In this article, we examine language in the context of globalization as a phenomenon constantly increasing in complexity presented through initial findings of the project "Globalization and the Development of Language Policy at & Scaron;koda Auto, a. s., over the Past 25 Years: Language Management in Everyday Practice". We focus on the company's internationalization within the Volkswagen Group and its expanding activities in India and Vietnam. Combining macro-approaches of the sociology of language and the micro-approaches of interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography, our analysis is guided by Language Management Theory providing fundamental analytical guidelines and a metalanguage. Key areas include linguistic diversity, especially German-English relations, videoconferencing practices, the semiotic role of the diacritic in the & Scaron;koda logo, and the interplay of global and local dynamics in a Czech border plant. Findings indicate emerging large-scale instances of language shift alongside increasing creative management of ever-evolving diversity.
Requests are an integral part of everyday communication, where speakers simultaneously manage practical needs and interpersonal relationships. Prior research has often characterised Russian requesting behaviour as predominantly direct, highlighting the prevalence of imperatives as the unmarked request format. As a result, the use of indirect and mitigated requests remains underexplored. This study investigates how Russian speakers formulate requests in spontaneous interaction. The study draws on annotated transcripts from the speech corpus Odin Rechevoy Den’ (‘One Day of Speech’) and adopts an Interactional Sociolinguistics framework complemented by a discursive approach to politeness. The analysis shows that speakers’ linguistic choices reflect their orientations to interactional contingencies and vary across request types. Requests for material objects or resources tend to be formulated through interrogatives that orient to the availability of the requested item. Requests for low-cost actions tend to be realised through imperatives, reflecting the routine and immediate nature of the action, while those for high-cost actions and for the cessation of an ongoing activity tend to involve more elaborated and mitigated sequences. The findings also reveal that indirectness and mitigation occur across all request types and function as spontaneous and unmarked interactional resources.
The article concerns the functioning of the class of parts of speech known as interjections in the lexical system of the Lower Sorbian language. The text is primarily based on the lexical material of Arno & scaron;t Muka's dictionary, pointing to various types of interjections in Lower Sorbian depending on the adopted classification criteria. Interjections are difficult to classify due to their ambiguous boundaries with other parts of speech. The article analyzes the types of interjections, their functions, and structural characteristics. In Lower Sorbian, interjections are morphologically productive, serving as roots for verbs, nouns, and diminutives. Muka's dictionary is a rich historical source for studying Lower Sorbian interjections. The analyses carried out are essentially diachronic and do not refer to the contemporary system of the Lower Sorbian language, which, as recent research shows, is extremely endangered. The interjections in Lower Sorbian are diverse, semantically rich, and structurally unique, especially the onomatopoeic group. Despite being marginalized in traditional grammar, interjections should be seen as a vital and productive part of the language.
This article constitutes a contrastive study of the French prefix mé- and its functional equivalents in Polish and Spanish. Drawing on a semantic-translational approach, the research aims to reconstruct the deep-level semantic structure of mé- by examining how French prefixed lexemes are rendered in the two target languages. The study is divided into three main sections. The first provides a synchronic and diachronic overview of the prefix mé-, tracing its possible Germanic origins and outlining its primary semantic features. The second section indicates the theoretical foundations of the semantic-translational method, presents the research corpus— compiled from bilingual dictionaries and parallel textual databases—and details the procedures for identifying and classifying Polish and Spanish equivalents of the studied prefix. The final section discusses the results of the analysis, revealing four fundamental semantic values of mé-: (1) negativity, (2) pejorativity, (3) error/inadequacy and (4) diminution/inferiority, along with their linguistic realizations in Polish and Spanish (i.e., negative prefixes, lexical periphrases, and words with pejorative or error/inadequacy meanings). The findings demonstrate a notable degree of cross-linguistic convergence in the realization of the semantic values of mé- in the two target languages.
