Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture

21-34

Authors: María Pilar Alberola Colomar, Andrea Menn

How can universities enhance their students’ internationalisation at home? The need to find teaching methodologies that boost students’ intercultural communication skills without travelling abroad has motivated the present study, carried out by two English lecturers from Florida Universitaria in Spain and Jade University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Research was divided into two stages: first, a deep analysis of the intercultural experiences organised in the past at both universities; and second, the implementation of virtual encounters with students from different cultures as tools to promote interculturality at the home university. This paper aims at showing the impact of those exchanges on boosting students’ intercultural communication in English. Two groups of undergraduate students, during their English classes, worked synchronously on topics related to essential aspects of intercultural communication. The main teaching objectives of the Virtual Intercultural Communication (VIC) exchange were to increase participants’ motivation for knowing other cultures, to raise their intercultural awareness, to foster their capacity to change perspectives, and to improve students’ English language skills and their digital abilities. Through the outcomes achieved, students’ self-reported feedback, and lecturers’ observation, it can be concluded that virtual exchanges are effective tools to improve students’ intercultural communication while they meet the English learning objectives.

51-69

Authors: Iryna Kachur

The article closely reads Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy in light of the existentialist motifs of alienation and death. The aim of the study is to analyse the literary representation of these motifs in the trilogy. The applied methodology involves close reading, which facilitates identifying the motifs of death and alienation in the novels; character analysis, focused on exploring the main characters’ experiences of death and alienation; and comparative analysis, which is used to compare the representation of the existentialist motifs in the novels. The study reveals that in The Border Trilogy, the existentialist motif of alienation manifests itself through the desire of the main characters to free themselves from social conventions and to mend the wrongness of the world they live in. This motif takes forms of madness, alienation from other characters, and isolation from society. The protagonists, looking for their place in the world, face hardships, encounter resistance, and therefore constantly feel estrangement. In the novels, the existentialist motif of death serves for a better understanding of human nature and is one of the driving forces of the protagonists’ existence. This motif manifests itself through blood and bones, dreams, natural and violent deaths, the extermination of nature, and the disappearance of established traditions. Symbolising the end of existence, death prompts the main characters to search for the purpose of their lives and strive for authenticity.

86-107

Authors: Esmaeel Ali Salimi, Seyed Mohammadreza Mortazavi

Twitter (X) is a popular social media platform that allows users to express their opinions and interact on various topics, including politics. However, Twitter can provide a space for impolite and aggressive language use, especially when the issues are controversial or polarizing. This study analyzes the replies to two controversial and similar tweets, namely Donald Trump’s tweet to Greta Thunberg and Greta Thunberg’s tweet to Donald Trump. Ninety-seven tweets that impolitely took issue with the original tweets were collected and coded for their moral order themes and pragmatic functions. Culpeper’s (2011) impoliteness framework was consulted as a threshold to include or exclude reply tweets in the data analysis. The results show that the replies invoked moral order expectations in three overarching categories in the responses to both parties: age-appropriate behavior, respect and manners, and concern for the common good. As far as the pragmatic functions were concerned, criticism of personal characteristics, criticism of supporters, criticism of relatives (to Trump only), praise of the opposing party, directing, mockery, and ideology denial (to Thunberg only) were performed. The study discusses how users took offense through language in a highly polarized political context.

121-134

Authors: Ömer Şekerci, Müjde Demiray

This comparative study explores how Aziz Nesin and Neil Simon, representing different literary canons, treat and reflect upon the incorporation of loneliness and humour in Hadi Öldürsene Canikom! [Let’s Kill Me Honey!] (1970) and The Odd Couple (1965), respectively. Both playwrights examine the loneliness that has caught urbanised and atomised humans in two metropolises: Istanbul and New York. Simon deals with the values, concerns, lifestyles, aspirations and problems of middle-class people in his plays with domestic realism. In contrast, Nesin’s plays explore lower-working-class people’s values, concerns and struggles. Moreover, it focuses on how Nesin and Simon employ humour, as a Lingua Franca of comedy, in their works. The study emphasises the two playwrights’ incorporation of the humour theories of superiority, incongruity and relief into the selected dramatic texts. The interactions between the characters in the two plays are analysed according to the three traditional humour theories by assuming a discourse-analytic approach. The study has exhibited that in Hadi Öldürsene Canikom, all the humour theories have been explicitly observed. The humour largely stems from a case of mistaken identity, which creates incongruity. On the other hand, in The Odd Couple, humour is primarily evoked due to the incongruous characteristics of the roommates abandoned by their wives.

154-170

Authors: Andrejs Veisbergs

When observing media texts, one cannot help but notice that some political terms are used with a meaning widely different from that offered by mainstream middle-size dictionaries, which generally stick to the initial, sometimes etymological senses. Corpora analysis confirms the shift in senses and divergence of use. The aim of this paper is to analyse the meaning and use of two terms ubiquitous in the public sphere: fascist/fascism and liberal/liberalism, their original meanings, and subsequent changes in meaning and use. Though the limited space available for defining terms in a general explanatory dictionary makes it extremely difficult to reflect all ideological tinges and meanings, where a frequently used political term seems to have developed stable, different, even opposite meanings, this should be reflected by introducing ideological polysemy in dictionary definitions.