Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture

4-20

Authors: Tatjana Bicjutko, Indra Odiņa

The internationalisation of universities and the ensuing policies mandating English as a medium of instruction made European universities impose corresponding requirements demanding a certain level of English language proficiency from their academic staff. Similarly, university-based teacher educators became subject to specific foreign language demands. This research focuses on university-based teacher educators who have been actively taking part in enhancing their academic English. The COVID-19 pandemic made for a prompt shift from face-to-face to online learning, providing for a comparison between the two learning environments. Since affective factors, including learning anxiety, may impact the success of language acquisition, the study addresses foreign language anxiety experienced by teacher educators when acquiring English for Academic Purposes in different learning modes. The research was conducted as a survey with the data obtained through administering the adapted Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale to 80 respondents from the 7 universities working in teacher education, furthered by 4 online semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal overall low levels of anxiety, with a small increase in communication apprehension. Although there is no conclusive evidence about the decrease in anxiety in remote studies, the interview results are clearly demonstrative of the possibility of combining face-to-face and online learning modes.

35-50

Authors: Ewelina Feldman-Kołodziejuk

Elaine Feeney΄s novel As You Were offers the story of a terminal cancer patient who forsakes any medical treatment. Narrating the final moments of her protagonist’s life, the author breaks with the traditional cancer novel formula in which a bellicose stance is prescriptive. Instead, the heroine’s stay at a hospital ward with other female patients constitutes Feeney΄s point of departure for writing a state-of-the-nation novel. The article discusses how the merging of different literary traditions, such as cancer narrative, literature of witness, or experimental fiction, allows the author to paint a poignant picture of Irish society, in which women, whose rights were historically curbed, empower each other through telling their life stories as well as reclaiming the life tales of their lost sisters. The analysis focuses on metaphors and narrative strategies that customarily underpin cancer stories and which can be identified in the novel. Secondly, the subversion of the cancer narrative is taken under scrutiny to demonstrate the experimental character of Feeney΄s novel. Subsequently, the ethical dimension of storytelling is given critical attention and the work’s status as a state-of-the-nation novel is elaborated on.

70-85

Authors: Łukasz Nieroda

The article analyzes the descriptions of Polish-Lithuanian peasants found in travel literature penned by British visitors to Poland during the reign of Stanisław August Poniatowski. It aims to present the literary image of peasantry and comment on the Britons’ attitude towards the problems they faced. The authors whose works are analyzed are William Coxe (historian and tutor), John Lind (associate of a Polish king), Nathaniel Wraxall (traveler and ex-merchant), James Harris (a future diplomat), Joseph Marshall (a mysterious figure, probably a merchant) and John Williams. Villagers are generally described as miserable human beings struggling with poverty, cruelly exploited by their lords in a condition resembling slavery. The authors’ attitude is sympathetic to the difficulties of peasant lives. Britons appreciated attempts to extricate them from their plight in the belief that emancipation was ethically desirable and would render their work more productive.

108-120

Authors: Adriana Elena Stoican

Blending literary and cultural studies, the essay discusses the manners in which Jhumpa Lahiri’s literary universe constructs a gradual unfolding of a layered transcultural vision. The paper argues that in the shift from fictions of migration to autobiographical narratives of self-redefinition, the Bengali-American author advances cultural scenarios of transformation that enable the reshaping of cultural identities through the transcendence of fixed cultural loyalties. Invoking perceived lacks in their native cultural traditions and intuiting the incompleteness of cultures, her characters are haunted by the urge to cross cultural boundaries in order to gain a sense of personal fulfilment. Ultimately, Lahiri herself replicates this pattern as she relocates to Italy and writes in a new language (Italian). The last stage in Lahiri’s transcultural scenario is represented by an attempt to dissociate cultural specificity from the notion of identity, as she takes refuge in the realm of abstraction through minimalist aesthetics. Relying on a close reading of her texts, the essay will scrutinise the author’s peculiar outlook on transculturality, which appears to embrace various cultural spaces while seemingly avoiding specific attachments. The analysis aims to establish whether Lahiri succeeds in transgressing the very idea of cultural belonging in her quest for a freeing path.

