The present paper offers a more macroscopic and system-oriented analysis of the tense-taxis-aspect-mood (TTAM) semantics of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system developed within the framework of grammaticalization-based maps and cognitive linguistics. By combining the maps (i.e. qualitative compositions of senses) and waves (i.e. qualitative-quantitative complexes of senses) into higher-level dynamic modules, i.e. currents, and by explaining the global system in terms of such currents, the study designs a possible way of expansion of the semantic maps’ model from a gram-oriented analysis to a more systemic perspective. Accordingly, higher level properties of the sub-modules of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system are postulated, the environments of grams are expanded from their immediate setting (the adjacent waves on the stream) to other, more distant, regions of the verbal organization, and a tentative dynamic model of the entire Biblical Hebrew verbal system is formulated.
The present article is concerned with the notion of ‘guilt’ as understood by the legal sciences and in the context of psychology and culture studies. Although legal connotations are unavoidable, ‘guilt’ is a term emotionally related to other feelings like ‘shame’, ‘fear’, ‘sadness’ etc. The analysis shall take a closer look at legal definitions of ‘guilt’ and ‘culpability’ at work in the American, Polish and German legal systems and refer the equivalents existing in these languages (wina,Schuld) to the concept of guilt understood as an emotion. As it turns out, legal definitions do not account for conceptual dimension of meaning and as such, they can only serve as departure points for further analysis to be complemented with cognitive analysis. ‘Guilt’ is a culturally determined and complex emotion that may be ‘dissected’ into several more basic emotional states. The underlying assumption is that there are differences in the understanding of the concept ‘guilt’ across languages which must be taken into account by the translators who deal with translational equivalents.
The aim of this article is to illustrate the most frequent conceptualisations of depression in the contemporary Italian media discourse. The analyses presented in the paper are mainly based on the cognitive theory of metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and form a part of a wider research topic regarding the differences in conceptualisation of depression depending on such factors as the language, the type of the discourse and the personal experience of the author concerning the state of depression. The study revealed that depression is represented the most frequently in the analysed corpus through the frame of disease, and by the metaphors DEPRESSION IS AN ENEMY and DEPRESSION IS A LOCATION, often situated down and taking the form of a container. Less numerous and regular were other kinds of its personifications and representations of depression as an object or danger.
This article first surveys the current, somewhat unproductive state of research into potential universals of translation. Then it considers in specific the “first translational response universal” (Malmkjær 2011), suggesting that it may be rooted in the cognitive mechanism of priming. Empirical evidence for this is next sought in the analysis of a set of 34 novice translations of the same short passage from Swedish into Polish, which are shown to exhibit the effects of priming to a considerable extent. Overall, the objective is to illustrate a possible way of investigating postulated translation universals: first identifying a cluster of cognitive mechanisms to motivate the universal, then determining the linguistic structures that are concrete manifestations of such mechanisms in languages meeting in translation. The proposed research procedure thus proceeds from a cognitive process to a detailed language structure, allowing for the examination of phenomena observed in the “third code” on the supra-cultural level.