Stand-up in the age of outrage:

Author(s): Jonas Nicolaï,Pieter Maeseele / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

In the context of an expanding societal awareness of social injustice and inequality, stand-up comedy is frequently caught in the crosshairs of discourses on free speech and political correctness. This study examines the evolving relationship between comedic critique and contemporary discourses on the boundaries of humour. Drawing on the thesis of there politicisation of humour, we analyse stand-up comedy’s reflexivity towards “wokeness” and“cancel culture” through the case of Flemish stand-up comedian Michael Van Peel. Our findings suggest that the complexity of the current political climate leaves Van Peel and his contemporaries disoriented in their attempts to surpass the boundaries of comedic critique. Asa result, we argue for a reimagining of comedy's political potential beyond traditional interpretations as subversive critique, towards a view of stand-up comedy as a site of democratic resistance. Expanding views on the public role of comedians in response to contemporary socio-political issues can enhance the understanding of complex sociocultural dynamics and enable critical engagement with discourses on social justice and comedic free speech.

From mocking pastors to roasting politicians:

Author(s): Ivo Nieuwenhuis / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

In this article, I argue that humour scandals are less a product of the changing media landscape of the last thirty years than recent studies seem to suggest. Instead, I point to the structural continuities that can be observed in Dutch humour scandals over the past seventy years.Although stemming from various sociocultural and media contexts, these scandals roughly follow the same ‘script’. I also show that humour scandals are not just mediated events, but markers of cultural conflict as well. Behind every scandal, a substantial moral, cultural, and often also social divide can be recognised, and the study of humour scandals can be used to better understand such divides. I substantiate both of these claims through a qualitative,contextual analysis of two Dutch humour scandals: the mocking of Catholic pastors by comedian Wim Sonneveld in a TV performance from 1963, and the roast of far-right politician Thierry Baudet by comedian Martijn Koning in a popular late night talk show from Spring 2021.

Comic innocence

Author(s): Dick Zijp / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

In recent years, humour has re-entered the public sphere as a serious and potentially explosive topic of debate, giving rise to social conflicts and controversies. Paradoxically,however, humour has at the same time been passionately (and often aggressively) defended as innocent and harmless. I propose the notion of ‘comic innocence’ to make sense of this paradox. I take Dutch and American studies of racism, white innocence and racial ignorance as a starting point to construct a theory of comic innocence, which is tested through the analysis of responses in both legacy and social media to a serious opinion article on humour(written by the author of this paper), which sparked a scandal in the summer of 2021. Ianalyse 265 tweets and a small number of related newspaper articles and blog posts to demonstrate the respondents’ “humour ideologies”. I argue that, in the context of the “re-politicisation of humour”, those who defend humour as innocent mobilise and re-articulate three older ideas on humour. First, they emphasise the overall positive psychological, social and political functions and effects of humour. Second, they believe that humour should be protected against a ‘woke’ culture of high sensitivity and censorship. Third, they argue that humour research is a joke, and humour scholars lack a sense of humour. The humour scholar appears in this debate as the most important source of danger: a humourless, left-wing scientist keen on curtailing and censoring humorous expression.

Liquid racism in Greek online satirical news

Author(s): Villy Tsakona / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

The present study explores the infiltration of racism in humorous texts which at first sight appear to have antiracist intentions, in particular in satirical news coming from popular Greek websites and targeting majority people for their racist practices towards migrants. The analysis reveals that distinguishing between antiracist and racist interpretations is not an easy or straightforward matter: humour seems to blur the boundary between racism and antiracism. In this context, the concept of liquid racism (Weaver, 2016) is exploited to account for the ambiguities of humorous discourse when it involves racist and antiracist meanings.Furthermore, given that this paper is part of a special issue on “Humour and the public sphere”,the latter understood in Habermas’s (1989/1962) sense, I will venture some observations concerning the (in)compatibility between Habermas’s conceptualisation of the public sphere and humour/satire. Perhaps a broader and more inclusive definition of the public sphere than the one initially proposed by Habermas is called for, which will allow for the ambiguities of satirical humour.

