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Please note that Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik is published as a Journal in print and online from 2016 (Volume 76) onwards. All back volumes are still available in print.
Abstract
The aim of this essay is to problematize the ontology of Judeo-Spanish qua language. First, I argue that its traditional conceptualization as an autonomous, self-contained language is predicated on a (flawed) classical ontological framework that relies on so-called ‘named languages theory.’ Second, I contend that a more enlightened understanding of Judeo-Spanish as a linguistic phenomenon necessitates a paradigm shift toward a hauntological framework consistent with theoretical models such as translanguaging and revivalistics. I conclude that Judeo-Spanish is best understood as an ensemble of the only partially overlapping idiolects of people who share a common Sephardi cultural/ethnic identity and who manage to communicate with reasonable success. Third, I discuss the momentous implications of this shift in three domains: linguistics, minority rights, and education.
Philological studies containing important critically edited texts, translations and commentaries remain in need as before. Thousands of Armenian manuscripts await disclosure in order to become part of scholarly and popular discourse and take their place in a field that invites an interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach like few others.
Armenian literature from the seventeenth century up to the present is understudied and will amply repay scholarly engagement.
In recent decades, the study of Armenian material culture, mythology and folklore has made great strides, next to art and architecture.The series welcomes contributions in these extensive fields.
Armenian Texts and Studies deals with Armenian prehistory up to the modern and contemporary period and promotes research that applies methods current in sociology, anthropology and other social sciences next to those used in literary, linguistic and historical studies, including the study of Armenian cinema and modern media.
Abstract
In this short article we publish, with translations, a macaronic Hebrew cum Middle Greek religious poem, accompanied by a refrain in Ottoman Turkish, all written in Hebrew characters and fully vocalized. The text comes from a Karaite prayerbook printed in Venice in 1528 on behalf of the Constantinople Karaite community. This poem and its origins played a role in different manipulations of Karaite identities and history during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Abstract
We examine here the distribution of morphological case (e.g., accusative, genitive, and dative) among object complements of monotransitive verbs in Classical Greek (CG). Accusative-marked objects are generally deemed to be direct objects (DO), while dative- and genitive-marked complements are typically treated as syntactically or semantically separate, sometimes being treated as objects bearing exceptional/semantic/quirky case and sometimes being analyzed simply as indirect objects (IO). Restricting our focus to verbs which have a single complement, we can observe that the distribution of accusative (ACC), genitive (GEN), and dative (DAT) marking on these in CG is atypical. CG productively places DAT and GEN NP s alongside ACC NP s as a singular complement to monotransitive verbs, allowing them to occupy what would normally be thought of as the direct-object position, but for their GEN and DAT case-marking. We offer an analysis of these verbs and their semanto-syntactic collocations, seeking to understand what is communicated through the marking of either ACC, GEN, or DAT on complement NP s. We find first that ACC and GEN-marking verbs interact in a transitivity hierarchy, being set apart by the change of state of the object (following an analysis laid out by Luraghi 2010). Second, we find that DAT-marking verbs exist outside of this hierarchy, making up their own productive class of interaction verbs, those which denote a complex series of overlapping subevents (first laid out by Blume 1998). Thus, this study offers an analysis of a wide array of ACC, GEN, and DAT case-marking verbs collected from a corpus of nine Classical Greek authors, providing the first statistical analysis of the conundrum of ‘atypical’ case-selection patterns of Classical Greek monotransitive verbs, wherein non-ACC cases are used to mark what appear to be DO s.
Abstract
Term-based indexing of documents is conventionally implemented by stemmers or their corpus-based improvements, both of which encode implicit linguistic information. Terms are directly derived from document content such that a unique indexing approach is available at indexing run-time. For highly inflectional languages where term variation is high, such techniques are more error-prone. The main focus of the current study is the extraction and normalization of single terms and phrases and the proposal of authenticated control of indexing. The proposed approach relies on the use of explicit linguistic knowledge, appropriately encoded in large language resources. Such control guarantees the highest possible expansion factor for indexing terms as well as indexing consistency. Moreover, it offers a framework where different and eventually contradicting indexing criteria can be practiced, conventional and Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based Information Retrieval (IR) applications can be served, while adaptations can be made for tuning to a specific domain or corpus.