135-153

Authors: Edward Owen Teggin, Shofi Mahmudah Budi Utami

This article examines the position of Andy Adams’ famous work, The Log of a Cowboy, through the lens of Western myth and the concept of coloniality. The novel has been critiqued in a variety of ways over the years, with reviews often citing the same factors in their evaluations. Foremost of these has been Adams’ lack of finesse in his writing style, with his particular attention to what he deemed to be objective truth. In this study, the Log will be re-examined with the aim of providing a fresh insight into how veterans of the Western trails, such as Adams, viewed the dynamic space in which they lived and worked. Therefore, the concept of the frontier, viewed as a stereotypical assumption in both mythological and colonial terms, is used as a lens of investigation in order to critique Adams’ descriptions and viewpoints. The study concludes that although Adams’ intention was to create a work true to life on the trail, he ultimately permitted himself to become another speaker for Western stereotypes. It is proposed that seemingly innocuous literary works such as the Log can be included amongst discussions of colonial fiction in the wider field of American studies and, by extension, in the latter postcolonial sphere, through their construction of stereotypical discourses and the glorifying of trail life.

4-17

Authors: Isaiah Aluya, Samuel Edem

That language is used to convey a broad sense of meanings and that the meanings that are conveyed with language are moulded by our immediate social, political and historical conditions are safe assumptions about the efficacy of language. This paper discusses language techniques and literary devices for national messaging to ascertain their functions in national discourse. To achieve this aim, the study examines purposively sampled excerpts from Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari’s Democracy Day speech on June 12, 2019, using insights from practical stylistics. This is to determine whether the language and literary devices have been deployed effectively to the speech’s content. The language and literary devices observed were reference items, to signal solidarity and inclusivity; evidential clauses, to consolidate the argument raised; capitalisation, to foreground the issues discussed; name-calling, to ridicule political opponents; the praise tactic, for self-promotion and positive representation, the blame-game tactic, to evade responsibility and denigrate previous administration; hasty generalisation, to advance personal agenda; and allusion, to draw knowledge from historical events. The study submits that the aforementioned devices, depending on how they are used in communication, can either foster or jeopardise national integration. Consequently, it recommends that national discourses be cautiously constructed using pertinent linguistic and literary devices.

35-47

Authors: Mihails Čebotarjovs

The present paper examines how John Banville creates a peculiar version of the Faust legend in his novel Mefisto (1999) through the use of double coding. The term is frequently used in postmodern art, especially in literary theory and architecture. The idea consists of the possibility of sending two opposite or even multiple messages at once. Mefisto presents a fertile ground for the analysis of the way double coding might operate in a work of postmodernist fiction. Moreover, it has been one of the most challenging contemporary interpretations of the Faust legend for critics and, therefore, the present analysis has more specific relevance for those who are already taking interest in Banville’s oeuvre and/or in the Faust legend. For those who are yet to discover Banville, the article may serve as a short introduction to his idiosyncratic artistic style and peculiar means of expression. The ensuing analysis of double coding in Mefisto has the task of demonstrating that both a metanarrative appeal and a quotation/irony combination are clearly detectable in the novel. The aspiration is also to stress that Eco’s approach to the definition of double coding is more in-depth and more relevant for literary theory or postmodernism than Jencks’s one.

69-83

Authors: Evelīna Ķiršakmene

False friends are the result of language interference on a lexical level. They have been studied in various language combinations and from various aspects, often resulting in different classifications and subtypes. The paper highlights the issues related to false friends from English and French into Latvian in the interpreting scene and considers the current lexical and semantic processes in the Latvian language. Research shows that the number of deceptive loans in Latvian has increased considerably during this century. The diachronic change of false friends may reflect the need for updated lexicographic resources on false friends, since they are an important tool for distinguishing them. However, false friends also exist on an idiomatic level. The discourse on false friends has been assessed through an analysis of a survey that was delivered to Latvian interpreters working in European Union institutions and in the Latvian local market. The study and conclusions may be of interest to linguists, interpreters and translators as well as language teachers and learners.

