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In this paper we studied the influence of the English language on the discourse of people in the area of video games. In the first part of the paper we introduced the lexicological and sociolinguistic terminology, which is necessary to understand and fully appreciate the characteristics of the gamer discourse. Additionally, we scrutinised the status of the English language as a lingua franca. We gathered the corpus by observing a group of gamers who communicate with each other over Facebook. Furthermore, we gave a survey to the aforementioned group. Results indicate an overwhelmingly positive attitude towards the use of the English language in combination with Serbian when the subject of video games is raised.
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Who are saints in the traditional Russian folklore, do they belong to us or to them? With the assumption that the boundaries between what is familiar and what is foreign are unstable and depend not only on the object but also on the subjective point of view, the author answers the question with an analysis of the material collected in the Arkhangelsk region (now in the archives of the Russian National Humanist University). He assumes that the category of “us” may be understood in two ways: relatively (somebody who belongs to the same group as we do; the relevant pronouns: my, our) and possessively (someone or something that belongs to the subject). The author further investigates how saints and sainthood relate to the “us --- them” opposition. There is no unambiguous answer. Saints are closely connected to categories of afterlife, such as God, mythological and demonic figures, the dead; they exhibit superhumam powers. At the same time, they are treated as humans, belonging to specific communities (cf. russkiy bog ‘Russian God’). Thus, saints occupy a middle position between the world of humans and the world beyond; more exactly, they are representatives of both, which in folk understanding makes relations with them valuable in a peculiar way.
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On the basis of data from various genres, the author analyzes the range and cultural functions of the images of ethnic foreigners in annual rituals. These include: the Jew, Gypsy, Turk, German, Hungarian, Cossack and a generalized figure called “the foreigner”. Some of them, e.g. the Hungarian or the Turk, only appear in some genres and rituals, whereas the Jew appears in a wide spectrum of genres. The article analyzes in greater detail the following exponents of foreignness: the language, clothes, appearance, gestures, singing and music, knowledge and skills, attributes and religion.The author also stresses that the figures of the foreigners, in contrast to commonplace stereotypes, are also manifestations of intentional and symbolic admissions of the people to the community. The process is multidimensional and is realized through Polonization (mainly in attire), functional equivalence to other figures, a change of semantic valuation (from negative to positive) or a socially grounded treatment of the foreigners as both addressees and participants of rituals.
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There exist many texts of folklore containing not only information about the lives of saints but also about other aspects of their sainthood, such as posthumous miracles, events connected with the discovery of their remains, histories of the churches and chapels connected with the saints, etc. The totality of texts of different genres concerning a saint may be considered as that saint’s folk life. The texts are characterized by a profound respect of the saint; they contain multi-aspectual information about his or her life or explain the rituals connected with the saint. Some folk text, especially legends, are based on religious texts (canonical or apocryphal texts, prayers) translated into the language of folklore. Literary hagiographical texts may be passed orally from one generation to the next and as a result become folk legends; they may also be based on folk orally-transmitted legends. Some of these transformations are presented in the article, e.g. the reduction of written texts to short episodes, a selection of literary hagiographic motifs, a description, containing folk terms, of events from the saint’s life, etc.
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In two separate studies, it was examined to what extent in languages with rich inflectional morphology, such as Serbian, in the tasks of automatic perception and word production we can rely on phonotactic information, i.e. permitted combinations of phonemes/graphemes. In the first study, with the help of support vector machines, word classes discrimination was carried out based on bigrams and trigrams generated at the morphosyntactic category level. In the second study, the production of inflected forms was explored, with the help of memory-based learning, relying on phonotactic information from the last four syllables of lemmas. Maximum discrimination accuracy of inflected word classes was obtained on the basis of bigrams reaching about 93% of accuracy. Similarly, in the task of inflectional production on all inflected word classes taken together, around 92% of the inflected forms were generated correctly. This confirms that phonotactic information in the perception and production of morphologically complex words plays an important role. Therefore, this information should be taken into account when considering the emergence of larger language units and patterns. The results show that functional connections between orthography/phonology and semantics lead to successful lexical learning, but at the same time they call into question the need for positing the existence of mental lexicon in which mental representations of various language characteristics are stored.
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The aim of this paper has been to determine the translation equivalents of passive constructions on the material of three languages, English as a language of the original text, and Serbian and Hungarian as the languages of the translation. The novel “1984“ by George Orwell was chosen as the corpora because it abounds in passive clauses, which is related to the theme and the atmosphere of a totalitarian society in which the agent is often unknown or generalized. The results of the analysis show that the thematically conditioned use of passives in the original text is reflected in the languages of the translations, which is considered non-characteristic for them, with the frequency of passive constructions being somewhat more common in Serbian than in Hungarian. Due to the characteristics of the translation languages, the translators opted for different translation solutions, which is why in the Serbian language almost equally frequent are participle and reflexive passives, while Hungarian translation is dominated by clauses with an indefinite subject and a predicate in the 3rd person plural. Deviations from the form of the original text are most evident in the translation of long passives since active sentences are the most common in both languages.
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This paper showcases coordinate clauses with conditionality semantics. The examples are excerpted from advertising discourse, where the first clause recommends/offers to buy a specific product or service, (in most cases using verbs ”купити“ and ”изабрати/одабрати“), while the second clause explains the consequences which always bear a positive outcome for the interlocutor, (reader or buyer), and which will set in if the recommended action of the first clause is fulfilled (in most cases using verbs ”добити (на поклон)“, ”освојити“, ”остварити (попуст)“). Those positive outcomes are the responsibility of the discourse initiator, in most cases a specific brand, and they materialize through various gifts, rewards, discounts, etc. Apart from lexical semantics of the verbs which comprise the first and second clause predicates, the paper points to the syntactic structure of these sentences: the first sentence predicate always uses imperative verb forms, while the predicate of the second is Serbian future tense type-I, or other future verb forms: present (especially for imperfective verbs) and imperative mood. Future type-I occurs in the fewest examples.
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Periphrastic predicative expressions present a special type of sentential units which usually do not coincide on a cross-language level either by their contents or their form (e.g. Serbian постићи договор: Polish dojść do porozumienia: English to reach an agreement), which makes their acquisition difficult for students of Serbian as a foreign language. Therefore, one of the main tasks of the theorists and practitioners in the domain of foreign language teaching is the identification of such structures, as well as the explanation of their meaning according to the semantics of the noun as the semantic focus of the phrase. The aim of this paper is to explore, by using two verbs – acquire and reach the following phenomena: (a) the selection of verbal lexemes and their complements, (b) the proposal for a presentation of such pairs in teaching Serbian as a foreign language and (c) an outline of their lexicographical treatment.
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