Styl jako praktyka i forma pamięci zbiorowej

Author(s): Marta Wójcicka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2017

Przedmiotem artykułu są relacje między stylem językowym a pamięcią zbiorową. Styl,ujmowany semiotycznie i antropologicznie, stanowi jedną z form pamięci zbiorowej, obok typutekstu kultury, odmiany, a także gatunku tekstu. Styl jest wyrazem, świadectwem przeszłości.Ze stylu indywidualnego, np. uznanych pisarzy, odczytać można ich obraz rzeczywistości, wtym także przeszłości. Styl jest więc nośnikiem zarówno pamięci indywidualnej danego pisarza,jak też świadectwem przeszłości, w której żył i tworzył. Style typowe stanowią lustroodzwierciedlające właściwe dla danej epoki konwencje wyrażania. Styl przechowuje więcobraz przeszłości, indywidualnej i zbiorowej, jest środkiem dotarcia do niej oraz sposobemwyrażania przeszłości oraz mówienia o przeszłości i jej niewerbalnych nośnikachwspółcześnie. Styl funkcjonalny ukazano więc jako praktykę oraz formę pamięci zbiorowej:komunikatywnej lub kulturowej. Styl potoczny stanowi praktykę wcielania, podczas gdypozostałe style funkcjonalne są praktykami zapisu. Pamięć komunikatywna przekazywana jestprzez środki i wartości typowe dla stylu potocznego, pamięć kulturowa związana jestpraktycznie ze wszystkimi stylami funkcjonalnymi, w zależności od treści pamięci. // The subject of the article are relations between a language style and collective memory. Thestyle, semiotically and anthropologically presented, is one of the forms of collective memoryalong with a type of culture text, variety and text genre as well. On the one hand, the style isan expression, evidence of the past. From an individual style of e.g. recognized writers one caninterpret their image of reality, including also the past. Thus the style is a means of conveyingboth individual memory of a particular author and evidence of the past he used to live in andcreate. Typical styles are the mirrors reflecting conventions of expression appropriate for agiven period. Thus, the style stores the image of the past, individual and collective, and is ameans of reaching it, a way of expressing and talking about it, including its contemporary nonverbal means. Thus, a functional style has been presented as practice and the form ofcollective memory: communicative or cultural. A colloquial style is the practice ofincorporating, whereas other functional styles are practices of recording. Communicativememory is conveyed by means and values typical for the colloquial style, while cultural memoryis practically associated with all functional styles, depending on the contents of memory.

Lingwista wobec języka uczuć

Author(s): Elżbieta Laskowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1&2/2016

Celem referatu jest zebranie dotychczasowych sposobów rozumienia zagadnienia języka uczućprzez lingwistów oraz zaproponowanie sposobu opisu języka uczuć. Zagadnienie to byłoprzedmiotem zainteresowania takich badaczy jak Wierzbicka, Grabias, Nowakowska-Kempna,Awdiejew, Habrajska, Pajdzińska, Data. Biorąc pod uwagę poziomy języka, uwzględniane wgramatyce komunikacyjnej, autorka rozważa zjawiska nazywanie uczuć oraz ich wyrażania.Nazywanie mieści się na poziomie ideacyjnym, Wyrażanie – na poziomie interakcyjnym.Badając wypowiedzi pod względem języka uczuć, zauważyć można, że nie zawsze łatwo jestwskazać granicę między wymienionymi poziomami. Trudności te związane są przede wszystkimz dwiema kwestiami. Pierwsza z nich polega na wykorzystaniu nazw uczuć do ich wyrażania,mamy wtedy do czynienia z wyrażaniem uczuć za pomocą ich nazywania. Druga kwestia toemotywne nacechowania nazw uczuć albo też emotywne nazywanie reakcji mogącychświadczyć o uczuciu. Analiza wypowiedzi, zawierających nazywanie i wyrażanie uczućdowodzi, że w różnych odmianach języka omawiane zjawisko występuje w bardzo różnychzakresach i przejawia się bardzo zróżnicowanymi środkami językowymi). // The goal of the paper is collecting hitherto existing ways of understanding the concept of the language of feelings by linguists and suggesting a way of describing the language of feelings.This question was the subject interest of such researchers as Wierzbicka, Grabias,Nowakowska-Kempna, Awdiejew, Habrajska, Pajdzińska, and Data. Taking into account the levels of a language, included in communication grammar, the author considers naming of feelings and expressing them. The naming is contained in the ideation level, the expressing –in the interaction level. Examining utterances with reference to the language of feelings one can notice that it is not easy to show a borderline between the mentioned levels. The difficulties are mainly connected with two questions. The first one consists in using the names of feelings for expressing them, in which the feelings are expressed by naming them. The second question is the emotive marking of the names of feelings or emotive naming of reactions which can manifest the feeling. The analysis the utterances including naming and expressing feelings proves that the phenomenon in question occurs in various scopes and manifest in diverse means of language.

