situation by several researchers. The…
On ‘linguistic colonialism’ in the dictionary
Dictionary work is, in a sense, like a river with linguistics standing on one bank and the user on the other. The dictionary has been trying to keep hold of both, sometimes at the expense of one, sometimes of the other. My earlier discussions of the relations between lexicography and linguistics (Langemets 2002, 2010) have mainly been focused on linguistics. Although the present article also has its impetus in linguistics, its focus lies elsewhere, notably, on lexicography as a highly applied area, as well as on the user. According to Aarhus School such a turnaround means quite a revolution in…
Emotions – the present and future of speech technology
One of the challenges of human-computer interaction is how to make a computer recognize emotions from human speech and react adequately. The article provides a survey of the role of speech technology in affective computing, explains the concept of emotion in that field, introduces different approaches to emotion classification (categorical and dimensional, combined), and describes different emotion corpora (acted, elicited, spontaneous) as well as the methods of collecting emotional speech for each kind of corpus.
The paper highlights recent and ongoing work at the Institute of the Estonian Language in affective computing, in particular the creation and content of the Estonian…
The paper highlights recent and ongoing work at the Institute of the Estonian Language in affective computing, in particular the creation and content of the Estonian…
On the epistemological status of applied linguistics
As a result of today’s political and economic pressures, academic disciplines can no longer distance themselves entirely from the mundane practical problems of the societies that aliment them. They even cannot restrict themselves to just describing or interpreting those problems. Nowadays, all academic disciplines are increasingly required to justify the resources allocated to them and to shift their focus from problem understanding to problem solving.
This paper discusses the epistemological status of Applied Linguistics. It will argue in favour of the position that Applied Linguistics is neither an autonomous discipline nor a loosely connected set of issues and interests. Rather, it…
This paper discusses the epistemological status of Applied Linguistics. It will argue in favour of the position that Applied Linguistics is neither an autonomous discipline nor a loosely connected set of issues and interests. Rather, it…
Räägiks lingvistikast
It is discussed how knowledge about language and its functioning is or could be applied to fields where language professionals are active (teaching languages and cultures, translation, lexicography, editing and other communication advisory, media-analysis, terminology, language technology, etc.). All these professionals work for others to succeed in verbal communication.
On the background, the effects of globalization and formation of cross-cultural identity groups within society are discussed. In all these new groups beyond a traditional opaque language society, English is used as a lingua franca. According to Lotman’s (1984) theory, semiosis and development of human cognition, knowledge, and cultural values never take…
On the background, the effects of globalization and formation of cross-cultural identity groups within society are discussed. In all these new groups beyond a traditional opaque language society, English is used as a lingua franca. According to Lotman’s (1984) theory, semiosis and development of human cognition, knowledge, and cultural values never take…
Applied linguistics?
What is applied linguistics has been, first and foremost, a question on the mind of applied linguists themselves. The opening article by Karlfried Knapp, professor of applied linguistics from Germany, considers the status and essence of the discipline from several aspects, emphasising that to-day the discipline covers many linguistic problems and aspects, such as multilingualism, lexicography, corpus linguistics, translation, language technology, language policy, and professional communication. Krista Kerge looks for the boundary between applied linguistics and the rest, asking whether drawing such a boundary is really necessary. Her emphasis lies on the mediating role of applied linguistics between theory and…
’Free man’ in Eduard Bornhöhe’s The Avenger
The article deals with the most prominent text of the first wave of Estonian historical fiction, which is Eduard Bornhöhe’s Tasuja (1880,”The Avenger”). The novella is exemplary of the role of historical fiction as the medium of cultural memory in the Estonian nation building period of the second half of the 19th century. However, while the previous research on the text has underscored the creation of the figure of a militant national hero, the article explores the trope of the ’free man’ created in the novella, searching its roots in the contemporary historical culture, social reality as well as literature.…
Reversed polarity rhetorical questions in Estonian everyday interaction
The article gives an overiew of reversed polarity rhetorical questions (RPQ-s) in Estonian everyday interaction. RPQ-s are rhetorical questions that convey strong reversed polarity assertions. The data for this article comes from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu. A total of 42 RPQ-s from different everyday conversations were analysed using the methodology of interactional linguistics and conversation analysis.
The article focuses on the grammatical construction, sequential position and interactional purposes of the RPQ-s. The analysis shows that the grammatical construction of RPQ-s does not differ from that of information asking questions. Therefore some RPQ-s can be interpreted…
The article focuses on the grammatical construction, sequential position and interactional purposes of the RPQ-s. The analysis shows that the grammatical construction of RPQ-s does not differ from that of information asking questions. Therefore some RPQ-s can be interpreted…
Otto Wilhelm Masing als aufklärerischer Kinder- und Jugendautor
Otto Wilhelm Masing (1763-1832) gilt in der estnischen Kulturgeschichte als Aufklärer par exellence. Auch in der Geschichte der estnischen Kinderliteratur wurden seine Verdienste gewürdigt, weil er im Jahre 1795 ein ABC-Buch mit weltlichen Lesetexten veröffentlichte, das einzigartig und seiner Zeit voraus war. Masing hat noch weitere ABC-Bücher, didaktische Erzählungen und religiöse Texte für Jugendliche veröffentlicht, die allerdings bisher noch nicht untersucht sind. Der vorliegende Artikel nimmt alle seine Werke, die an Kinder und Jugendliche gerichtet sind, unter genauere Betrachtung und analysiert ihre inhaltlichen und formalen Eigenschaften sowie sucht ihre möglichen Vorbilder.