From London Bridge to Finsbury Park Mosque:

Author(s): Nikita LOBANOV / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

The former Twitter (now called ‘X’) is a social media platform characterized by an intense exchange of posts by users on political themes. These posts can indicate the evolution of a social phenomenon around a pivotal event. The overarching theme of this paper is to observe and examine the posts of Twitter users following the London Bridge terror attack on June 3rd, 2017,and following another attack against the Finsbury Park Mosque on June 19th of the same year.By means of a content analysis of a robust database of posts collected from the Twitter platform I was able to observe the reactions of radical right users during the attacks and reflect upon how hate was played out in terms of language and emotions. Despite the inevitable violence of these attacks, I detected the presence of humour in tweets as well as remarks that were predictably characterized by both physical and moral disgust. All tweets examined displayed at least one of Haidt’s Moral Foundations. My hypothesis is that humour is a moral phenomenon which can lead to exaggerated human behaviours as well.

The Development of Intercultural Mediation Skills in English Language Teaching

Author(s): Irena Dimova / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

This article focuses on the rise of English as an international language and explores its function as a global lingua franca used for enabling communication among speakers of different linguistic and cultural origins. It discusses research concerned with investigating the pedagogical implications of the use of English as a lingua franca and presents calls on the part of scholars for encouraging students to become intercultural mediators and acquire pragmatic competence for negotiating differences in language use/sociocultural standpoint and achieving intelligibility in intercultural communication. It also reviews research engaged in offering practical advice on devising pedagogical activities for developing intercultural mediation skills necessary for functioning well in lingua franca interactions. Drawing upon this body of literature, the present study argues for the need to incorporate the teaching of intercultural mediation skills into traditional English pedagogy. It proposes two categories of pedagogical activities, awareness-raising and analytic, which can make space for the development of intercultural mediation competence in the English language classroom. The current study also gives an example of how these activities can be incorporated into tertiary education English classes by presenting pedagogical tasks from a course offered in the Department of English and American Studies at Sofia University.

A Morpho-syntactic Analysis of Human-moderated Hate Speech Samples from Wykop.pl WebService

Author(s): Inez Okulska,Anna Kołos / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

The dynamic increase in user-generated content on the web presents significant challenges in protecting Internet users from exposure to offensive material, such as cyberbullying and hate speech, while also minimizing the spread of wrongful conduct. However, designing automated detection models for such offensive content remains complex, particularly in languages with limited publicly available data. To address this issue, our research collaborates with the Wykop.pl web service to fine-tune a model using genuinecontent that has been banned by professional moderators. In this paper, we focus on the Polish language and discuss the notion of datasets and annotation frameworks, presenting our stylometric analysis of Wykop.pl content to identify morpho-syntactic structures that are commonly applied incyberbullying and hate speech. By doing so, we contribute to the ongoing discussion on offensive language and hate speech in sociolinguistic studies, emphasizing the need to consider user-generated online content.

The role of language in the formation of value models of cultures

Author(s): Oksana Leontieva,Marina Teplenko / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

The extent to which the value systems of different cultures influence each other is one of the most important issues in intercultural communication today, as it is closely related to the understanding and acceptance of the Other. Each of the existing cultures has its own value model created by it. The core of this model is formed by the most ancient layers of language, its root basis. Any value that emerged on the philosophical-religious stratum of culture is encoded with linguistic meanings. These codes form the value core of culture. The paper deals with the extent to which the value codes of one culture influence the codes of another culture. Different value models of cultures are proposed and considered and the role of language in creating their value core is shown.

Book review

Author(s): Patricia Díaz-Muñoz / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2023

ТЕКСТЪТ В АНГЛОЕЗИЧНАТА МУЗИКА

Author(s): Emilia Karaminkova-Kabakova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2023

The article considers, for research purposes, the role and the meaning of the lyrics (words) in the vocal-instrumental genres of the English-speaking world, emphasizing its content and meaning. A counterpoint to this type of musical genre is instrumental music, which in specific cases is used as an opportunity to compare different musical forms. Special attention is paid to the sung words in the musical works of the English-speaking world in the context of the distinction between speech and language.

Лингвистический анализ мегленорумынского идиома: по следам этнолингвистической экспедиции

Author(s): Ivan Kazakov,Alexandra Chivarzina / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2024

This article considers the language characteristics of the Megleno-Romanian dialect, using texts recorded by a speaker from Gevgelija (Huma), North Macedonia. The texts were collected during an ethnolinguistic survey while studying funeral and memorial rites among the East-Romanian communities of Macedonia, including the Aromanians and Megleno-Romanians. The Megleno-Romanian recordings have significant linguistic value. Given the fact that Megleno-Romanian is on the verge of extinction, it is important to gather data from the few speakers in order to document the state of the idiom today and compare it with the earlier studies. This article also includes a small comparative component: the collected Megleno-Romanian data is analysed and compared with the neighbouring Aromanian dialects and the Romanian language.

