About the Syntactic Structure of Bulgarian Proverbs and English Proverbial Parallels to Them

Author(s): Nadezhda Ershova / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

The article considers the most frequent sentence structures of Bulgarian proverbial parallels to Russian proverbs included into G. L. Permyakov’s paremiological minimum. The aim of the study is to classify the syntactic structures of the Bulgarian proverbs in comparison with the structures of the English proverbial parallels. The research has been based on the findings of a paremiological sociolinguistic experiment conducted by Professor M. Yu. Kotova of St. Petersburg State University and her paremiological group that resulted into series of publications titled “Tetradi Paremiographa” (“Handbooks of a Paremiographer”). The relevance of studying sentence structures is due to the fact that the coverage of grammatical issues, i.e. the analysis and description of the logical and syntactic structures of proverbs, is not paid sufficient attention in many languages.

Приложение на съвременните технологии при оценка на степента на усвояване на междуезиковия трансфер на темпоралните форми (български и английски език)

Author(s): Georgi Dzhumayov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2021

The present study demonstrates the application of modern methods for analysis of acquired knowledge of interlingual transfer at grammatical and semantic level of the temporal systems in indicative mood in modern Bulgarian, English and Spanish. The basic experiment, conducted for the first time in Bulgarian linguistics, consists of two parts and aims to check in a comparative way the degree of acquisition of the temporal categories in English and Spanish by native Bulgarian students. The experiment consists of contrastive examples in declarative affirmative sentences, which illustrate their use. The analysis of the results of the acquired knowledge of transfer from a native to a foreign language is a basis for refining the work of the teacher in the field of grammar.

Икономиката в контекста на преподаването по български език и информационни технологии

Author(s): Neli Minkova,Zdravka Georgieva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2021

The article presents a lesson, related to the acquisition and application of knowledge in Bulgarian language, Information technology and Economics. The aim is to learn students how to use these skills in practice for their professional realization in life.

Cultural dimensions and characteristics reflected in Hungarian TED talks

Author(s): Emese Pozdena / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

The present paper is aimed at exploring humour and cultural aspects in TED talks recorded at Hungarian independent TEDx standard events. Applying Speck’s (1991) humour taxonomy, a corpus of 30 Hungarian language talks have been classified based on Barry & Graca’s (2018) humour typology groups and further examined by descriptive statistical indicators. Results show that cultural and other national features are reflected in the talks and are appreciated by the audience. Incongruity and disparagement appeared to be a safe comic device to create laughter in highly individualist and masculine cultures; however, relief-based humour is riskier in high uncertainty avoiding countries, as the message may be interpreted differently than expected.

Post-climax analysis in toli

Author(s): Yaw Sekyi-Baidoo / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

Aspects of contextual jokes include the relationship with the goal of the interaction, and the involvement of the audience in the overall manifestation of the joke and its response. Sacks' identification of the ‘response’ or the ‘reaction’ – the final of the three-phased organisation of joke narratives (Sacks, 1974: 337; Attardo, 1994: 307-311) points to an aspect of the manifestation of contextual jokes beyond the fabula or the narration of the tale ‘proper’ to include a part relating to the reaction of the audience. Such reactions may be the joke itself or to its telling. A study of the performance of humorous tales, called toli in Ghana, reveals that the final phase, which we refer to as ‘post-climax’, involves the attention of all players, not to the telling of the tale, but to the incongruity and humour which underlie the very identity of the humorous tale. The post-climax discussion is, thus, an analytical reaction to various points of the tale, which has become an integral part of the performance of the tale as a conversational act, and which contributes extensively to the total manifestation of humour and laughter. Based on incongruity and comic-climax perspectives, the paper discusses the nature and strategies of post-climax, including the association of tale audience and setting, hypothetical extension of tale, incongruity and forced congruity discussions, dramatization and evaluations of realness, through which laughter, the main tenet of the genre, extensively manifests.

Funny or distasteful?

Author(s): Anna Stwora / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

Today’s infotainment clutter puts pressure on advertisers to come up with more surprising and more memorable ads. This need for novelty, creativity, and astonishment does set the expectation bar high, steering ads towards various means of eliciting surprise, including humour, shock, and taboo. In this paper, the author will try to investigate a set of multimodal advertising messages which use (debatable) humour and surprise, with a view to finding trans-cultural similarities and differences in terms of ad appreciation. The primary objective of this paper is to explore attitudinal responses of Taiwanese informants to controversial humorous advertisements in English; to this end, an online survey was conducted to ask them about their interpretations of and feelings towards a selection of ads. Its results will be compared with those obtained from Polish respondents, described in the author’s previous study (Stwora 2020).

