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Christa Agnes Tuczay. Geister, Dämonen – Phantasmen. Eine Kulturgeschichte. Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2015. 252 pp.
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Irina Pchelovodova & Nikolai Anisimov. Lymshor pal udmurt”eslen kyrӟan gur”essy / Pesni iuzhnykh udmurtov / Songs of southern Udmurts. Izhevsk & Tartu, 2015. 374 pp.
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Anneli Baran writes about an international conference of linguistics, Slavofraz 2016: Phraseologie und (naive) Psychologie, which took place in Graz, Austria, on April 7–10.
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Language learning objectives have drastically changed in recent decades, shifting from a liberal arts educational perspective to the achievement of essentially three utilitarian purposes: (i) trade globalisation through English, (ii) the rise of supranational organisations advocating equity of national languages and (iii) cultural identity affirmation expressed through vernacular language recognition and use. These three socio-political intentions all combine to reconceptualise the language teachers’ mission and impose a societal responsibility to integrate and articulate all three in classroom teaching practices. Such is the complexity of the role assigned to language teachers by culturally diverse Caribbean multi-ethnic postcolonial nations upon whom it is incumbent to strengthen social cohesion within their borders through (re)valuing local creoles, while contradictorily supporting their regional integration through learning the international languages of the Caribbean (French, English and Spanish) and potentiating global economic integration through proficiency in the world lingua franca (English). In other words, language teachers are expected to fulfil a complex and potentially contradictory educational tri-dimensional social, political and economic mission. This is namely (a) ‘social’ by affirming the local Creole as an approved socio-linguistic identity marker, (b) ‘political’ by authenticating the international colonial language as the inalienable tie to the former privileged colonial power and (c) ‘economic’ by shaping a trilingual regional identity as an internationally recognised Caribbean poised for enhanced participation in the global world market.
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In this era of war of words, multiple language acquisition and cultural awareness can be tools to end misunderstanding and conflicts between civilizations. Language barriers lead to poor communication, and establishing a multilingual society can eradicate misunderstanding stemming from lack of proficiency in one another’s languages and ways of thinking. This study investigates in detail the benefits of multilingualism for civilizational dialogue, and focuses on the importance of utilizing mass media to foster such communication. It addresses the relationship between multilingualism and constructive dialogue, proving that multilingualism is not a “problem” to be “solved.” Some historical and contemporary examples of the importance of language in civilizational dialogue have been introduced to prove the positive effects of multilingualism. These examples show how mastering more languages might have a positive impact on societies. Also, a total of 159 participants speaking more than one language were administered a questionnaire. The majority of participants agreed that multilingualism promotes civilizational dialogue more than monolingualism does. They agreed that political and religious clashes stem from cultural differences in the understanding of some words.
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In light of the changing picture of gender representation in politics and most importantly in political leadership, Lithuania should be granted a special position among examples of women political leaders’ success stories. On the one hand, the general proportion of female MPs in the Lithuanian Parliament Seimas , is not at all impressive with 26 female (18%) vs. 115 male (82%) MPs in 2008–2012 term and 34 female (24%) vs. 107 male (76%) MPs elected in 2012. On the other hand, however, the highest political offices in Lithuania were held by women in 2008–2012 term: namely the President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaitė, the Speaker of Seimas Irena Degutienė, the Minister of Finance Ingrida Šimonytė and the Minister of National Defence Rasa Juknevičienė. The situation itself can be seen as a breaking point with regard to widely-quoted stereotypic assumptions, for instance, professions related to politics, economics and military issues are typical male professions (R. Lakoff, 2000, 2003; Walsh, 2001) or some underlying statistical evidence like the one provided by Wodak (2003) that women rarely occupy the top authoritative positions. Moreover, with around two years in office in her second term President Grybauskaitė has been largely enjoying people’s support in popularity polls. This not only demonstrates a dramatic shift from traditional gender divisions of women being ‘silenced’ (Cameron, 1998, R. Lakoff, 1975), but also a rather significant move from the female discourse of resistance and survival presented by Martin-Rojo (1997) to the discourse of success. G. Lakoff (2004) claims that for political discourse to be successful it needs to be built on values. With these observations in mind, the present paper aims to investigate how such values as responsibility, fairness, active agency, etc. are delivered through choices of pronouns (Cf. Wilson, 1990) and equivalent morphological forms by the main political leaders in Lithuania: the President Dalia Grybauskaitė and the former Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius. The data for analysis come from transcripts of political interviews available in the media. The study is based mainly on qualitative discourse analysis with some quantification for comparison.