100-107

Authors: Antra Leine

While the first utopias manifested aspirations for a better socio-political system, dystopias typically reflect societal fears and concerns that are intensified by the twentieth century’s political and social crises that, besides other significant turns, have caused a rethinking of the role of the elderly in the society. While, typically, the protagonists of dystopias are very young or middle-aged, they often must interact with the previous generations to achieve their goals, thus providing an exciting field for analysis of how these elderlies are depicted in dystopian novels. The methodology for comparing the treatment of the elderly in Utopia with the treatment of the elderly in Lois Lowry’s The Giver involves literary analysis and a comparison of the specific ways in which the elderly in both works are depicted. Special attention is paid to the specific ways in which they are treated and the roles they are assigned in their respective societies, as well as the level of respect and care they are shown especially at the end of their lives. The characteristic attitude towards the elderly suggested by More in Utopia is masterfully rendered in Lowry’s twentieth-century dystopia, The Giver. The study reveals that the treatment of the elderly has often been discriminatory in More’s work Utopia and is deliberately portrayed as such in Lowry’s novel.

125-141

Authors: Ömer Şekerci

Impoliteness has recently been of interest to scholars as a linguistic study in the field of pragmatics. It has emerged as the opposite orientation to politeness strategy, theory and studies. This paper explores how the impoliteness strategies mapped out by Jonathan Culpeper (1996) are employed in dramatic texts. It examines Culpeper’s impoliteness strategies designed to investigate face in the dramatic text. This paper tests the strategies through Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues (1985). This dramatic comedy is used for three reasons: (1) as a drama, it is a mirror of life and real-life speech events; (2) impoliteness strategies provide a resource to analyse impolite interactions between the characters in dialogic discourse; (3) dramatic texts provide a rich context to interpret and analyse verbal and non-verbal impoliteness strategies. Impoliteness strategies can cause disharmony and conflict between characters in a dramatic text. The interactions exchanged by the characters in Biloxi Blues are analysed according to Culpeper’s five impoliteness strategies: bald on record impoliteness, positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness, sarcasm or mock politeness, and withhold politeness. This study employs a descriptive qualitative method to determine how face-threatening acts are incorporated into the play in line with Culpeper’s impoliteness strategies propounded in his article entitled Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness (1996). The paper also examines how the characters react to face-threatening acts. In the twelve selected dramatic extracts, seventeen cases of positive impoliteness, ten cases of bald on record impoliteness, eight cases of sarcasm or mock politeness, and four cases of negative impoliteness have been observed. Moreover, it has also been observed that the characters use taboo words and abusive and strong language. The bald on record impolite acts are aggravated mainly by abuses, sexual insults and name-calling strategies. Racial slurs have also been identified as a part of positive impoliteness.

4-19

Authors: Aamir Aziz

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is, in the first instance, a literary reconstruction of a historical event: the Salem trials that took place in the village of Salem in Essex County, New England (today Danvers, Massachusetts) in 1692. As Miller explains in his autobiography Timebends (1987), and as is clear from his introduction to the play, he not only carried out scholarly research in preparation for writing the play, he also reflected explicitly on how he had used the historical material to reconstruct a story. The central issue in this investigation is the position taken by the play with regard to writing history – historiography – and to the question: what is historical truth? How does the play relate to the issues of representing history and historical truth? To answer these questions, I will, in this research, give an extensive overview of the historical debates about witchcraft in order to situate Miller’s position on this topic. Further, I will position Miller’s work within more general debates about historiography and the historian’s possibilities of rendering a historical ‘truth’.

30-47

Authors: Damian Herda

The synchronic degrees of grammaticalization of size nouns are traditionally measured based on proportionate frequencies of their quantificational attestations in corpus samples. However, grammaticalization, in general, is associated not only with an increased frequency of grammaticalized uses but also with a rise in productivity and distributional expansion. Thus, drawing on corpus data encompassing selected English size nouns which originally individuate concrete inanimate nominals, this paper investigates the relationship between the three aforementioned parameters. Productivity is operationalized as the arithmetic mean of two measures, namely type-token ratio (TTR) and hapax-token ratio (HTR), i.e. the number of, respectively, types of quantified collocates and hapax legomena N2s divided by the number of all quantifier tokens of each expression, while host-class expansion is construed as the proportion of animate and abstract collocates among the respective items’ quantifier uses. Contrary to expectations, the results reveal only a weak positive correlation between the elements’ frequency values and their levels of productivity, and the same holds for the relation between frequency and distributional extension. Also surprising is the moderate negative correlation observed between productivity and expansion, which can nevertheless be elucidated in terms of a high type frequency of semantically general animate and abstract N2-collocates of the most distributionally extended expressions.