Humour as political aesthetics in street protests during the political Ice Age

Author(s): Tijen Tunali / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

This article analyses humour as a part of carnival aesthetics in urban social movements. It regards humour’s place in street protests as an aesthetic experience that brings forth an interplay of joy, imagination and freedom. Drawing from social movement theory regarding collective identity and collectivism, aesthetic theory and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalesque, this paper examines the link between humour and carnival aesthetics in recent social movements. It argues that carnival laughter initiates a process of symbiosis that opens relationships with others and allows recognition of democratic diversity, aesthetic sensibility and political dignity—essential for the reconstruction of a new space that is resistant to the politically imposed world crisis. It asks: could humour be one of the social catalysts we need during the authoritarian turn in a political Ice Age instigated by conservative populism? Drawing on examples from the Gezi Movement in Turkey in 2013, the article demonstrates how humour is not just a tool to consolidate solidarities but a definitive aesthetic experience that, in the context of the street protests, becomes the antidote to hegemonic-sense-making mechanisms and the greyness of our collective thinking.

Using intentional humour in a higher education classroom:

Author(s): Jannie Pretorius,Mariëtte Koen,Robert Schall / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2020

Positive humour can facilitate learning. From an educational perspective, it is important to examine how, when and why humour elicits a positive feeling in students, which, in its turn, creates an environment conducive to learning. Previous studies in humour research have focused on the generally perceived impact of humour in educational settings. Reflection on this idea gives rise to two questions. Will the use of intentional humour as a pedagogical tool indeed be perceived as such by students? Also, will a lecture containing positive humour affirm the impact of humour reported in academic literature? The researchers therefore decided that a lecture containing intentional humoristic elements would be presented to two groups of students with a view to determining their responses. To accomplish this, a mixed-methods approach was used, one employing a concurrent embedded nested design to explore the role and impact of intentional humour in two higher-education classrooms. A Likert-scale survey exploring six themes was developed regarding the impact of humour, as identified by Lovorn and Holaway (2015). Open spaces were provided to allow participants to expand quantitative responses. While the Mantel-Haenszel chi-square test statistic was used to analyse the quantitative data, content analysis was used to analyse the qualitative data. The theoretical framework for this paper was drawn from the instructional humour process theory (IHPT). Trustworthiness was gauged by applying Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) model of trustworthiness. The findings of the paper are in line with Lovorn and Holaway’s (2015) research, which suggests that when lecturers take advantage of the positive attributes of humour, it has the power to fuel both students’ engagement and their learning.

Affect philosophy meets incongruity:

Author(s): Mark Weeks / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The emergence of philosophical affect theory, sourced substantially in Continental philosophy, has intensified scholarly attention around affective potentials in laughter. However, the relationship between laughter’s affect and the comic remains a complicated one for researchers, with some maintaining that the two should be approached separately (Emmerson 2019, Parvulescu 2010). While there is a credible academic rationale for drawing precise distinctions, the present article takes an integrative approach to laughter and the comic. It analyses, then synthesises, points of convergence between key texts in affect philosophy and certain elements of incongruity-based humour theory. Specifically, the article seeks to demonstrate that some integration can bring insight and clarity to discussion of transformative potentials sometimes attributed to forms of comic laughter, especially within cultural studies and social science following the philosophy of Deleuze. This approach may also usefully complicate the concept of incongruity itself.

Актуaлни въпpocи нa двуезичнaтa унгapcкo-бългapcкa лекcикoгpaфия

Author(s): Lilyana LESNICHKOVA / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2021

The article focuses on the presentation of the Hungarian-Bulgarian valence dictionary, which is currently in preparation, against the background of an extremely actual task – the creation of an academic English-Bulgarian dictionary, adequately reflecting the current state of vocabulary in both languages. The author substantiates the need for such a dictionary, given the lack of general and specialized Hungarian-Bulgarian dictionaries, based on the theoretical foundations and principles of modern lexicography. Outlined are the main features of the dictionary, the specificities and approaches in the work of its compilation. The selection of material and the methods of its presentation are in accordance with the practical needs of learners of Hungarian as a foreign language.

Мотивации и затруднения на съвременните ученици при изучаването на чужд език

Author(s): Georgi Dzhumayov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2021

The present study aims to test students’ motivation in foreign language classes. The survey also aims to gather information which area of learning English or Spanish contemporary students consider most difficult to acquire – reading, writing, listening, speaking, grammar, vocabulary, and why they have decided to learn the relevant foreign language.