Den größeren Teil seines Kinder- und Jugendwerkes bilden religiöse Texte,…
Den größeren Teil seines Kinder- und Jugendwerkes bilden religiöse Texte,…
vagel – a tricky etymological knot?
The article considers the possible Baltic origin of vagel : vagla : `vakla ’worm, larva’, which has a South Estonian background, but is nowadays also used in the North-Estonian based common and standard language. The dialectal variants etymologically associated with the word vagel are vakl, vagõl, vaul/vaal/vual/ voul/vaun/vouv ’bot, swelling caused by gadfly maggots under animal skin’. Nearly all Finnic words currently or formerly containing the sequence *kl, have been proved to be borrowed stems, some of them being old Baltic loanwords like kael ’neck’ (< *kakla), tael ’tinder’ (< *takla), some old Germanic ones, e.g. nael ’nail’, nõel ’needle’, sõel ’sieve’ and probably also pael ’ribbon’. Vocalization of the syllable-final stop occurring in the North Estonian dialect…
Was Jakob Liiv the author of the first Estonian sonnets?
According to Bernard Kangro’s Eesti soneti ajalugu („History of the Estonian sonnet”, 1938) the first Estonian sonnet ever written was Õnnesoov isamaale („Congratulation to Fatherland”) by Matthias Johann Eisen, published in 1881, which has ever since been regarded as the birth year of the Estonian sonnet.
However, there are two Estonian sonnets dated to earlier years by their author Jakob Liiv (1859–1938). The sonnet Isale 50 aastaseks sündimise päevaks („To Father on his 50th anniversary”) bears the date 1878, and Asjata („In vain”) – 1880. Both were published later than Eisen’s poem: Isale. . . .in 1886 (undated) and 1903 (dated), while Asjata was…
However, there are two Estonian sonnets dated to earlier years by their author Jakob Liiv (1859–1938). The sonnet Isale 50 aastaseks sündimise päevaks („To Father on his 50th anniversary”) bears the date 1878, and Asjata („In vain”) – 1880. Both were published later than Eisen’s poem: Isale. . . .in 1886 (undated) and 1903 (dated), while Asjata was…
Regularities of the Estonian system of declension
The article offers a description of the Estonian declensional system. The underlying principle is that of W. Wurzel’s concept of stable and unstable inflectional classes. Basing its claims on frequency data, the article presents a conceptual implicational structure of the nominal paradigm, headed by the nominative singular. The article also shows that the extramorphological properties of a word comprise the derivational structure (together with the knowledge of the base), the phonological properties of the nominative singular, and the foreignness of the word. The important phonological properties are: the final phonemes of the word, the length of the final syllable, in…
Change of place names in Pöide parish
The article reports a study of changes in place names used in Pöide parish, focussing on three time periods from the end of the 18th century until today. The necessity for place names depends on people’s need to communicate and identify a certain place, while survival of the names critically depends on their use. Both social changes and changes in nature may be the reason for changes in place names. Place names can be classified into cultural and nature names. This classification is expedient, because the names change differently as do their referents. Although nearly half of the names of…
On some words erroneously labelled as Latvian loanwords
The article deals with a dozen South-Estonian words which Kalev Kalkun (2012) has taken for Latvian loanwords. Actually, most of them are of a different origin. The lexemes kostum(m)a ’to thaw up; to soften’, klympama ’to limp’, mäürämmä ’to growl’ and, maybe also räüs ’hail’ and räütmä ’to trample down; to tousle’ are genuine. It is likely that some of the words, especially klympama and mäürämmä are expressive. The general form of klympama is (k)lVmp(s)V, cf. klimpama, limpama, lompama, lumpama ’to limp’ etc. A borrowing from Germanic languages is not excluded either, cf. the English „limp”. The word räüstämä ’to…
„Great stories” of a small nation – self-presentation constructed through folktales
The article discusses how rumours and legends work together in creating national and personal identity. The subject matter is a narrative cycle centered around so-called stories of descendence. According to these stories, a number of famous people such as Harry S. Truman, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Boris Yeltsin, Boris Becker, Ayrton Senna da Silva, Lady Diana etc are either Estonians or have Estonian ancestors. Following these stories through many different sources and material (archival texts, memories, diaries, literature, media, popculture) we can observe how vibrant this discourse has been and still is today. We may take these stories with…
The object in Estonian impersonal clauses
The paper examines whether the use of the typical subject case, the nominative, with the total object in the impersonal clause could be possibly accompanied by transference of even some more subject characteristics to such object, and whether the total object has more characteristics of the subject than does the partial object.
There is no subject in the Estonian impersonal construction, while the only overt argument is the object. In active clauses, the case of the total object is usually genitive and the case of the partial object is partitive. In impersonal clauses, the total object is in the nominative which…
There is no subject in the Estonian impersonal construction, while the only overt argument is the object. In active clauses, the case of the total object is usually genitive and the case of the partial object is partitive. In impersonal clauses, the total object is in the nominative which…
The smellscape of Palanumäe
Smell is one of the most powerful human sensations evoking memories. A single whiff may bring back images from decades ago. When reading the novel series Minge üles mägedele („Go Up the Hills”) (prologue + 12 volumes) by Mats Traat one can hardly avoid sensing the importance of smells. Traat’s vivid sense of smell makes him almost unique among the Estonian authors. Thus his novels represent, inter alia, an Estonian history in smells from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century.
In the mid-19th an Estonian may still easily get chastised in the stables of the manor and feel the sickening smell…
In the mid-19th an Estonian may still easily get chastised in the stables of the manor and feel the sickening smell…