Philologia

Patologija (ne)normalnog u drami Bolnica u doba revolucije Keril Čerčil

Svjetlana Ognjenović — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Caryl Churchill’s The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution is a documentary play based on Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric reports about the causes and nature of mental disorders, described in his books Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, as well as on Freud’s case study of Daniel Schreber, a judge diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia who wrote about his illness in his own memoirs. The play relies on the anti-psychiatry model by R.D. Laing, who opposed repressive methods of the traditional psychology and psychiatry and defined neurotic disorders as alternative ways of understanding the world. The purpose of this paper is to offer an extensive analysis of the play that deals with the imperative issue of oppressive treatment of the other, be it in the strictly political terms of colonialized countries such as Algiers, or personal exploitation and suffocation of one’s individual self as in still popular authoritarian parenting.

A Word from the Editors

Biljana Čubrović — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Digital Media and Slang in the ESL Classroom: Hungarian ESL Teachers and Students’ Views

Adrianna Kostic, Andrea Burai — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Slang has always been an integral part of language use, which cannot be ignored when examining people’s everyday conversational use of language. With the emergence of digital media, including social media, the trends in slang use have also changed considerably, which is important to explore if we want to gain a deeper insight into the role of slang in this medium and the personal views associated with it. The aim of this study is two-fold: first, to gain insight into how native Hungarian ESL students and teachers use and perceive slang; and second, to assess the extent to which slang is present in the ESL classrooms. The research questions focused on how ESL students and teachers used their L1 and L2 in digital (social) media (1), what roles slang and digital media played in their ESL classrooms (2), and what teachers’ and students’ views were on the incorporation of slang into the ESL classrooms in terms of practicality and usefulness (3). Results revealed that the use of digital and social media were regarded as important and considered as integral parts of the participants’ daily routines, being widespread among both teachers and students. The findings also showed the participants’ vast need for knowing and using slang in their everyday lives. Despite these views, most respondents also emphasized the fact that slang is not present in Hungarian ESL classrooms, and they do not get sufficient help nor support in schools when it comes to more informal ways of language use.

Intercultural Communication Sensitivity – A Prerequisite for Developing Intercultural Communication Competence

Natka Alagozovska, Nina Daskalovska, Adrijana Hadji-Nikolovna — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This study aims to prove that teachers in the Eastern part of the Republic of North Macedonia are still lacking intercultural training and have not developed the two prerequisites of intercultural communication competence: intercultural communication awareness and intercultural communication sensitivity. Using a questionnaire for teachers which was distributed in high-schools in Strumica (R. N. Macedonia) and sent to teachers in Ruse (R. Bulgaria) online, the level of intercultural awareness was measured. The results reveal that 63% of the participants have medium level of Intercultural awareness and there is no difference of the level of intercultural awareness in terms of the place of living i.e., the country.

Grammar and Communication: Two Language Teaching Approaches

Bojana Vidović — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This paper analyzes two teaching approaches, the Grammar-Translation Method (GTM) and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). A brief history and description of the two methods, their advantages and disadvantages, is followed by the practical section, reflecting on an in-house Business English course. The goal of the course was to train employees for competent business communication, especially oral. While CLT would have been the obvious choice for such a course, it turned out that course-takers of different levels of background knowledge needed a step-by-step progression from the GTM to CLT. A selection of tiered exercises is reproduced in the paper.

Subject-Verb Agreement in Popular Music and its Potential Impact on Linguistic Development of Non-Native English Learners

Maja Žarković Mccray — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

This paper aims to examine the impact of non-standard subject-verb agreement (SVA) in popular music lyrics and its potential effects on the linguistic proficiency of non-native English learners. A corpus of 802 songs with over 200 million views on YouTube was analyzed using descriptive, analytic, and statistical methods. The hypothesis assumes that popular music often contains numerous SVA instances that deviate from conventional Standard English usage. If not adequately addressed in foreign language classrooms, these instances could potentially impede the linguistic development of non-native English speakers and learners. The results indicate that 49.37% (396 songs) of the analyzed songs contain standard grammatical elements, while 50.62% (406) do not. Of the 181 songs with non-standard SVA, 37 have over one billion views on YouTube, with most receiving between 200 million and over 5 billion views. The study identified 1506 non-standard elements in the songs, with 417 related to non-standard SVA. The majority of non-standard SVA examples were found in the verses or intro/outro sections of the songs, with 142 songs containing non-standard SVA in these sections, while 38 songs had non-standard SVA in the chorus. The findings of this study have significant implications for language instruction and the role of popular music in language learning. The present research underscores the potential negative impact of non-standard linguistic input on non-native English learners and highlights the need for proper educational guidance in utilizing popular music as an authentic and engaging tool in language instruction. This study lays the groundwork for future investigations on the potential role popular music may play in formal language acquisition.

