Irony in fashion memes:

Author(s): Kristina Stankevičiūtė / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

The practice of fashion memes is a rather fresh exercise on the fashion scene, and it has been enjoyed by both the audiences and the brands. Fashion media have turned their attention to the phenomenon as well, addressing its scope, authorship and function from various angles. Scholarly research of the field is very scarce, though. The article seeks to contribute to the emerging field of fashion meme research by analysing a Lithuanian author of original fashion memes, a self-proclaimed fashion critic the Pink Poodle – an imaginary social media personality active on Facebook and Instagram platforms. The subjects of Pink Poodle memes are objects of media photographs from local and global public events (such as the Presidential Inauguration or an international cinema festival opening, Grammy Awards, Oscars) that demonstrate, from Poodle’s perspective, disagreements with fashion and/or aesthetics in general. The aim of the article is to reflect on the function of irony and sarcasm of the fashion meme as an instrument for fashion criticism, and the role of (visual) irony on the perception of fashion in the contemporary society. The text also addresses the role of independent fashion criticism that the practice of fashion meme creation seems to provide, and the function that this kind of intermediary between fashion and its audiences may perform.

“E is for Ernest who choked on a peach”:

Author(s): Nikola Novaković / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

In Edward Gorey’s numerous scenes of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and afternoon teas, food and drink often feature with more or less prominence and are sometimes even found in the titles of his books, such as in The Fatal Lozenge (1960) or The Unknown Vegetable (1995). Their seemingly innocent appearance is often tied to violence or death: a head is discovered in a breadbox, a woman murders her husband by lacing his tea with atropine, a boy dies of exposure after being punished for “splashing his soup”, and several characters are consumed by more or less fantastic creatures. And yet, throughout all such gruesome events, Gorey’s characteristically playful and absurd humour adds levity to scenes of food-related death, misery, downfall, and even murder. Whether much attention is drawn to such events (such as in The Unknown Vegetable, where the entire story revolves around the discovery of a giant turnip-like vegetable that leads to a woman being buried alive) or whether they are merely mentioned in offhanded comments, Gorey couches them in a frame of the ridiculous and the nonsensical. It is therefore the aim of this paper to explore how Gorey achieves this curious combination of the grotesque and the humorous in scenes revolving around food, and how this approach extends to a general confusion of tone in his darkly funny, seriocomic creations in which any manner of horror may be lurking in peaches, cakes, crackers, boiled turnips, a recipe for fudge, a family picnic, or under a haunted tea cosy.

Avant-garde humour as ideological supplement:

Author(s): Alejandro Romero-Reche / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

In 1939, when the Spanish civil war had recently ended, avant-garde humorists Miguel Mihura and Tono published an absurdist propaganda ‘novel’, María de la Hoz [María of the Sickle], about the republican zone during the conflict. Unlike other Francoist propaganda pieces of the time, it did not focus on the violence or the alleged moral degeneracy of the ‘reds’ but rather on what its authors perceived as the absurdity of egalitarianism and the progressive ideals. The novel, while not contradicting the emerging official ideology, conspicuously overlooked some of its key tenets, particularly those related to nationalism, Catholicism and Franco’s leadership. This article contextualises María de la Hoz in the development process of Spanish avant-garde humour and in Francoist propaganda fiction during and immediately after the civil war in order to analyse the ideological stance it represented and, potentially, reinforced. As a political piece, the book seems to convey the position of an affluent middle class who did not enthusiastically believe in Francoism but preferred it to the republican alternative, caricatured as a communist regime by nationalist propaganda.

The humour factor:

Author(s): Matilde Eiroa / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

This article analyses the social reaction to Francisco Franco’s exhumation from his burial place in the Valley of the Fallen at the end of 2019. This decision was taken by virtue of compliance with the so-called Historical Memory Law approved in 2007 and generated a great social debate. Apart from opinions in favour and against that decision coming from the political spectrum of the left and right, respectively, we observed a new attitude, that of humour, present in tweets and memes. By analyzing a collection of memes that circulated in Twitter and WhatsApp groups, our research shows that the new media have brought in content and symbolism that ridicule the late dictator, trivialise the treatment given to the “Caudillo” [Leader] of Spain for nearly four decades and contribute to an uninhibited interpretation of memory policies.

An intercultural pragmatic approach to English- Russian and English-German renditions of the formulaic That’s what she said-punchline in telecinematic discourse

Author(s): Monika Kirner-Ludwig,Aleksandra Soboleva / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

This paper takes an intercultural pragmatic approach to identifying and discussing rendition strategies of one specific punchline recurrent in scripted telecinematic discourse: That’s what she said. While this formulaic punchline demonstrates a relatively high salience in the US, particularly in oral and scripted genres, it issues more than one challenge to translators seeking to render it for other speech communities in a manner that acknowledges and retains the source pattern’s complexity as a discursively triggered and formulaic pragmatic idiom. We shall focus here on two specific target cultures, i.e. the Russian and the German, in demonstrating the challenges that this complex and linguistically as well as cognitively multi-faceted formula poses for its appropriation into either cultural sphere. Our study is based on a self-compiled parallel dataset of context-embedded source occurrences of That’s what she said and their renditions into German and Russian, thus offering immediately contrastive insights into the rendition strategies that translators have been employing to interculturally transfer this highly evasive idiomatic formula from one speech community to others.

