Young Linguists' Seminar: Young Linguists' Seminar V: Linguistics and Its Applications in Specialised Contexts

The fifth meeting of Young Linguists' Seminar took place on 16th April 2015. The talks were guided by the following leitmotif:

Linguistics and Its Applications in Specialised Contexts

The following five papers were presented by linguists from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin and Maria Curie-Skłodowska University.

Izabela Batyra

Human Animal – Animal in Human: On an English Course Book for Veterinary Science Specialists A2-B1 Level – Demo Version

John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

Necessity is the mother of invention…

This research supplies the needs and expectations of all Polish and international non-native English speaking veterinary physicians working in or off the clinical settings, students, academics and the like specialist of veterinary medicine who wish to communicate in English on their professional arena.

Frequent conferences which DVMs are obliged to participate in to stay on the surface and keep their licence, delegations outside the country, international workshops or student exchange demand from the specialists to operate with exceptionally technical and undoubtedly complicated medical language.

The idea to write an English course book for veterinarians was born when my best friend and the most dedicated doctor of all my pets asked me to teach him general and specialized English. Although ESP has been expanding aggressively in the past few years satisfying English language needs of the majority of the professions, no single English course book for veterinary surgeons has been identified among the publishers.

The outcome of the research is the presentation of the teaching aid dedicated to cattle and swine and sample section ‘Cats and Dogs’ with various task types concentrating around receptive and productive skills as well as language areas, that is grammar and specialized lexis catering for all possible learning styles and learners’ preferences.

Articles from magazines:

Bojdo-Brodnica, T. (DVM) (2014, December) Bezpieczne odsadzanie prosiąt. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Akcja Polskiego Cukru za buraki?, p. 138.

Grabowski Kalisz, A. (2014, December) Problem po uszy. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Akcja Polskiego Cukru za buraki?, pp. 157-158.

Jajor, M. (2015, January) Przebiegła paratuberkuloza. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Nie ma rzetelnych zasad oceny ziarna, pp. 177-178.

Janusz, P. (2014, December) Nowe zasady bioasekuracji. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Akcja Polskiego Cukru za buraki?, pp. 134-135.

Janusz, P. (2014, December) Witalne mioty dały zarobić. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Akcja Polskiego Cukru za buraki?, pp. 136-141.

Kowalski, M. Z. (2015, January) Z chylatami żywienie mineralne może być tańsze. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Nie ma rzetelnych zasad oceny ziarna, pp. 161-164.

Kurek, A. (2015, January) Bez pracy nie ma…prosiąt. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Nie ma rzetelnych zasad oceny ziarna, pp. 136-139.

Kurek, A. (2015, January) Ropiejące maciory. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Nie ma rzetelnych zasad oceny ziarna, pp. 147-148.

Kurek, A. (2014, December) Zdążyć przed obrzękówką. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Akcja Polskiego Cukru za buraki?, pp. 159-160.

Lesiakowski, R. (2015, January) Genomika wkracza do obór. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Nie ma rzetelnych zasad oceny ziarna, pp. 173-176.

Pająk Grabica, K. (2014, December) Hodowcy świń lekceważą miko toksyny. Sposób na splayleg. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Akcja Polskiego Cukru za buraki?, p. 155.

Wieczorek, M. (2015, January) Inwazja kokcydiów. Top Agrar Polska, Nowoczesne Rolnictwo – Nie ma rzetelnych zasad oceny ziarna, pp. 179-180.

Articles form weekly magazines:

Dąbrowska, B. (2015, January) Ketoza niejedną ma postać. Tygonik Poradnik roliczny, p. 25.

Dąbrowska, B. (2015, January) Zasadowa niestrawność. Tygonik Poradnik roliczny, p. 21.

Course books:

Clare, A. & Wilson, JJ. (2011) Speakout. Intermediate Students’ Book with Active Book. Pearson Longman.

Clare, A. & Wilson, JJ. (2011) Speakout. Pre-Intermediate Students’ Book with Active Book. Pearson Longman.

Evans, V., Dooley, J., Tran, M. T (M.D) (2012) Career Paths. Medical. Express Publishing.

O’Sullivan, N. & Libbin, J. D. (2011) Career Paths. Agriculture. Express Publishing.

Links:

http://www.vetlive.com/

http://www.vet.cam.ac.uk/

http://www.wet.up.wroc.pl/en/

http://www.vet.cornell.edu/

http://www.westpointfarmvets.co.uk/

Paweł Tutka

On the translation of video games: challenges and opportunities

John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

The XX century showed a rapid development of new types of media, chiefly the television and film industries. In the second half of the last century, a new type of media was introduced – video games, which has grown into a booming industry since then. This new genre of the entertainment industry started to offer something new – a greater degree of interactivity on the part of the player (as opposed to television and films). As time progressed, the level of interactivity became the main driving force behind video games, resulting in their unprecedented popularity. Ultimately, game developers started shipping their products abroad, and this required qualified translators to deliver as best quality of the product as it was possible. With the games becoming ever more complex, they started to pose certain challenges for the translators who had to be ready to work with many varieties of text, depending on the genre of a given video game. However, translators may use the complexities of video games to their advantage – it provides them with a plethora of work. Additionally, the number of genres within the video game industry is constantly increasing, meaning that translators will be able to find types of text which suits them best. Last but not least, we will consider what qualities make a good translator of video games.

Rafał Augustyn

Polysemy in specialised translation: A cognitive account

Maria Curie-Skłodowska University

Polysemy does not only refer to lexical items but also to other aspects of language and cognition. In Cognitive Linguistics lexical items are held to be representations of cognitive categories stored in human mind as mental concepts. However, each lexical item may provide access to a number of different mental concepts. Since meaning is not given but construed on the basis of the stored mental concepts and individual experience, the construal of meaning is highly subjective, influenced by language and the conceptualisers themselves. Further, concepts are not stable but flexible and can undergo some changes over time, which additionally contributes to the abundance of polysemy in any natural language.

