The study contributes to knowledge on how a man’s ego develops in an early age. The construal of egocentric perspective is observed in expressions of self-reference (the pronoun I is expressed explicitly). The method of longitudinal case study is used. Since Slovak language is pro-drop language (personal pronouns can be omitted) the research is set in pragmatic and social context. We examine the pragmatic function of utterances with the pronoun I and their dynamics. While at first the child refers to herself in third-person, at the end of toddlerhood the child can use the pronoun I even when talking about others. This indicates comprehension of reciprocity of perspectives (I versus you).
The study traces the development of morphological thinking about the Slovak language during the 90-year existence of the Slovenská reč journal. Morphology has been at the forefront of attention throughout the period, with the focus consistently on nouns and verbs. In the early years, contributions focused on normative morphology and the preservation of the purity of Slovak predominated along with the genre of diversity. The development of modern morphology begins with an orientation towards the description and classification of word classes and form-formation processes. A landmark was the publication of Morfológia slovenského jazyka (Morphology of the Slovak Language, 1966) with a system-structural description of the Slovak morphological system. By the end of the 1980s, interest in semantic-functional morphology intensified. The predominant genre is discussion. Since the 1990s, the methodological spectrum has been broadening. The sociolinguistic view of morphological variants, corpus morphology, morpho-pragmatics as well as the explanation of the dynamics of morphology and the morphological disposition of human beings are being promoted.
The research on the relationship between antepreterite (AnteP) and text focuses on the following questions: (a) To what extent is an antepreterite a living form in Slovak? (b) Does antepreterite function as a grapheme with a temporal function or is it a stylistic variant of the preterite (past tense)? (c) How do the functions of antepreterite correlate with the oral/written realization of the text and its stylistic differentiation (scientific/ journalistic style)? The research is carried out on the extensive material of the corresponding sub-corpora of the Slovak National Corpus and the Slovak Spoken Corpus. The results can be summarized as follows: (a) AnteP is a marginal form, its frequency in the written text has significantly decreased since the mid-1990s; in orally realized communication, its speakers are mainly in the 70-90 age range. At the same time, however, it is a living form in some specific functions: in spoken text, as a means of social and personal deixis, it characterizes a person using what he or she has had. In memoir narrative, it signals the experience of spatial, temporal, and generational distance. In the scientific style, the AnteP of communicative verbs dominates. It specifically functions as a means of intertextuality. In the 1st person singular (as I had told/ako som bol povedal; as I had written/ako som bol napísal) it refers to a communicative act from the quite recent past. From a temporal identifier, it becomes a pragmatic comment. In the journalistic style, the rate of representation of AnteP is the lowest, but the rate of innovation of its form and function is the highest. Antepreterite is most prominent in journalistic texts as a stylistic variant of preterite and a part of the individual personal style of an author.
The study explores when and why speakers in the dialogic communication refer to themselves through a combination of the verbal person with the personal pronoun “I”(i.e., an explicit self-reference), even though a verb endings alone indicate the person in the Slovak language. Traditionally, expressiveness, emotionality, emphasis and functional sentence perspective are considered to be the cause for explicit self-referencing. In this paper, we focus on two questions: (a) What are the verbs’ semantic classes that are used preferentially in the dialogue in the 1st person singular form? (b) Which verbs are used with the explicit self-reference most frequently? The research shows, that cognitive verbs (and those representing the inner world of the speaker) are among the verbs with the highest degree of explicit self-referencing. The paper concludes with the case study of explicit self-reference using cognitive verb “I do not know” as an example compared to implicit self-reference. We used the text-corpus method. The findings of the study are interpreted within the salience theory.
The paper presents current research activities in Slovak linguistics carried out by members of the Department of the Slovak language at the Faculty of Arts, University of Prešov. After introducing the history of the institution which celebrates the 70th anniversary of its existence (dating back to early 50’s of the 20th century) (Chapter 2), the scope of the Slovak language research is presented (Chapters 3 – 8). The range of these research interests is rather broad, spanning from lexicology, word-formation, morphemics, onomastics, morphosyntax, interdisciplinary investigation (developmental psycholinguistics, teolinguistics, sport and media linguistics), historical linguistics, dialectology, to the study of Slovak as a foreign language. Within each domain, the relevant projects and publications are described. Finally, the last chapter provides a detailed overview of the perspectives of further research in the field.
JavaScript jest wyłączony w Twojej przeglądarce internetowej. Włącz go, a następnie odśwież stronę, aby móc w pełni z niej korzystać.