Współczesny polski dyskurs publiczny w perspektywie międzynarodowej.

Author(s): Władysław Chłopicki,Stanisław Gajda / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1&2/2016

How Jokes Change and May Be Changed:

Author(s): Christie Davies / Language(s): English Issue: 1&2/2016

Many excellent jokes can pose potential difficulties for tellers and listeners since they require considerable knowledge of the subject of the joke and have a long and elaborate narrative structure such that only a very skilled joke-teller can do justice to them. In a democratic, fastmoving, plural, urban world such features can create problems since they mean that on a particular occasion when jokes are being told some of the listeners may miss the point of the joke and others will feel inhibited from telling a joke. Jokes with seemingly pointless endings may likewise disappoint the broad masse, who like clear, well structured jokes with a strong resolution and who may be bored by one that disappears into nonsense. Each of these points will be considered in turn, partly from an analytical point of view and partly in relation to empirical observations of how jokes in the English language have evolved in the course of the twentieth century.

Recenzja tomu Niedosłowność w języku. Język a Komunikacja 37 pod redakcją Marcina Odelskiego, Aleksandry Knapik, Piotra Chruszczewskiego i Władysława Chłopickiego, Kraków: Krakowskie Towarzystwo Popularyzowania Wiedzy o Komunikacji Językowej „Tertium

Author(s): Grażyna Sawicka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1&2/2016

Comedy and humour:

Author(s): Mehrdad Bidgoli / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

In this essay, I aim to study comedy and humour from an ethical perspective. My main proposal is that comedy and humour can be understood alternatively in the light of ethics, and in one sense, they actually begin, more effectively, with an ethical sensibility. Effective comedy and humour initiate through an ethical sensibility called “hospitality”; ideally, they are preceded by this ethical openness. I will argue that it is this pre-original ethical hospitality and openness that can give rise to more effective moments of comedy, humour, carnival, festivity and also laughter, opening the Self to the Other in order to be able to enter into a disinterested humorous (dialogic) experience. Hospitality is of prime importance here because it turns out to be part and parcel of comedy as it also underlies the ethics of alterity. I therefore suggest that the thoughts of both Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin can give rise to a fruitful study of ethics, comedy and humour. I will “reduce” socio-political complexities of our daily life-world to comic moments through Bakhtin, and then expose the reader to a Levinasian simplicity and ethical openness that actually takes place before effective comedy and humour can begin. In this essay, I mainly have literary/critical aims, and to fulfil that aim, I will briefly discuss two Shakespearean works and contextualize my thesis. The matter of studying comedy, humour and ethics in a broader cultural, social and/or philosophical context is open for other thinkers.

Humour and ex-Yugoslav nations:

Author(s): Željko Pavić,Nataša Krivokapić / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

This study explores the issue of humour stereotyping between ex-Yugoslav nations, its veridicality and possible explanations. Three research questions were put forward related to humour stereotyping and the differences in humour production, use and appreciation between the countries, with Hofstede’s model of culture as a possible explanatory framework. The survey data were collected on a sample of university students from four ex-Yugoslav countries (N = 611). The results revealed strong negative humour stereotyping toward Croats and Slovenians and positive stereotyping toward Bosnians. However, only about 0–4 per cent of the variance in humour production, use and appreciation, depending on the sub-scales of the Multidimensional Sense of Humour Scale, could be attributed to group (country) membership, thus indicating low correspondence between the stereotypes and reality. The study results concerning the stereotypes were interpreted by evoking the discourse of Balkanism, as well as humour-style differences in popular culture between the countries.

Book review

Author(s): Vaso Psilaki,Matoula Papadimitriou / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

Book review

Author(s): Şenay Yavuz Görkem / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2019

Book review

Author(s): Christian F. Hempelmann / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

Satire, humour, and parody in 21st century Nigerian women’s poetry

Author(s): Bartholomew Chizoba Akpah / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2018