Asymetrické užití tzv. formálních a neformálních pozdravů a rozloučení v české a francouzské části korpusu InterCorp

Author(s): Magdaléna Lapúniková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 29/2024

The contrastive study describes the most frequent greetings and saying goodbye used in the Czech and French language, and defines and evaluates the ways in which they can be translated. In the present study, the data were gathered from the parallel corpus InterCorp. The research includes an interlinguistic questionnaire survey carried out in the Czech Republic and France. The results of this survey showing the assessment of polite phrases by native speakers of either Czech or French are confronted with the findings of the contrastive analysis to identify and characterize in detail potential translation problems between French and Czech especially in terms of the use of formal and informal greetings and saying goodbye.

Taikomosios kalbotyros raida

Author(s): Meilutė Ramonienė / Language(s): Lithuanian Issue: Supplement/2023

The aim of the article is to review the development of applied linguistics in Lithuania, analyse the general tendencies of the development of this science, and present the more prominent groups of researchers in applied linguistics, the schools that have been formed or are being formed, and the contribution of some researchers to the research of different branches of applied linguistics. The article focuses on the work started after the restoration of independence of the Republic of Lithuania in 1990, because only from that time onwards did the work of Lithuanian applied linguistics enter the international mainstream of this science. It discusses some of the research and practical work related to the research that helps or has helped in certain periods to solve problems related to language in life. First of all, the article introduces the works on teaching Lithuanian as a foreign language, which are connected with the beginning of applied linguistics in Lithuania, and which have laid the appropriate methodological foundations for the formation of communicative competence, for the development of a new type of textbooks, pedagogical grammars of the Lithuanian language, and for the creation of a system of assessment of competences. After discussing the origins of applied linguistics in Lithuania, the paper discusses the further development of this science. Research in the field of language acquisition, sociolinguistics, language attrition, cognitive linguistics, pragmatics, politeness and impoliteness, corpus and forensic linguistics, and other branches of applied linguistics is presented, and the real-life linguistic issues, analysed by Lithuanian researchers, are highlighted. The final section of the article describes the most important works of dissemination of applied linguistics and presents the research journal Taikomoji kalbotyra (“Applied Linguistics”), the international conferences on applied linguistics that have taken place in Lithuania, and the networks of researchers.

Standardizace zdola vs. shora: Jak se z Charlese III. stal Karel III.

Author(s): Ondřej Dufek,Martin Beneš / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2024

The paper deals with the standardization process of the regnal name of the new King Charles III in Czech. It documents the fact that leading Czech internet media at first referred to the new king in the original form, Charles III, but very soon began to call him Karel III, using the Czech form of the English name Charles. The paper places this process into the broader context of translating foreign personal names into Czech and investigates whether European Monarchs are usually referred to by their original names or a translated form of their names in contemporary written Czech (as evidenced by the SYN corpus series). The central focus of the paper lies in the hour-byhour detailed reconstruction of how it happened that the Czech internet media ceased quite suddenly to call the new king Charles III, beginning to call him Karel III. The paper proceeds to discuss this process in the context of language standardization theories, showing that although authorities (linguists, predominantly from the Czech Language Institute) explicitly refused to recommend (“from above”) either the original, or a translated variant of the name, internet media representatives interpreted their statements in favour of the translated version and started to call the new king Karel III in Czech.

Anglická adjektivní přirovnání: srovnání korpusového vzorku s výběrem ve standardní příručce idiomů

Author(s): Jaroslav Emmer / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2024

An adjectival simile is an established phraseological unit with a standardised form (blind as a bat). It is perhaps for this reason that it has not been attracting much attention, and most studies on similes focus on verbal similes. This study reports a significant diachronic shift in the usage of adjectival similes, identified by comparing a lexicographic sample with one from a corpus. Analysing corpus data, we collected a representative sample of 309 adjectival similes in English, which further served for the compilation of a “simile minimum” of 60 types. Both corpus samples were then contrasted with lexicographic lists from a dictionary of idioms: English Idioms and How to Use Them (Seidl & McMordie, 1978; 1988). The comparison shows that the lexicographic minimum (65 types) overlaps with that from the corpus by just one-third and the whole representative list (166 types) only by one-fifth. The significant disproportion can be explained as a shift in linguistic reality but also as a result of the dictionary authors’ idiolects or homogeneity of their data. These findings can serve for textbook and reference manual authors as a warning against relying too much on their own linguistic intuition.