Polysemy is particularly problematic for translators, notably in case of specialised translation. For instance, in case of translation of legal texts, the conventional meaning of certain lexical items are juxtaposed with their specialised use, very frequently within the same text. For the translation to be successful the translator has to, first, properly construe the (terminologically ambiguous) ST, and then re-conceptualise it in such a manner that the TT-receiver’s conceptualisation of the TT is as close as possible to that of the ST.

The paper attempts at accounting for the intricacies of the mental operations taking place while the conceptualisation of polysemous lexical items unfolds in the translator’s mind using Vyvyan Evans’s (2009) Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models theory combined with the Conceptual Integration Theory proposed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002), and Ronald W. Langacker’s (2008) Current Discourse Space.

References

Evans, V. 2009. How Words Mean: Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models and Meaning Construction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fauconnier, G. & M. Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Langacker, R. W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar. A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Daria Bębeniec

The many pitfalls of polysemy: gaps and bridges between the different methodologies in Cognitive Linguistics

Maria Curie-Skłodowska University

In its over 30 years of research on polysemy, Cognitive Linguistics has embraced, quite unsurprisingly, a wide range of rather diverse methodological positions – from the early introspection-based approaches (Brugman 1981, Brugman and Lakoff 1988, Dewell 1994, Kreitzer 1997, Przybylska 2002, Tyler and Evans 2003) to the more recent corpus-driven perspectives and techniques (Gries 2006, Gries and Divjak 2009, Fabiszak et al. 2014, Glynn 2014a, Perek 2014, Robinson 2014). Perplexing to many, this diversity may also be seen as a strength, as it shows the complexity of the phenomenon at hand, and is a result of concerted efforts of a number of linguists, who, though employing and refining divergent methods, are certainly united by a set of shared theoretical assumptions and converging research goals.

In this presentation, adopting both an insider’s view on the problems inherent in introspective methods (Bębeniec 2010) and a neophyte’s stance on the possibilities offered by usage-based analyses (Bębeniec and Cudna In prep.), I will systematically examine the gaps and also search for the bridges between the distinct methodological frameworks for studying semantic variation in Cognitive Linguistics. In the end, I will review some of the recently articulated gap-bridging ideas (Glynn 2014b), stressing that both kinds of methodologies in question can be usefully deployed, though to different extents, to inform a cognitively plausible theory of language.

References

Bębeniec, D., 2010. Directional prepositions in Polish and English: towards a cognitive account. PhD dissertation, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin.

Bębeniec, D. and M. Cudna, In prep. “Constructional variation from a semasiological perspective: a corpus-based approach.”

Brugman, C., 1981. Story of OVER. MA thesis, University of California, Berkeley.

Brugman, C. and G. Lakoff, 1988. “Cognitive Topology and Lexical Networks,” in S. Small, G. Cottrell and M. Tanenhaus (eds.) Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Perspective from Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology and Artificial Intelligence, 477-508. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Dewell, R. B., 1994. “Over again: Image-schema transformations in semantic analyses,” Cognitive Linguistics 5 (4): 351-380.

Fabiszak, M., Hebda, A., Kokorniak, I. and K. Krawczak, 2014. “The semasiological structure of Polish myśleć ‘to think’: A study in verb-prefix semantics,” in D. Glynn and J. A. Robinson (eds.) Corpus Methods for Semantics. Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy, 223-251. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Glynn, D., 2014a. “The many uses of run: Corpus methods and Socio-Cognitive Semantics,” in D. Glynn and J. A. Robinson (eds.) Corpus Methods for Semantics. Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy, 117-144. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Glynn, D., 2014b. “Polysemy and synonymy: Cognitive theory and corpus method,” in D. Glynn and J. A. Robinson (eds.) Corpus Methods for Semantics. Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy, 7-38. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Gries, S. Th., 2006. “Corpus-based methods and cognitive semantics: The many senses of to run,” in S. Th. Gries and A. Stefanowitsch (eds.) Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics: Corpus-based Approaches to Syntax and Lexis, 57-99. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Gries, S Th. and D. Divjak, 2009. “Behavioral profiles: a corpus-based approaches towards cognitive semantic analysis,” in V. Evans and S. Pourcel (eds.) New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics, 57-75. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Kreitzer, A., 1997. “Multiple levels of schematization: A study in the conceptualization of space,” Cognitive Linguistics 8 (4): 291-325.

Perek, F., 2014. “Rethinking constructional polysemy: The case of the English conative construction,” in D. Glynn and J. A. Robinson (eds.) Corpus Methods for Semantics. Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy, 61-85. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Przybylska, R., 2002. Polisemia przyimków polskich w świetle gramatyki kognitywnej. Kraków: Universitas.

Robinson, J., 2014. “Quantifying polysemy in Cognitive Sociolinguistics,” in D. Glynn and J. A. Robinson (eds.) Corpus Methods for Semantics. Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy, 87-115. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Tyler, A. and V. Evans, 2003. The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning and Cognition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kinga Lis

Raison d'être for intertextual lexical divergences between the Wycliffite Psalters

John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

The objective of the paper is to establish the motivation behind the lexical divergences between otherwise uniform late-14th-century Middle English Wycliffite Psalters and observe how it affects the etymological make-up of the texts. For this purpose the paper analyses the nominal layer of the first fifty Psalms and tries to assign each case of divergence between the texts to one of four groups of probable causes, both intra- and extratextual, prompting the variation, while juxtaposing these nominal lexical items with the corresponding data from two earlier 14th-century Psalters – Richard Rolle's rendition and the Middle English Glossed Prose Psalter.