21st century Nigerian women poets have continued to utilise the aesthetics of literary devices as linguistic and literary strategies to project feminist privations and values in their creative oeuvres. There has been marginal interest towards 21st century Nigerian women’s poetry and their deployment of artistic devices such as satire, humour, and parody. Unequivocally, such linguistic and literary devices in imaginative works are deployed as centripetal force to criticise, amidst laughter, the ills of female devaluation in the society. The major thrust of the study, therefore, is to examine how satire, humour and parody are deployed in selected Nigerian women’s poetry to reproach and etch the collective ethos of women’s experience in contemporary Nigerian society. The study utilises qualitative analytical approach in the close reading and textual analysis of the selected texts focusing mainly on the aesthetics of humour, satire, and parody in challenging male chauvinism in contemporary Nigerian women’s poetry. Three long poems: “Nuptial Counsel”, “Sadiku’s Song”, and “The Sweet, Sweet Mistress’ Tale” by Mabel Evweirhoma and Maria Ajima respectively were purposively selected. The choice of the selected poems hinges on the artistic vigour, especially the evoking of laughter, mockery and condemnation of hegemonic structures through the use of satire, humour, and parody. The paper employs Molara Ogundipe’s Stiwanism, an aspect of Feminist theory in the analysis of the selected poems. The poets have shown the interventions of humour, satire, and parody as linguistic devices in condemning and highlighting peculiarities of women peonage in Nigeria.

Book review

Author(s): Alyona Ivanova / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2018

Typowy Janusz and Bad Luck Brian:

Author(s): Joanna Szerszunowicz / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2018

The Poles’ observations regarding the reality of the last decades motivated the creation of certain meme characters deeply set in the Polish culture and reflecting the new social phenomena which have come into existence recently. The examples of such persons include the characters named Janusz, Grażyna, Seba and Karyna. Previously, the names had no connotative potential and they were not used as components of idiomatic expressions. In the modern Polish, the names function as labels evoking many features (personality, given intellectual potential, appearance, stereotypical behaviour etc.). For instance, Janusz is a man in his fifties, with a beer belly and reddish face, unattractive, with very limited knowledge in a field in which he himself considers to be an expert, complaining and stressing that life was much better in communist times, wearing unfashionable clothes, putting on sandals and white socks. It is worth adding that because of the connotations, the name is used in the expression typowy Janusz/janusz and in the construction Janusze/janusze + a discipline/area of activity, e.g. janusze biznesu. Both in informal communication and in the journalese discourse, their belonging to labels is of importance – the names evoke complex pictures. As culture-bound items, such units are interesting from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. They will be analyzed and compared with the character of the English-language Bad Luck Brian memes.

Gertrude Bonnin on Sexual Morality

Author(s): Tadeusz Lewandowski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

This paper examines attitudes to sexual morality held by the Yankton Dakota author and activist Gertrude Bonnin (1876–1938), better known by her penname Zitkála-Šá (Red Bird in Lakota). Bonnin’s concerns encompass several themes: the victimization of Indian women, disintegration of Native courtship rituals, sexual threats posed by peyote use, and the predatory nature of Euro-American men. This critique as a whole — in which a ‘white invasion,’ in her words, leads to a corruption of Native sexuality — sometimes produces inconsistencies, particularly regarding Bonnin’s statements on the alleged sexual perils of peyote. Her investigations into the Oklahoma guardianship scandals of the 1920s, however, strongly buttress recent research by Sarah Deer (2015), whose study, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America, highlights the tragic aspects of Native-white sexual relations under United States settler-colonialism.

Collocational Knowledge Uptake by University Students under Online Learning

Author(s): Svetlana Danilina / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The article discusses an experiment that looked into the acquisition of collocational knowledge in three university groups studying online, each subjected to different learning conditions: incidental acquisition, intentional acquisition, and intentional acquisition with an extra productive output (essay), the latter having been assessed for the amount and accuracy of target lexis usage in their texts. The aim of the study was to see how well upper-intermediate university students could identify collocations in an input text, and how the text-based output affected the collocational uptake outcomes. The study showed that the productive output group outperformed the other intentional learning group, while incidental acquisition group failed to complete a productive knowledge posttest. Although the study revealed only slightly higher gains in the output group, their results appeared more consistent than those demonstrated by the other intentional uptake group, whose retention rate decreased by the time of delayed posttest.

Editorial Humour research:

Author(s): Diana Elena Popa,Władysław Chłopicki,Dorota Brzozowska / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2013

ИНТЕРКУЛТУРАЛНА КОМУНИКАЦИЈА НА РАДНОМ МЕСТУ...: РОДНО ОЗНАЧЕНЕ ЛЕКСЕМЕ ЗА НАЗИВЕ ЗАНИМАЊА, ЗВАЊА И ТИТУЛА У СРПСКОМ И ЕНГЛЕСКОМ ЈЕЗИКУ

Author(s): Katarina Subanović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 73/2020