„Je to tvoj priateľ alebo PRIATEĽ-priateľ?“

Author(s): Sára Petrechová / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2024

Contrastive reduplication (CR) (e.g., milk-milk or soy milk) has emerged as a notable linguistic phenomenon in both spoken and written English, drawing attention across various linguistic dimensions, including morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. However, the phonology and prosody aspects of CR remain relatively unexplored. This paper represents a summary of an MA thesis (Petrechová, 2022) addressing this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis of approximately 200 spoken excerpts of CR. The CR corpus encompasses diverse sources such as literature, radio, movies, and TV series, with manually curated spoken examples. The analysis investigates the overall intonation patterns of CR constructions, with special attention given to acoustic properties, including contrastive features in terms of intonation, overall duration of elements, and measurements such as F1 and F2 of stressed vowels. The investigation aims to shed light on the nuanced interplay of prosody and phonology in expressing contrast within CR constructions. The study also analyses the interconnection of acoustic and prosodic features of CR and other observed variables, such as the speaker’s gender, CR pragmatic functions, and the position of CR in a sentence. The study provides evidence that the first element of CR tends to be more prominent and stressed, and that the intonation pattern of CR depends on the overall intonation pattern of the whole clause in which CR occurs.

Adaptácia antroponým cudzieho pôvodu v slovenčine a španielčine

Author(s): Bohdan Ulašin / Language(s): Slovak Issue: 2/2024

This article compares the adaptation of anthroponyms of foreign origin in Slovak and Spanish across historical periods. We analyze ancient names of Latin and Greek origin where Spanish shows, in general, a deeper level of adaptation. We have also included biblical, Near Eastern, and Egyptian names and names from the medieval and early modern periods, where the predominant tendency is to find native equivalents, not only for first names, but for surnames as well (in a significantly more systematic way in the case of Spanish). Nowadays the clear tendency is to maintain the original graphic form of foreign names in languages using the Latin alphabet, except for names of popes and monarchs. Searching more widely, the article analyzes rules for transcribing names from Slavic languages, Arabic, and Chinese, noting a greater degree of adaptation in Spanish. Different approaches are found in transcription of Chinese names, with Spanish using pinyin and Slovak employing a system of transcription based on its own alphabet. The article concludes with translations of anthroponyms, highlighting variations in the use or absence of translation of descriptive names (nombres parlantes, e.g. Schneewittchen) into the two languages analyzed.

Типология на административната лексика и лексико-семантични групи в Закона за устройство на съдилищата от 1899 г.

Author(s): Zornitsa Ivanova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2023

The article focuses on the creation of a typology of the administrative vocabulary and its distribution into lexico-semantic groups as exemplified by the Courts Organization Act of 1899. The typology of the administrative vocabulary and its classification by lexico-semantic groups are two approaches to the analysis and organization of lexical units, each of them having a different focus and application. Typological analysis focuses on the structural and functional relationships between the various units of the administrative vocabulary. It examines how these lexical items are organized and interact within a given system or context. Lexico-semantic classification divides words into categories and subcategories according to their meanings, thus showing how different concepts are related by their meaning.

Нов театрален жанр ли е документалният театър?

Author(s): Blagoy Boychev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 32/2024

The aim of this article is to answer the question whether documentary theater is a separate theatrical genre, or simply a specific method for the realization of performances in already established theatrical genres. In order to answer this question correctly and reasonably, I have examined the various aspects in the definition of the phenomenon “genre”, I have traced the influence of Aristotle’s thought system on the conception of theatrical art and on the views of modern theatre theorists. A comparative analysis of various theoretical concepts regarding “genre” has been realized and a definition of “genre” has been proposed – as having a specific impact and asserting this impact in works of documentary theatre, which also differentiates it from other theatrical genres and conceptualizes it in an independent category.

„Вино от глухарчета“ в сетива и лета

Author(s): Sylvia Borissova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 32/2024

The article examines basic philosophical-aesthetic elements in Dandelion Wine (1957) by Ray Bradbury, in parallel with the play of the same name under the dramatization and direction of Katya Petrova in the “Nikolay Binev” Youth Theater, Sofia, Bulgaria, which is being performed during the current theater season (2023/2024). The main object of study – both in terms of the novel and in terms of the play – is the specific language of expression of the senses in summer and summer in the senses: a characteristic line both of the rich set of means of expression of the great American writer and of the original dramatization, adaptation, choreography and scenography of the production. In this perspective, sensory anthropology is a methodological key both for research and for creating an artistic world.