Impressum

Biljana Čubrović — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Defining English and Serbian Verbs of Damage

Boris Hlebec — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Applying his own collocational method in line with the distributional semantics, the author provides definitions of causative “verbs of damage” in Serbian and English. In this way the two lexical subfields can be compared, and relevant conclusions drawn about their similarities and differences. “Verbs of damage” comprise a small set of verbs that share the definition ‘cause to get in bad state’, and they are to be distinguished from “verbs of destruction”. This common parlance definition is reduced to a semantic definition stated in terms of semantic atoms, and the graphic devices used in the definitions are explained. Its implications are commented on, as well as the evaluative connotation of the object nouns. Collocational method is a variant of distributional semantics, and the article expounds its main principles and states the three steps to be taken when applying the method. In connection with this matter, the acceptability of collocations is discussed. Implications are given of broad semantic categories like ‘sth’, and ‘phenomenon’ by offering narrower categories.

Functional Hybridization In Discourse: Turning Imperatives into Discourse Markers

Iiulia Nenasheva — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The author addresses discourse markers (DMs), suggesting that DMs represent functional, but not categorical, units. The paper shows that in reading aloud, under specific discourse conditions the readers convert imperatives into interjection-like units similar to DMs. This conversion is carried out through processing and adjusting prosodic features of imperative utterances, according to the function they perform in discourse, and can be defined as “functional hybridization”. The findings of the present paper support previous research in that: 1) according to our findings, prosodic structure of “functionally hybridized” imperatives places them close to interjections, and their function in discourse changes to attract attention to new information, or express “emphasis”; 2) “functionally hybridized” imperatives, like DMs, are characterized by specific formal features: initial position appears prerequisite for their autonomy, in other than initial position “functionally hybridized” imperatives tend to act as an enclitic to the previous word. Factors facilitating “functional hybridization” of imperatives are: 1) the formulaic/iconic structure of the imperative, 2) initial position, 3) emphatic nature of the utterance.

Great Aspirations: Examining VOT of Word-Initial Voiceless Stops in English and Serbian in Serbian EFL Speakers

Nina Đukić — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

The role of aspiration (positive VOT) in English and Serbian differs significantly. While positive VOT helps distinguish between voiced and voiceless plosives in English, it has no distinctive function in Serbian. For this reason, a clear contrast between long-lag stops of English and short-lag stops of Serbian might prove challenging for Serbian EFL students. For this reason, this paper examines the degree of aspiration in initial voiceless stops in both Serbian and English with two separate target groups: five intermediate and five highly proficient speakers of English. The aim of this study is to determine to what extent L1 affects L2 speech and how this is reflected in the two groups of speakers. All participants are asked to read sentences containing target words with voiceless stops in initial position while being recorded with the help of Praat (Boersma/Weenink, 2022). For every token, we measure VOT for the interval between the release of the plosive and the onset of voicing of the following sound, expressed in milliseconds (ms). The results show that more proficient EFL speakers reach native-like VOT values. This experiment, however, yielded some striking results, specifically the proof of significant L2 transfer, where the same proficient speakers pronounce their stops with a significant degree of aspiration in Serbian, which deviates from the phonetic habits of native speakers of Serbian. Results also show that, even though the use of long-lag stops in intermediate users does not resemble that of native speakers, they make a clearer distinction when it comes to applying VOT in their L1 and L2 respectively.

Kritička analiza metafora u medijskom diskursu o veštačkoj inteligenciji na srpskom jeziku

Anđela Miladinović — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100

Although artificial intelligence as a concept was created in the twentieth century, significant progress in this field has marked the twenty-first century. Nowadays, media discourse on artificial intelligence reflects a divided public opinion: are robots, machines and chatbots friends or enemies of humanity? The subject of the paper is a critical analysis of metaphors in media discourse on artificial intelligence in accordance with the methodological framework formulated by Jonathan Charteris-Black. The aim of the paper is to observe the presence of ideologies in this type of discourse and challenge the assumption that ideologies related to artificial intelligence are predominantly negative in the articles representing the corpus for the analysis in this paper. The analysis is based on combining cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, and is performed in three steps: identification, interpretation, and explanation of metaphors and metaphorical expressions. The results confirm that the negative perception of artificial intelligence prevails in the analysed articles, as well as that they are permeated by various ideological messages. The implications of the research refer to the fact that it is necessary to be aware of possible ideological messages in media discourse and to take them into account when objectively reasoning about a certain topic.

Uvodna reč

Biljana Čubrović — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0100