66-85

Authors: Yurii Kovbasko

The paper aims at tracing the origin of the preposition, adverb, and conjunction after, starting with the first examples registered before 850; distinguishing the primary and transposed categories; and reconstructing the process of functional transposition in general. The analysis is undertaken on the basis of the examples, which have been manually selected from the HCET and the CLMET and have undergone the following PoS tagging, and the statistical data retrieved from the COHA and the BNC. It is proved that after emerges as the preposition and transposes into the adverb and conjunction. The preposition, which predominates throughout Old English, loses its position in favor of the adverb in the second half of the Middle English period. Later, it stabilizes the correlation, which remains more or less consistent up to now. The adverb reaches its peak in Early Modern English, then it starts rapid declension, and now its quantity is close to null. The conjunction, being neglected up to the middle of the Early Modern English period, starts its increase and is at the peak in Present-Day English. It testifies that functional transposition, which is undeservingly disregarded in linguistics, is still remaining in progress for fundamental and newly-coined lexical units.

101-113

Authors: Viktor Rakhnianskyi, Oleksandra Chernikova, Polina Khabotniakova, Anna Gaidash

The article is focused on the reinterpretation of the genre of spiritual autobiography in Richard Rodriguez’s novel Darling. Rodriguez’s autobiographical prose depicts his extremely embittered attitude to heritage and the pitfalls lurking at the crossroads of cultural practices. For a long time, this author had been placed outside the canon of Chicano literature and was considered an ‘outsider’ because of his statement that he was not a representative of a minority but a supporter of the assimilation of immigrants into the broader mainstream American society. Rodriguez emphasized the privilege of the individual over the collective identity. The study focuses on the formation of ethnic identity by autobiographical narrator Rodriguez and the evolution of his views on the nature of the concept of ‘self-identification’. In addition, as Mexican-Americans are gradually becoming the largest ethno-cultural group in the United States of America, the issues of identity, assimilation, heterogeneity and cultural hybridity raised by the author stay relevant and important.

136-151

Authors: Gunta Rozina, Indra Karapetjana, Margarita Spirida

In 2017, the organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that around 25 per cent of the population experiences difficulties in reading comprehension. The World Health Organisation (2021) has indicated that around 15 per cent of the world population faces functional impairment-related problems, which limit sufficient access to information unless the resources are adapted for meeting the needs of this layer of society. Considering the increasing numbers of the population who suffer from impairments at the language perception level, the present study has attempted to examine selected approaches that might serve for developing easy-to-read (EtR) discourses. Limited research has been conducted in the above-mentioned field, and the contributions that exist so far have focused on the linguistic and design features considered when producing EtR discourses; however, other central components that govern the adaptation of authentic texts for EtR needs seem to be neglected. Therefore, the present study aims to examine selected discourse-pragmatic approaches that can be applied for adapting texts to an EtR language. The present research is a qualitative case study targeted at EtR text developers and seeks to answer the research question: which discourse-pragmatic approaches should be considered to produce easy-to-read discourses? In conclusion, the paper offers the implications of the findings and reflects on the value of using discourse-pragmatic approaches to EtR discourse and cognitive load reduction.

4-20

Authors: Monta Farneste, Vineta Apse

Distance learning introduced in almost all educational establishments in spring 2020 has raised interest among researchers how to deal with it in a more productive way. Thus, the goal of the research was to find out undergraduates’ views on distance learning of English grammar and the use of online revision materials in developing students’ independent study skills at a tertiary institution in Latvia. the research tool was a questionnaire consisting of open-ended and closed questions. Twenty-three students answered the survey questions. the research results indicate that studying by distance is preferred because it allows the students to choose the study time and place, to develop their timemanagement, independent study skills, as well as improve their motivation. the main drawbacks of studying by distance, according to the students, are insufficient feedback, inability to ask questions directly and receive immediate answers and problems with their own time management and independent study skills.

41-51

Authors: Ina Druviete

The article deals with the perception of language and languages in the economy-oriented contemporary world and its specific features in such language-centered countries as Latvia. Two main levels could be discussed concerning the ‘intellectual’, ‘symbolic’ and practical treatment of language: a global (supra-national) and a national one. In majority of countries special laws have been adopted or national level programs have been enacted in order to protect the most significant elements of respective national identities – folklore, traditional ways of life, beliefs and languages in particular. At the beginning of the 21st century, economic and political goals of the European Union have been associated with the ideas of European culture and European identity. At the same time, the popularization of the languages, histories, and traditions of the member states have also been emphasized. The Republic of Latvia belongs to the countries where the diversity of thoughts and viewpoints on language are ever present and intense in both the political debates and even in many informal conversations. The paper gives an insight in Latvian language policy against the background of global and European sociolinguistic processes and wide usage of so-called international languages, English in particular.

