The present article studies the properties of the phrase Como si no hubiera (un) mañana (‘As if there were no tomorrow’), which more frequently occurs in European Spanish than in other diatopic varieties of that language. As it is shown in the article, the phrase modifies verbs and verbal predicates, being able to perform intensifying quantification.

This article is devoted to the German classes of particles: Gradpartikel (degree particle) and Fokuspartikel (focus particle), which are assigned divergent contents in different grammars and lexicons. In addition to this, a problem with didactic implications is the inconsistency of terminology. For example, Helbig/Buscha (2001) apply the term Gradpartikel to expressions that Hentschel/Weydt (2013) classify as Fokuspartikel. Engel (2009), on the other hand, refers to the expressions as Gradpartikel, which in Hentschel/Weydt (2013) represent the classes Fokuspartikel and Intensivpartikel. There are more similar inconsistencies in the literature with regard to class names and the inclusion of particles within them. The aim of this article is to revise the classification criteria and analyse the distinguishing characteristics of these classes and to put the terminology in order. The choice of terms in this article was determined by the primary function of the class: Fokuspartikel is named according to the function of focusing attention on something (German: fokussieren), while Gradpartikel is named according to the function of reinforcing (German: gradieren).

The present article demonstrates that languages tend to contain dispersals – a subtype of conative calls used to chase animals – that are built around voiceless sibilants. This tendency is both quantitative (i.e., voiceless-sibilant dispersals are common across languages and in a single language) and qualitative (i.e., sibilants contribute very significantly to the phonetic substance of such dispersals). This fact, together with a range of formal similarities exhibited by voiceless-sibilant dispersals encapsulated by the pattern [kI/Uʃ] suggests that the presence of voiceless sibilants in dispersals is not arbitrary. Overall, voiceless-sibilant dispersals tend to comply with the general phonetic profile associated with the prototype of CACs and dispersals, postulated recently in scholarship, thus corroborating the validity of this prototype.

Presented paper deals with the morphological category of aspect in Cantonese. Given the lack of a morphological category of tense in Cantonese, aspect holds a particular position in this system, as it is the sole morphological means expressing temporal relations. The aim of the paper is to present the functioning of the various aspects of Cantonese, both perfective and imperfective, based on the theoretical framework presented beforehand, which draws on the previous achievements of linguists in this field. The second section presents what specific morphological means are used to express the category of aspect in Cantonese, which is then followed by a brief discussion of the relation between resultative verb compounds and the perfective aspect. The last, and by far the largest section, presents corpus material which exemplifies the use of different aspect markers. The paper is an attempt to respond to the hitherto lack of consensus among Sinologists about the number as well as the types of aspects that occur in Cantonese.

The paper aims to test a hypothesis of introducing free speech in Polish translations instead of censored renderings typical of post-World War II reality after 1989 when communists lost the parliamentary elections (4th June) and stopped ruling Poland. The new political reality of a democratic system was reasserted by abolishing the censorship apparatus in 1990.
The analysis is based on articles from a magazine Forum. Przegląd Prasy Światowej, which are Polish translations of 10 source texts (STs) - selected articles concerning Polish issues from The New York Times. The STs and their Polish translations have been compared in detail to be able to evaluate the target texts (TTs) according to their correspondence with the STs.
In lieu of the censorship rule of hiding unwanted content and manipulating the audience, also with the propaganda language ( Newspeak), after 1990, the only remaining type of information flow blockage was self-censorship or superiors’ interference. The analysis will discover how topics changed, what happened to the language of propaganda, how the contents of STs are revealed in translations, and what translation techniques are applied in the process of transferring the ST message. The questions posed are, first, how accurate the translations after 1990 are, and second, what reasons might have occurred to have avoided the publication of some contents.
The analysis will be the basis for evaluating translators’ ethics in ST content delivery by reference to Andrew Chesterman (1997, 2001, 2018), Anthony Pym (2001, 2012), Jeremy Munday (2012), Juliane House (2015), and others.