Book review

Author(s): Piotr Kałowski / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

Book review

Author(s): Jan Chovanec / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

Book review

Author(s): Marta Kapera / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

Book review

Author(s): Polina Oleneva / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

CDA PERSPECTIVE ON THE REPRESENTATION OF POLITICAL ACTORS IN BIH IN THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF THE EU REPRESENTATIVES IN BIH

Author(s): Kemal Avdagić / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

The paper focuses on the role of language in a specific socio-political context. It offers a critical approach regarding the representation of political actors in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) in press releases of the Office of the High Representative in BiH, for the period 2006 - 2011. The aim of the linguistic examination is to analyse the notion of the power imbalance between different actors and ideology which is subtly interwoven in the investigated discourse. There are three stages of analysis in the process of linguistic investigation. In the first stage of analysis, the linguistic investigation is carried out by the means of language tools provided by systemic functional grammar. At this stage, the text is analysed at three different levels: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. In the second stage, the logogentic patterns, which emerge as a result of the lexico-grammatical investigation, are further sifted by the analytical framework of critical discourse analysis. In the final stage of the investigation, the text, which is comprehended as a structure realized by clauses, undergoes a pragmatic investigation of presuppositions. The paper shows that the proposed threefold investigation of the text enables the deconstruction of the meaning of the text and at the same time provides an insight into the nature of the relationship between different actors involved in the discourse.

Cross-textual reconceptualisation of the deictic space of “victory” in political discourse: Donald Trump versus Joseph Biden

Author(s): Amir H. Y. Salama / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

The present study propounds the notion-complex of cross-textual reconceptualisation as a cognitive-linguistic output of applying Paul Chilton’s (2013, 2014, 2017) model of Deictic Space Theory (DST) to textual practices drawn from the broad domain of political discourse. The DST model has operated methodologically towards conducting a cognitively oriented political discourse analysis of the two victory speeches produced by Donald Trump and Joseph Biden during the 2020 election for US presidency. As a geometric model, DST has been applied to the two speeches in a way that demonstrated the deictic spatial construction of victory in relation to Trump and Biden as the now-here-real speakers on the three axes of discourse referents, time, and epistemic modality. The data analysis has revealed four significant instantiations of cross-textual reconceptualisation made by Biden of Trump’s deictic space of victory as a contested concept: (i) a “clear”and “convincing” victory, (ii) a peripersonal real victory, (iii) Trump and his voters,and (iv) a now shift from a past Democrat to a future President. All four instantiations have proved the hypothesis that the DST model, while revealing the deictic-spatial conceptualisations of “victory” constituted by each speaker in his speech, may further be extended to disentangle the interesting aspect of how one and the same concept could be reconceptualised across two textual practices produced by speakers with ideologically opposed perspectives.

Normatywne aspekty komunikacji inkluzywnej

Author(s): Ewa Kołodziejek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 21/2022

The author of the article describes problems a participant in a language communication must encounter if he/she obeys the principles of inclusiveness and wishes to act in accordance with the linguistic norm. Linguistic inclusiveness refers to individuals and social groups discriminated against for features beyond their control, including sex, race, skin colour, sexual orientation, national minority membership, physical fitness, mental condition. Normative problems connected with talking and writing about these groups are considered at various levels of the text organization: semantic-pragmatic, lexical, inflectional, and syntactic.

TEKST KAO MJESTO SUSRETA UČENJAKA: PRAGMALINGVISTIČKA ANALIZA IDŽAZETNAMA IZ OSMANSKOG PERIODA

Author(s): Amra Mulović / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 71/2022

This paper deals with a pragmalinguistic analysis of five ʼiğāza manuscripts written in Arabic during the Ottoman period in the 18th century and one written at the beginning of the 20th century which were issued mostly to Bosnian scholars. ʼIğāza is a specific type of document and textual form common in the Islamic world. It confers upon a recipient the right to transmit a text, a specific knowledge he acquired, or to teach. This article investigates the performance of the speech acts in the corpus from the perspective of historical pragmatics within the framework of the speech act theory and the politeness theory. Since ʼiğāzas are extremely conventionalized texts, different types of speech acts, expressives, directives and declarations, the explicit and implicit form of their realization, as well as the principles of politeness, are viewed with regard to socio-historical contextual factors.