This theoretical paper deals with gender-lexicalized names for occupations, functions and titles in the Serbian and English languages. The main task is to provide a summary of Serbian and English literature in terms of a given topic so as to compare general attitudes and conclusions in the two languages. The language material consulted for the writing of this paper included scientific studies, academic debates and newspaper articles, since this topic represents a social phenomenon which can be pointed at by the interaction between scientist (academic studies, debates) and the public (newspaper articles). As for the methodological procedure, it involved several steps. Firstly, we created tabular annotated bibliographies which contained the following data: the title of the paper/article, the subject matter of the paper/ article, the aim(s), methodology, the information on the participants in the study, or the information on the corpus, the main results, limitations and conclusions. Next, we selected the relevant parts for the problems we dealt with and included them in the appropriate parts of our paper. Eventually, based on the analyzed studies and newspaper articles, we made a conclusion regarding the given topic. The main results indicate that active efforts are made in both languages in order to eliminate sexist language and gender inequality. However, since English and Serbian are different in terms of the typological classification, the problem is approached differently in the two languages. To conclude, these results refer to the said corpus, thus further research is needed to consider the observed tendencies a rule.

АКАДЕМСКИ ВОКАБУЛАР: ДА ЛИ СУ СТУДЕНТИ (У)ОПШТЕ ОБРАЗОВАНИ? О ПОТРЕБИ ЗА УКЉУЧИВАЊЕМ АКАДЕМСКОГ ВОКАБУЛАРА У КУРИКУЛУМЕ ЗА СРПСКИ ЈЕЗИК У СРЕДЊОЈ ШКОЛИ И НА УНИВЕРЗИТЕТУ

Author(s): Jovana Z. Milovanović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 73/2020

This article discusses reception and production of academic vocabulary among native speakers of Serbian language. Academic vocabulary is one of the key elements of academic language competence, and a modest lexicon and underdevel- oped academic language competence can cause problems in both comprehension and production. In this research, we used a vocabulary test consisting of 12 items taken from general culture entrance exams used at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. The participants are BA students of French language at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, years 1-4. The participants were instructed to provide a synonym or a definition for each item, as well as a sentence containing the given word. The aim of this research is to highlight issues in comprehension of academic vocabulary and establish the influence of factors such as word etymology or university level on the success of the participants. We analysed the results and classified them in three categories: correct, incorrect and unanswered. The majority of participants successfully identified just half of the given words (in order of success: poliglota 95,76%, bestseler 92,37%, pacifista 66,10%, suveren 58,47%, prototip 57,63%, elokventan 56,78%). The success level for the other half of the items from the test was below 50% (in order of success: erudita 49,15%, hipokrizija 39,83%, nepotizam 22,03%, skrupulozan 18,64%, šprahfeler 10,17%, eksproprijacija 8,47%). The influ- ence of etymology was analysed through a comparison of the results for six items of French/Latin origin with the results for the other six items which did not originate from Romance languages. This analysis shows that the participants had similar re- sults in both groups of items, with three words from each group having above 50% of correct answers (suveren, elokventan, pacifista; poliglota, bestseler, prototip). Lastly, we examined success levels from year 1, year 2, year 3 and year 4 students and de- termined that the median of correct answers for each year does vary, but that there is no strong linear progression (median year 1=5, year 2=6, year 3=7, year 4=6). The results indicate a lack of knowledge of academic vocabulary and difficulties in identifying and manipulating this type of lexis. We believe it is necessary to integrate academic language skills, including academic vocabulary, in high school curriculum and introduce Serbian language as a subject at university level.

Trevor Noah and the contingent politics of racial joking

Author(s): Jennalee Donian,Nicholas Holm / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2021

This article takes up the transnational comedy career of Trevor Noah as a way to explore how the political work of racial comedy can manifest, circulate and indeed communicate differently across different racial-political contexts. Through the close textual analysis of two key comic performances –“The Daywalker” (2009) and “Son of Patricia” (2018), produced and (initially) circulated in South Africa and the USA, respectively – this article explores the extent to which Noah’s comic treatment of race has shifted between the two contexts. In particular, attention is paid to how Noah incites, navigates and mitigates potential sources of offence surrounding racial anxieties in the two contexts, and how he evokes his own “mixed-race” status in order to open up spaces of permission that allow him to joke about otherwise taboo subjects. Rejecting the claim that the politics of Noah’s comedy is emancipatory or progressive in any straightforward way, by means of formal analyses we argue that his comic treatment of race does not enact any singular politics, but rather that the political work of his racial humour shifts relative to its wider political contexts. Thus, rather than drawing a clear line between light entertainment and politically meaningful humour, this article argues that the political valence of racial joking can be understood as contingent upon wider discourses of race that circulate in national-cultural contexts.

Book review

Author(s): Dorota Brzozowska / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2021