The paper presents the most overall project of Hungarian dialectology of the past few decades and deals with the partial result of its sociolinguistic survey. The interviews analysed were recorded in Western Hungary as part of the New General Atlas of Hungarian Dialects project between 2007 and 2012. The project, funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and organized by the Geolinguistics Research Group of the Eötvös Loránd University, asked the participants about sociolinguistic issues at several data collection sites in the Hungarian language area, in addition to surveying dialectological phenomena. For example: Do you speak dialects here in this town? Do they speak better here than in the neighboring settlements? Do you speak in the same way in a city or official place as at home, in a family circle? Have you ever been mocked because of your dialect speech? Given that tens of thousands of hours of the recordings have not yet been processed in a systematic and comprehensive way, the first half of the study provides numerical and detailed data on how the planned program of the research group was realized in practice regarding, for the time being, the Western Hungarian data collection sites. The second half of the study presents partial results on the language and dialect awareness, attitudes and use of the respondents by analysing the sociolinguistic interviews recorded in this area. The study provides a more accurate description of the specifics in the archive of the New General Atlas of Hungarian Dialects project, as well as what the recorded data reveal on the linguistic mentality of the Western Hungarian speech community in the beginning of the 21st century. This is just one of the numerous research topics offered by the enormous archive.

Applying frame semantics, usage-based construction grammar, and quantitative corpus-based methodology, this article seeks to explore the nature of the extraposed construction with past participles complemented by that-clauses. To this end, the author extracts the occurrences of the It BE V_en that-construction from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), determines its structural, semantic, distributional, and discourse-functional features, and identifies verbs that are strongly associated with the construction in question. The study meaningfully contributes to a growing body of research on it-extraposition by conducting a qualitative and quantitative analysis of one of its variants, a grammatical pattern with past participles that has not been hitherto investigated in much detail from a quantitative corpus- based perspective.

This paper investigates left-dislocated free relatives in Old English. On the theoretical level, it contributes to the ongoing discussion on the syntax of free relatives. It confirms a sharp distinction between wh- free relatives and demonstrative free relatives. The former type favours the Comp analysis, whereas the latter class is amenable to both the Comp and Head analyses. On the empirical level, it provides evidence that the Comp analysis with wh- pronouns is selected mainly on the basis of pied piping/stranding facts, while case marking regulates the choice of an appropriate analysis with demonstrative free relatives with þe. This corpus-based study also offers some quantitative information on the frequent patterns and cases commonly found in them.

The present paper is an empirical, corpus-based study of the Polish translations of Shakespeare’s agentive neologisms in -er in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The inspiration for the analysis was Kalaga’s book Nomina Agentis in the Language of Shakespearean Drama (2016), where the author selects 39 Shakespeare’s agentive neologisms in - er. The paper surveys qualitative and quantitative tendencies of translation techniques adopted by nineteenth and twentieth-century translators occurring in the corpus placed against the context of general discussion on the translation of neologisms. A brief discussion concerning word formation processes with the suffix - er in the current and Early Modern English systems of word formation precedes the analysis.

The paper compares the employment of the definite article in the Gothic version of the Gospel of Luke and in its Greek counterpart which served as the basis for the Gothic translation. Although the Gothic text is usually said to be a word-for-word reflection of the Greek text, we demonstrate that just like in the case of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John, which were of concern in our previous studies, there are enormous differences between the two languages especially in the domain of the definite article, not only in terms of amount but also in terms of the cases used – nominative, genitive, dative or accusative.

Many legal texts are produced in repetitive and standardised communication situations; they are therefore subject to unification and are consequently characterised by formulaicity. Formulaicity can be regarded not only as a significant but also as a constitutive textual property. The aim of this article is to attempt to present formulaicity as a textual property and descriptive category of legal texts and to describe its characteristics both at the level of text structure and at the level of formulation, using the example of the German text type 'Gesetzestext'.

The article studies the use of linking adverbials (LAs) in English-medium articles by Polish and Anglophone scholars representing medicine and psychology, attempting to reveal discipline- and culture-specific preferences in the choice, frequency and distribution of linkers. The results show that disciplinary and linguacultural constraints impact on LA use. Variation across disciplines reflects differences in the knowledge base and its rhetorical management, as there are significantly more LAs in psychology than in medicine. Cross-cultural variation determines the choice of specific LA (sub)categories in line with the authors’ linguacultural backgrounds, target readers and publication contexts. These findings can raise academic writers’ awareness of culture- and discipline-driven aspects of adverbial cohesion in English academic prose.

