Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics

10

Authors: Ana Tereza Barišić

The aim of this paper is to explore the stylistic authenticity of Dark on the Lit Paths, a short story written by Ivan Goran Kovačić, within the context of theory of stylistic devices. The short story abounds in expressive lyrical descriptions which portray characters and events from the author’s own homeland who, sympathising with the minor, ordinary, suppressed members of society emphasizes an idyllic harmony between Jačica Šafran, a peasant and nature, at the same time warning against poverty, envy and inhuman relationships among people. The paper presents an analysis of stylistic devices which, like skillfully interwoven threads in the plot of this short story, in presentation of characters and in problems presented in this work, are extremely important for the poetic segment of the author’s work of fiction. Gérard Genette (1985; 52) claims that a stylistic device is space which has its own form, space “between a sign and sense”, “inner space of language”, and that there are as many stylistic devices as there are forms of this space that can be identified. Therefore, the paper aims to present a review of figures of diction, figures of speech based on sentence structure, tropes and figures of thought, using the concrete examples from the short story in order to show the characterisation of the figurative features of Kovačić’s text, such as its picturesque features or expressive syntax. Figures of literary discourse have been exempt from this paper. Analysing the short story through various examples of anaphora, epiphora, onomatopoeia, epithets, inversion, similes, metaphors, antithesis, gradation, hyperbole, irony, personification and many other stylistic devices, the author wishes to present, determine or dispute the recent claims by numerous critics who do agree about one thing – that Kovačić's fiction is original both in its structure and expression. She also wishes to emphasize a wide range of meaning and engagement of the writer's discourse.

11

Authors: Lejla Kucukalic

This essay describes a semiotic analysis exercise designed to enhance students’ cultural and critical literacy, a skill necessary for language comprehension, pragmatics, and proficiency (Liton and Madanat). Rather than observing and comparing cultures as monolithic and unchangeable, students are encouraged to develop complex cultural understanding based on the reading of their surrounding semiosphere. Following Yuri Lotman’s concept of “semiosphere,” defined as a totality of signs in a certain system, students apply semiotic analysis on their local physical and media space in order to understand the signifying processes in their hybrid cultural environment. Rather than looking at the target culture as a separate Other, students observe the incursion of that culture into their own environment. The relevance of this approach is ensured by the system of signs in the Gulf – its semiosphere - being heavily influenced by mixing of Arabic and English, as well as Filipino/Tagalog, Bengali, and Hindi languages, by entertainment and media outlets of multiple cultures, and the logoed and branded presence of multinational companies. The semiosphere of the Gulf involves an array of signals that function both on the global and local scale, what Yuri Lotman describes as “a semiotic continuum filled with multi-variant semiotic models situated at a range of levels.” The exercise described in this paper invites students to use semiotics for analysis of culture and its objects, in turn increasing their integrated motivation, their agency, and their cultural literacy by getting them involved in “the processes of reflection and negotiation through which shared cultural understanding emerges” (Weninger and Kiss) while relying on standard practical techniques for teaching culture in the EFL classroom, “noticing,” “prediction,” and “research” (Cullen and Sato).

12

Authors: Ivana Grabar & Ekaterina Kostina & Marijana Kolednjak

Living in a world that has become a 'global village' makes different nations seem very similar - we dress in a very similar way, we listen to the similar music, we sometimes even use the same words. But how similar are we when it comes to understanding another person’s culture and values related to some of the general notions, such as love and hatred? The authors of this paper come from two countries that speak Slavic languages and are in many ways similar: Russia and Croatia. This similarity initiated a cross-cultural research described further in the paper. The authors have compared the meanings of two opposite notions (a value and an anti-value) - love and hatred - with regard to the meaning and importance they have in these two countries and how they are used in their respective languages. The definitions of the value love were collected from various available dictionaries in different areas and then analyzed as semantic components. Then the same procedure was conducted with the anti-value hatred. Since these semantic components are used in sentences/phrases in Russian and Croatian in various ways, their comparison has been made. Furthermore, students of two universities (one Russian and one Croatian) filled in a questionnaire regarding the meaning these notions have for them. The purpose of the questionnaire was to help the authors find out whether there are similarities/differences in how these two notions are perceived in their respective countries and languages and whether their meanings and importance for the culture differ. The obtained results will offer some insight into the Russian and Croatian languages when compared on the linguistic and cultural level with regard to a value and an anti-value.

12

Authors: Ružica Čubela

The nation as an "imagined community"1 mirrors the creation of personal senses of identity, which can lead to feelings of belonging to one group but excluding the other one. Exclusive nationalism has created many brutal conflicts in the 20th century, and a particular example of it was seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This kind of nationalism still exists in everyday life supported by an uncontrolled rapid spread of (dis)information on web portals. This paper deals with the reconstruction of the nationalist discourse on web portals in Bosnia and Herzegovina through different concepts of nationalism with a comparative approach using methods of linguistics and cultural and social anthropology. It is a continuation of the contemporary discourse on the concept of nationalism, personal and collective national identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as a personal empirical research in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

13

Authors: Giovanni Borriello

The great influence that the Chinese writing system has had on the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese writing systems is widely demonstrated. Nevertheless, besides the use of the characters directly imported from China, these cultures have had the necessity to create “national characters” to satisfy the needs of their own languages. This paper, that analyzes this phenomenon in the Japanese environment, begins with an analysis of the reasons that have pushed the Japanese “to create” own characters and the reasons why at a certain moment such “creation” has been suspended. In the second part of the paper samples of kokuji will be presented that can be circumscribed to those with radicals 魚・鳥・木・草 and that result to be surely the most numerous and related to species of flora and fauna japonica.