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Language is a reflection of society, which is developing with alterations in political, economic, and social spheres. As a result, some words lose their importance and fade into obscurity, whereas others come into existence. Despite the fact that the occurrence of borrowings is a global phenomenon, some spheres are more prone to accept foreign words, the dynamic IT field among them. As the USA have been leaders in the technical sphere for many years, the majority of the words describing IT concepts are of the American origin. Having entered the receiving language, some loan words may alter the meaning in order to avoid lexical competition and survive. To establish whether any semantic changes occurred, borrowings and their native counterparts have to be analyzed according to dictionary definitions as well as their contexts. Thus the aim of the present research was to analyze the issues of synonymy as well as the usage and meaning differences of English borrowings (nouns) of the IT field in the Russian language and their native counterparts. In order to perform the analysis, quantitative as well as qualitative research methods were applied. The quantitative method, particularly a corpus-based research, was employed while checking frequency and collecting the most frequent collocates of the loan words. The analysis of raw frequencies in the Russian National Corpus revealed that 21 loan words are widespread, whereas 25 of them are occasional. The majority of the loan words were found to be semantically narrowed. The analysis revealed that not a single one is in lexical competition with native Russian lexemes, since all of them are results of lexical addition rather than replacement.
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Set within the generative syntactic framework, the present study explores the aspectual projection in Russian and Lithuanian. As is known, aspect is traditionally regarded to be a grammatical category in Russian, whereas there is no unanimous view on Lithuanian aspect and the latter is perceived within the lexical or lexico-grammatical range. Given the fact that both Lithuanian and Russian exhibit the features of languages with the verb merged low on the syntactic tree, while their general morphosyntactic properties are similar in many respects, e.g., rich verb morphology, tense and agreement systems, the verb may be derived by both prefixation and suffixation. Different aspectual properties present an interesting puzzle. The article aims to provide a formal account for this phenomenon. It is first shown that, similarly to Russian, the Lithuanian verb is positioned low, which is reflected in the regular appearance following manner adverbs. However, due to the varying feature strength of the relevant functional projections in each language, verbal movement in each language is realised differently, which consequently affects the morphemic layout as well as has implications for the aspect-tense correlation in each language.
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The paper tackles two investigative approaches to the study of mutual influences among languages in which researchers focus either on languages themselves or on communicating individuals. Considering the question of whether and to what extent the contact-conditioned language development results from structural properties of respective languages, or is rather triggered by psychic properties of their speakers, the study exposes, on the basis of selected literature on the subject, a causative role of humans in language contacts. At the same time, it argues that the search for unborrowable language features and structures entails defining naturalness, unmarkedness, and markedness in terms of human abilities. More critically, this paper substantiates the statement that uncovering the rules, which govern the contact-induced language change in terms of communicative properties of humans, implies, for example, the necessity of dealing with identity and group affiliations of multilingual subjects demonstrable, apart from language transfer and lexical and grammatical interference, mostly in codeswitching. Thus, the author argues that the sources of linguistic changeability and variability in contact situations must be read, in the first instance, into the psychic conditionings of socially and culturally determined language speakers. All in all, she tries to prove that linguistic borrowings cannot be examined in accordance with universal applicability or absoluteness but with reference to principles of human perception, memorizing, the ability of association, etc., as well as the economy of effort in communication in conjunction with individual and socio-cultural needs of humans, their knowledge and attitudes.
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Estonia has been part of the European Union since 2004. Concerning that, it is very important for Estonia as a Member State of the EU to find out what languages are used by Estonian residents in informal and formal situations and environments (DfEE). In the context of globalisation, the topic of immigrants in Estonia and their educational needs, linguistic and cultural specificities have also gained more and more importance. Apart from that, attention must be paid to the skill of coping with the changed situation at the level of the society and the individual, while maintaining the immigrants’ cultural identity and at the same time integrating them effectively into the Estonian cultural space. An important role in this is played by the education system. The Estonian public education curriculum (National curriculum for basic schools ..., 2010; National curriculum for upper secondary schools ..., 2010) promotes Estonian culture, common European values, multiculturalism and the cultural and scientific achievements of the world. The research at hand reflects Estonia’s first experiences in that field. The research method used was unstructured in-depth interviews. The research results show that the state provides financial support for the education of new immigrant students, the school attempts to ensure a smooth adjustment of the students, although academic performance and the language level of the new immigrants are very different, the new immigrants generally cope linguistically and have mostly adjusted well, i.e. they have learned the Estonian language and have received peer and teacher support in the educational process. However, the instruction of the home language of the ethnic minority is left to the family.