65-78

Authors: Indra Karapetjana, Gunta Roziņa

Today, social reality can hardly be viewed as the one-state-one-nationone language ideological framework (Bauman and Briggs, 2003). The modern multilingual and multicultural communities are inclined to examine social reality in a multiple variety of socio-economic and political manifestations and forms. To understand how social reality can be explored through examining certain socio-political processes in a country, the present paper aims at analysing the role of conceptual metaphor in cases when political scandals, involving corruption charges of high-ranking officials in Latvia are considered. For this purpose, the present study has focused on the analysis of selected commentaries that deal with corruption charges which were revealed in December 2019 issues of the magazine IR. The Latvian-origin weekly magazine IR was selected deliberately because; on the one hand, it has an enormous influence on how social reality is constructed and perceived by Latvian citizens. On the other hand, it was important to reveal that the evidence-based theoretical premises on the relationship between metaphor and society in the English language are applicable and work cross-linguistically in Latvian. The research presents a case study type. With the focus on the conceptualization of corruption-related social problems, selected discursive practices that dealt with the corruption cases being revealed by the news medium IR were considered. The results demonstrated that the journalists of the commentaries tend to take a critical discourse perspective on the representation of corruption-related issues and political events, which can be represented at the levels of abstraction. Conceptual metaphors contributed to mental representations of political issues and communication of social reality by conveying additional negative evaluation of such an inherently derogatory concept as corruption. The metaphors CORRUPTION IS DIRT, CORRUPTION IS GARBAGE, CORRUPTION IS NUCLEAR DISASTER, CORRUPTION IS A DISEASE also fulfil a cognitive function, helping to understand the concept of corruption in terms of another more concrete concept. The use of metaphors in the commentaries may have causal effects such as bringing about changes in the readers’ knowledge, beliefs and attitudes.

98-120

Authors: Anastasija Ropa

The present article analyses intertextual references in David Lodge’s Small World. An Academic Romance (1984), focusing on allusions to the corpus of medieval and twentieth-century Arthuriana in the representation of women characters. An analysis of Arthurian allusions in the portrayal of women characters shows that Lodge introduces Arthurian women to his academic ‘Camelot’ in response to medieval and post-medieval literature about King Arthur and the Grail quest. In this respect, his representation of academic women in Small World is different from the way they are described in Lodge’s other academic novels, Changing Places and Nice Work. Lodge rarely recasts Arthurian women characters as his heroines with the exception of Prof Fulvia Morgana, who is modelled on the Arthurian sorceress Morgane/Morgause. Nevertheless, in Small World, women appear in the traditional roles of being the object of a ‘knight’s’ quest, such as Persse’s beloved Angelica and Swallow’s lover Joy, and wise advisors (Miss Maiden). Alternatively, women are portrayed as antagonistic or negative characters, the so-called ‘whores’ or ‘demonic temptresses’: such are Angelica’s twin sister Lily and the lusty Fulvia Morgana.

138-175

Authors: Andrejs Veisbergs

The first decade of the 20th century was a period of huge advances and expansion in the Latvian translation scene. New, contemporary authors’ works became available to Latvian readers. The Latvian readership was consciously being integrated into general European literary trends. It was also a heyday of periodicals that published numerous translations, including numerous novels. There are countless parallel translations even reaching double digits. Translations included various genres and the traditional Latvian interest in plays was obvious. German was gradually losing its dominant positions as both a source and intermediate language, Russian was advancing. This period also saw a change of generations among translators, and with the new generation women became visible in translation scene. Practically all Latvian writers were also active translators. The translation method changed from localisation to a fidelity mode with a tendency towards foreignisation. Frequently translations now had prefaces and explanations by the translators. Translated literature now ranged from serious classical works to modern ones and from pulp literature to high quality creations. The quality of translations was also very varied. T he expansion of translation and the cultivation of new domains went hand in hand with the development of the Latvian language itself.