This study presents a potential solution to a long-standing question of the phonological representation of short diphthongs. Their mere existence in Old English, the West-Saxon dialect, in particular, has been a matter of great controversy among historical phonologists and beyond. Some attention has been paid to short diphthongs attested in Icelandic by structuralists and phoneticians. Additionally, glide emergence, where a short vowel is expected, seems to take place in the present- day Sursilvan dialect of the Romansh language. What these languages have in common is that diphthongs occur in specific contexts, namely, they are allowed before consonants that are marked by what might be defined as secondary articulation. In this paper, in order to account for the occurrence of short diphthongs in these contexts, I adopt a structural model of phonological representations whereby glide emergence is the result of the interplay between a weak, empty-headed onset and the preceding nucleus.

Among the most important expressions of the cultural identity of the Silesians are the Silesian dialect and Silesian cuisine. The German-Polish cultural and linguistic contacts that have been present in Silesia for centuries are also manifested in the culinary vocabulary of the regionʼs inhabitants. In addition to numerous loan words of German provenance, which have also been incorporated into Polish literary language, many other lexemes are found in Silesian variety that are related to eating and drinking and have only regional distribution. From a contact linguistic perspective, the article focuses on the court terms of German provenance present in the Silesian dialect, mainly addressing the various forms of borrowing.

The article discusses the use of metaphors in the terminology of astronomy and astrophysics. The terminology of these fields is relatively stable, characterized by terminological diversity, thus allowing to draw sufficiently general conclusions. Three cases are to be considered: (a) first, the metaphor as a powerful source of terms, assuming the denominative function, (b) the terminological metaphor which leaves a certain domain and which penetrates into the general language, which is sometimes called determinologization, and, (c) finally, the terminological metaphor migrating from one specialized domain to other terminologies in which it is newly used to denote another concept, this phenomenon sometimes being referred to as transterminologization. The three processes are analysed and documented, using French and Czech examples, excerpted from specialised texts (encyclopaedic dictionary and newspaper articles).

The computing performance optimization of the Short-Lag Spatial Coherence (SLSC) method applied to ultrasound data processing is presented. The method is based on the theory that signals from adjacent receivers are correlated, drawing on a simplified conclusion of the van Cittert-Zernike theorem. It has been proven that it can be successfully used in ultrasound data reconstruction with despeckling. Former works have shown that the SLSC method in its original form has two main drawbacks: time-consuming processing and low contrast in the area near the transceivers. In this study, we introduce a method that allows to overcome both of these drawbacks.

The presented approach removes the dependency on distance (the “lag” parameter value) between signals used to calculate correlations. The approach has been tested by comparing results obtained with the original SLSC algorithm on data acquired from tissue phantoms.

The modified method proposed here leads to constant complexity, thus execution time is independent of the lag parameter value, instead of the linear complexity. The presented approach increases computation speed over 10 times in comparison to the base SLSC algorithm for a typical lag parameter value. The approach also improves the output image quality in shallow areas and does not decrease quality in deeper areas.

The Open Seminar on Acoustics is an annual conference, the largest acoustics conference in the country. It has been bringing all Polish acousticians together for over sixty years. It is organized in turns by different divisions of Polish Acoustical Society – in 2019 by the Poznan Division with the Institute of Acoustics, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and Committee on Acoustics of Polish Academy of Science. The conference presents all sections of acoustics, such as: physical acoustics, technical, environmental, speech, hearing, musical, architectural acoustics, etc. The seminar is joined with special session “New trends in psychoacoustics in tribute to professors: Józef Zwisłocki and Andrzej Rakowski” and the Workshop “Noise protection in regulations – current state and directions of changes” (in Polish). We also invite you to the special session “Advances in research in the field of audio acoustics and sound engineering – ISSET 2019”.

The human voice is one of the basic means of communication, thanks to which one also can easily convey the emotional state. This paper presents experiments on emotion recognition in human speech based on the fundamental frequency. AGH Emotional Speech Corpus was used. This database consists of audio samples of seven emotions acted by 12 different speakers (6 female and 6 male). We explored phrases of all the emotions – all together and in various combinations. Fast Fourier Transformation and magnitude spectrum analysis were applied to extract the fundamental tone out of the speech audio samples. After extraction of several statistical features of the fundamental frequency, we studied if they carry information on the emotional state of the speaker applying different AI methods. Analysis of the outcome data was conducted with classifiers: K-Nearest Neighbours with local induction, Random Forest, Bagging, JRip, and Random Subspace Method from algorithms collection for data mining WEKA. The results prove that the fundamental frequency is a prospective choice for further experiments.