Suundumusi inimsuhtluse keelelises analüüsis ja modelleerimises (II)

Author(s): Mare Koit,Haldur Õim / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 02/2017

Reviews of: Vyvyan Evans. The Crucible of Language. Cambridge, 2015; Arefeh Farzindar, Diana Inkpen. Natural Language Processing for Social Media. San Rafael, 2015; Bing Liu. Sentiment Analysis. Mining Opinions, Sentiments, and Emotions. Cambridge, 2015;

To make fun of power:

Author(s): Orest Semotiuk,Viktoriya Eduardivna Shevchenko / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2022

The paper deals with Ukrainian President’s Zelensky image in political cartoons and memes. They are forms of political humour and can be examined in an interdisciplinary manner. The first part describes theoretical aspects, functions, and elements of political humour and political satire, main features and types of cartoons and memes. In the second part, the corpus of 198 political cartoons and 1121 memes from March 2019 to December 2020 is analysed with computer-aided content analysis and multimodal discourse analysis. The analysis units are social context, formed by the domestic and foreign political events in Ukraine in the research period, joke techniques and communication levels in the cartoons and memes. These units are examined chronologically and thematically. The research is based on the hypothesis about the interdependence of social context and subversive/supportive humour in the construction of Zelensky’s image.

The cute and the fluffy:

Author(s): Liisi Laineste,Anastasiya Fiadotava,Eva Šipöczová,Guillem Castañar Rubio / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2022

When serious official political statements are not enough to get people’s votes, politicians often turn to attention-grabbing and emotion-triggering self-presentation. They give the public access to their “normal, everyday” lives through personalisation and use other tools of “new” politics to create a favourable image of themselves. They can also show the unexpected, backstage aspects of their lives, such as their interactions with their pets. The paper analyses four case studies from different countries (Belarus, Estonia, Slovakia and Spain) in which politicians’ references to their pets became a prominent topic in internet communication and provoked numerous humorous reactions in the form of memes. By looking at various degrees of politicians’ personalisation strategies, we show that “new” and “old” politics should be regarded as the poles of a continuum rather than a binary opposition. We also discuss the content, form and stance of the humorous internet memes posted in reaction to the appearance of politicians’ pets in the news. Our research indicates that such memes function to provoke a discussion and, as a result, form a polyvocal commentary on events; the politicians, however, must take risks accompanying unconventional, revealing political communication and hope that “there's no such thing as bad publicity”.

Examining the rhetorical strategies employed in the humorous discourse of Chinese talk shows

Author(s): Zhou Tianli,Nor Shahila Mansor,Lay Hoon Ang,Sharon Sharmini,Xuan Tang / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2022

Researchers have pointed out that rhetorical strategies have a significant impact on producing humour in Chinese talk shows, while few of them have investigated the factors that affect the rhetorical choice in humorous discourse in that context. This study aims to identify the rhetorical strategies used in humorous discourse and investigate the factors that impact on the rhetorical strategies chosen by the hosts or comedians to produce humour. Thus, the current study selected 24 monologue samples from a popular programme called Rock & Roast and conducted a discourse analysis on them. Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical theory is adopted to uncover the factors that influence rhetorical choice in the humorous discourse of Chinese talk shows. The findings reveal that the realisation of rhetorical strategies in the humorous discourse of talk shows is rich, including rhetorical devices, foreign language (English), and internet buzzwords, among other things. The main factors influencing the rhetorical strategies chosen in the humorous discourse in Chinese talk shows are the ‘ratio’ of ‘agent and agency,’ which are talk show comedians and the Chinese language. This study contributes to helping the audience gain a better understanding of rhetorical humour in Chinese talk shows and provides a new perspective for humorous discourse analysis.

Could humour make advertisements worse?

Author(s): Vytautas Dikčius,Karina Adomavičiūtė,Ieva Venskuvienė / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2022

The aim of this study is to assess the impact of sexist advertisements on the perception of advertisements’ violation, ridiculousness and consumers’ intention to purchase a product by considering different cases of interaction between the type of advertisement (sexism without humour and sexism with humour), the direction of sexism and the respondents’ gender. The study uses a two-by-two factorial design experiment to investigate data obtained by means of a questionnaire (183 responses). Data analysis revealed that the involvement of humour in sexist advertising has a negative impact on the perception of the advertisement and consumers’ intention to purchase. Furthermore, the direction of sexism (against women vs men) appears significant when it is paired with humour. The results of the study fill a research gap regarding the impact of the interaction between the type of advertising, the direction of sexism, and the respondents’ gender on the perception of specific advertisements and intention to purchase the advertised product.

Book review

Author(s): Władysław Chłopicki / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2022

KROKODIL LACOSTE ZLATKA TOPČIĆA KAO SILVERTOWN: ANALIZA PREVODA DRAME

Author(s): Selma Đuliman,Amira Sadiković / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 21/2022

This paper contains an analysis of the selected scenes from the play Krokodil Lacoste / Silvertown by Zlatko Topčić. The play won the “Alija Isaković” award in 2010, while the Cultural Association of Bosniaks Preporod published its dual Bosnian and English edition in 2016. The segments are analysed parallelly in Bosnian and English for the purpose of observing the level of functional equivalence in the target text. The analysis entails extralinguistic and linguistic categories in accord ance with the model developed by Hatim and Mason (1990) and later expanded by Zhang et al. (2015). The extralinguistic category includes, among other, the culture-translation relationship, and the linguistic category entails three dimensions: communicative, pragmatic and semiotic. The analysis in this case includes the communicative and semiotic component.