14

Authors: Lendita Kryeziu

Many empirical researches on Gender and language have been conducted by numerous sociolinguists in order of finding out the relationship between them. These differences between women’s and men’s language consisted in terms of phonology, lexis, syntax, dominance and difference in discourse analysis. Some other studies have investigated the influence of female - male language differences on maintaining the imbalance power between the two genders. This paper will aim at finding out the relationship between gender and language in political debates in Albanian and English while trying to identify the impact of gender based language in displaying the difference and dominance in conversational interaction. Political debates in English and Albanian will be analyzed in order to distinguish cross gender and cross language differences through the use of linguistic and discourse features such as: turn taking, dominance, minimal response, overlaps, hedges, interruptions etc.

16

Authors: Danae Tsapikidou

This paper presents the results of a classroom-based study which I conducted for my PhD thesis. It is an experimental study on the comparative benefits of Isolated and Integrated FFI in primary EFL education. Greek 5th year primary learners aged 10-11 were exposed to Integrated FFI (n= 75) on the English Past Tense and their learning gains were compared to the gains of their peers who were exposed to Isolated FFI (n = 73), as these were first defined by Spada and Lightbown (2008). Integrated FFI was operationalised as the provision of comprehension and production structure-based communicative tasks; that is, tasks that were especially crafted to provide meaningful contexts for the practice of the English Past tense and its progressive aspect. In completing those tasks, learners focused on comprehension and the expression of meaning while they produced the target structures and received corrective feedback on their errors. Isolated FFI was operationalised as the explicit presentation and metalinguistic explanations of the rules that govern the formation and use of the same target structures, coupled with grammatical consciousness-raising tasks, structural grammar exercises and controlled oral and written production activities. I taught the groups myself as a teacher researcher throughout the intervention, which lasted for 12 hours. The two groups were tested four times; each test was given after completing six hours of treatment and two months after the end of the intervention. The tests included grammaticality judgments, multiple-choice tests, tense formation tests, an open cloze, a question formation task, picture description, sentence matching and text completion tests. I will present the results of the statistical analyses from the comparisons of these groups. One suggestion is that, planned Integrated FFI targeting specific structures in context, if applied consistently for some time, produces equivalent learning gains to Isolated FFI even for elementary-level EFL learners whose opportunities for productive use of the language are generally limited within the classroom context.

16

Authors: Ljiljana M. Vulović

Βajanje, basma, bajalica are the serbian words that belong to the circle of magical terminology. Interesting is the comparative approach that compare the Serbs and the Greeks at the linguistic aspect. Βajanje is seen as a magical behavior which aims to make a change in the desired direction. As a rule, the basis of this behavior makes a voice part - specific language formula, shorter or longer, which is usually called by Serbs basma. In the literature the Serbs use the word bajalica as a synonym for the basma , term that in Serbian is used as a common name for a person who is engaged in chanting, and it is usually a woman. Greek for bajanje use the term καταδέσμος, while for the basma they have more terms: κατάδεσμος, μαγεία, μαγγανεία, γητειά / γήτεμα, ξόρκι, and επωδή. Based on these findings, we see that the Greeks „bajanje“ use the above terms and that as a marker for the same action and as a result of these actions they have “ basme, bajalice”. In the case of the Greek’s terms we can make a classification on the basis of objective magic spells that act on the content and those can be as follows: 1. positive or negative for achieving any goal, whether good or bad - κατάδεσμος, μαγεία, μαγγανεία. We must draw attention to just κατάδεσμος and μαγγανεία are basme with negative content and operation. 2. those that are used for the treatment and reject evil ξόρκι, επωδή while γητειά / γήτεμα may be to invoke the rejection of evil, so for healing and for love. 2 Narodno bajanje predstavlja širok prostor za ispitivanje gradje kako kod Srba tako i kod Grka. Ispitivanje se vrši sa više aspekata, držeći se magijskih principa i pravila koja vladaju u građenju verbalne strukture bajanja. Interesantan je komparativan prilaz kojim se upoređuju basme kod Srba i Grka s lingvističkog aspekta. Grci za "bajanje" koriste termin καταδέσμος, dok za basmu imaju više termina: μαγεία, ξόρκι, γήτεμα, μαγγανεία, επωδή. Svaki termin označava posebnu vrstu basme što se ogleda u različitim terminima označivačima. Na uporednom primeru svakog grčkog termina videćemo podudarnosti u sistematizaciji naših basmi što otvara veliki prostor za istraživanje.

45

Authors: Ronald W. Langacker

I will be examining central aspects of English clause structure from the standpoint of Cognitive Grammar (CG). Though well known and extensively studied, these phenomena have eluded definitive treatment; they still have much to tell us. Indeed, working out their theoretical basis has contributed to further development of the CG framework (Langacker 1991, 2008a, 2012). Especially relevant are two general notions: the organization of structure in terms of baseline and elaboration; and grammar as the implementation of semantic functions.