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The paper focuses on the differences and similarities in the performance of two groups of test takers taking the ECL (European Consortium for the Certificate of Attainment in Modern Languages) language exam – a proficiency-type of language exam – in Hungary and in neighbouring countries. The two groups under investigation include Hungarian test takers living in Romania, Slovakia and Serbia and native Hungarians between the ages of 14 and 19 living in Hungary. The research aims to identify whether bilingual test takers have an advantage when taking a language examination in a third language as compared to those who are monolingual. The study compares, contrasts and analyses the performance of these two distinct groups, one of which comes from a multilingual environment. It has been found out that the overall performance (achieved in each of the four components: listening, speaking, writing and reading) of bilingual test takers was significantly better than that of the monolinguals (p < 0.001). Three tendencies have been identified with respect to the differences between the performance of the bilingual and monolingual test takers: first, there is a greater gap in relation to receptive skills - listening and reading – than in the case of the productive skills – speaking and writing; second, in the case of the receptive skills the gap decreases as the proficiency level increases; third, in the case of the speaking skill the gap increases as the proficiency level increases. Possible explanations are offered to explain these phenomena.
More...NEMOKAMŲ KALBOS MOKYMOSI PLATFORMŲ PANAUDOJIMAS SAVARANKIŠKO MOKYMOSI PROCESE
Even though modern communication technologies are already employed in various processes starting from remotely initiated political revolutions or massive help initiatives to individually accessible self-development opportunities, attention of researchers is still attracted by global processes, while their use at individual level stays not fully revealed. Therefore, this article aims to research the interaction within social media and foreign language learning, which may contribute to the development of an ordinary internet user. The reader is invited to look at people‘s activity in social networks not only as an entertainment but also as a possibility of informal and individual learning. The study focuses on identifying possibilities to use the free language learning platforms for individual learning process. Taking into account the newest trends in the labour market, where more and more attention to the knowledge of foreign languages is being paid, we can notice that people are looking for diverse ways to develop their language skills. Nowadays mobile technologies together with social networks can already supply all types of language skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. The user interacts not only with a program but also with other people from all over the world. Structured qualitative interviews with Lithuanian participants have revealed that individual foreign language learning online is seen as an undeniable and useful practice. Nevertheless, internet language learning platforms cannot yet replace the traditional language learning methods.
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As the significance of science increases and the cooperation with foreign partners becomes more intensive, education and training of highly qualified specialists gains its importance. At the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, update and improvement of the curriculum are priority fields in the education and training of health specialists. The field of professional languages is the field that attracts special attention. The University should educate specialists who would be able to cooperate in research and professional activity via free communication in several foreign languages. This study aimed at revealing the peculiarities of the expression of the elements of the problem-based learning system in professional language studies at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU). The generalized results of the study showed that the formation of students’ deep approach to studies and their independent work skills may be affected by integrating the elements of the problem-based learning system into the studying process. Empowering the students for successful studies was significantly facilitated by the application of such techniques as mind maps, group work, problem solving, brainstorming, and discussion.
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Review: J. Donguy, Poezja eksperymentalna. Epoka cyfrowa (1953-2007), przeł. M. Madej, Gdańsk 2014
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The main aim of my article is to investigate, or simply to highlight the evolution of the twofold character of Surrealism-influenced, and later Surrealist, manifestos in three consecutive stages of the avant-garde movement in Romania. I apply the notion of the avant-garde manifesto developped by Benedikt Hjartarson in his essay “Myths of Rupture. The Manifesto and the Concept of Avant-Garde”, with the aim of taking a closer look at the anti-Surrealist Romanian manifestos of the mid-twenties, pre-Surrealist texts of the thirties, and the proper phase of the newly-established Romanian Surrealist Group’s discoveries in the forties.
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