The most challenging in speech enhancement technique is tracking non-stationary noises for long speech segments and low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). Different speech enhancement techniques have been proposed but, those techniques were inaccurate in tracking highly non-stationary noises. As a result, Empirical Mode Decomposition and Hurst-based (EMDH) approach is proposed to enhance the signals corrupted by non-stationary acoustic noises. Hurst exponent statistics was adopted for identifying and selecting the set of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) that are most affected by the noise components. Moreover, the speech signal was reconstructed by considering the least corrupted IMF. Though it increases SNR, the time and resource consumption were high. Also, it requires a significant improvement under nonstationary noise scenario. Hence, in this article, EMDH approach is enhanced by using Sliding Window (SW) technique. In this SWEMDH approach, the computation of EMD is performed based on the small and sliding window along with the time axis. The sliding window depends on the signal frequency band. The possible discontinuities in IMF between windows are prevented by the total number of modes and the number of sifting iterations that should be set a priori. For each module, the number of sifting iterations is determined by decomposition of many signal windows by standard algorithm and calculating the average number of sifting steps for each module. Based on this approach, the time complexity is reduced significantly with suitable quality of decomposition. Finally, the experimental results show the considerable improvements in speech enhancement under non-stationary noise environments.

The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between tinnitus pitch and maximum hearing loss, frequency range of hearing loss, and the edge frequency of the audiogram, as well as, to analyze tinnitus loudness at tinnitus frequency and normal hearing frequency.

The study included 212 patients, aged between 21 to 75 years (mean age of 54.4 ± 13.5 years) with chronic subjective tinnitus and sensorineural hearing loss. For the statistical data analysis we used Chisquare test and Fisher’s exact test with level of significance p < 0:05.

Tinnitus pitch corresponding to the frequency range of hearing loss, maximum hearing loss and the edge frequency was found in 70.8%, 37.3%, and 16.5% of the patients, respectively. The majority of patients had tinnitus pitch from 3000 to 8000 Hz corresponding to the range of hearing loss (p < 0:001). The mean tinnitus pitch was 3545 Hz ± 2482. The majority (66%) of patients had tinnitus loudness 4–7 dB SL. The mean sensation level at tinnitus frequency was 4.9 dB SL ± 1.9, and 13 dB SL ± 2.9 at normal hearing frequency.

Tinnitus pitch corresponded to the frequency range of hearing loss in majority of patients. There was no relationship between tinnitus pitch and the edge frequency of the audiogram. Loudness matching outside the tinnitus frequency showed higher sensation level than loudness matching at tinnitus frequency.

The effects of friction were observed in electric guitar strings passing over an electric guitar saddle. The effects of changing the ratio of the diameter of the winding to the diameter of the core of the string, the angle through which the string is bent, and the length on either side of the saddle were measured. Relative tensions were deduced by plucking and measuring the frequencies of vibration of the two portions of string. Coefficients of friction consistent with the capstan equation were calculated and were found to be lower than 0.26 for wound strings (nickel plated steel windings on steel cores) and lower than 0.17 for unwound (tin plated steel) strings. The largest values of friction were associated with strings of narrower windings and wider cores and this may be due to the uneven nature of the contact between the string and saddle for wound strings or due the surface of the windings deforming more, encouraging fresh (and therefore higher friction) metal to metal contact. It is advised to apply lubrication under the saddle to string contact point after first bringing the string up to pitch rather than before in order to prevent this fresh metal to metal contact.

The paper presents the key-finding algorithm based on the music signature concept. The proposed music signature is a set of 2-D vectors which can be treated as a compressed form of representation of a musical content in the 2-D space. Each vector represents different pitch class. Its direction is determined by the position of the corresponding major key in the circle of fifths. The length of each vector reflects the multiplicity (i.e. number of occurrences) of the pitch class in a musical piece or its fragment. The paper presents the theoretical background, examples explaining the essence of the idea and the results of the conducted tests which confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for finding the key based on the analysis of the music signature. The developed method was compared with the key-finding algorithms using Krumhansl-Kessler, Temperley and Albrecht-Shanahan profiles. The experiments were performed on the set of Bach preludes, Bach fugues and Chopin preludes.