Език, власт, медия

Author(s): Mariana Georgieva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2021

Media language is a prototype of the public consent for the media to be defined through compromise as a fourth position in the paradigm of power as a philosophical category, whose explications before the media are legislative, executive, judicial. The linguistic norm and the cognitive-rhetorical characteristic of the media discourse are the prototype of the metaphor of the "fourth power". The formation of the information-language culture and the preservation of the language norm is the high social responsibility of the media discourse. The media is a prototype of public consciousness, a “picture” of national identity – a unit of political and socio-economic information and cultural “taste” (a sample of art and its list).

Disparagement humour and anti-obesity attitudes

Author(s): Jacob Burmeister,Robert Carels / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

People with obesity are often the target of disparaging humour. The typical derision of obesity found in everyday life also extends into the realm of the media. Many assumptions have been made about the effects this type of humour may have on the public’s attitudes toward people with obesity, but little empirical research exists. In the present research, two studies sought to uncover whether jokes and humorous media depictions of people with obesity affect individuals’ attitudes. In Study 1, participants (N = 271) either read a list of derogatory jokes about obesity, read a list of derogatory comments about obesity, or read a list of jokes that were unrelated to obesity. All participants were then asked to report their 1) attitudes toward people with obesity in several domains, 2) level of belief in stereotypes about obesity and 3) judgement of the social acceptability of jokes about obesity. Participants’ scores on these dependent measures did not differ across groups suggesting obesity jokes do not have an immediate impact on attitudes. In Study 2, participants (N = 146) were shown video clips from film and television programmes that featured derogatory humour targeting obese characters. Again, participants’ scores on dependent measures did not differ across groups. The results of these studies suggest that brief exposure to derogatory weight-related humour may not affect individuals’ attitudes toward people with obesity as might be assumed. Longer exposure to disparaging humour may be required to shift individuals’ attitudes about people with obesity.

Sharing humour digitally in family communication

Author(s): Anastasiya Fiadotava / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

This paper offers a folkloristic perspective on the features and dynamics of sharing humorous content digitally within a family in the context of daily communication. The data, collected from 60 Belarusian families via oral interviews and an online survey (175 respondents), were subjected to quantitative and qualitative content and context analysis. The results suggest that sharing humour digitally within a family can take various forms, some of which parallel oral face-to-face interactions, while others complement them. The most preferable ways of sharing are those that ensure the privacy of conversation, thus providing family members with an opportunity to follow the customary patterns of communication while adapting them to the new spatiotemporal circumstances. Even though the process of selecting humorous content to share with one’s family does not necessarily involve conscious reflection on the sharer’s part, some tendencies clearly transpire from the data. For example, visual and generic forms of humour are more popular than textual and personal ones. Sharing such humour presupposes certain considerations about its recipients, thus making the fact that one’s audience is their family an important consideration in the practice of digital sharing.

Book review

Author(s): Alyona Ivanova / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

Book review

Author(s): Jay Friesen / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

Preview

Author(s): / Language(s): English,Bulgarian,Polish,Macedonian Issue: 1/2021

This first issue of volume 9 of Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT titled “Discourses of Change: Language and Literature” encompasses five papers dealing with different aspects of language, comparative linguistics, literature, and journalism.

Conceptual blending in English and Serbian question-and-answer jokes:

Author(s): Predrag Niketić / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

This paper analyzes English and Serbian question-and-answer jokes using the cognitive linguistic theoretical framework of conceptual blending, which relies on mental spaces as cognitive packets of information used to interpret the world around us and within us. The analysis is used to illustrate how culture influences humour: specifically, how the Anglo-American culture, the dominant and best-known foreign culture in Serbia, is used as a basis of jokes in English as well as in Serbian. It is shown that the jokes in English can work on a non-English-speaking Serbian recipient culturally, but only if not impeded by linguistic obstacles, such as untranslatable puns. The selected Serbian jokes illustrate intercultural merging, as they use elements from both Anglophone and Serbian pop cultures to create humour that is difficult to transfer back to Anglophone audiences, but now due to linguistic as well as cultural transfer issues. These issues revolve around humour translation, which is made difficult by linguistic aspects, cultural aspects, or both. Conceptual blending and the mental spaces involved provide a useful tool for adapting cultural/linguistic barriers to obtain more or less workable joke translations.

Commentary piece

Author(s): Massih Zekavat / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

Because most theories of humour emphasize its intersubjective and/or semantic nature, they fail to fully appreciate and explain self-directed humour. Through a critical exploration of the implications of different theories of humour and satire, this paper argues that the spectrum of reflexive humour and satire can be categorized according to the figure of the satirist and the target of satire, both of whom can feature individual or collective social selves. Depending on the satirist and the scope of satire, the functions of reflexive humour may range from securing psychological homeostasis to dealing with more impersonal, social and philosophical concerns.

Appropriate and relevant humour in the university classroom:

Author(s): Farhana Bakar / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2019

When used for the purpose of teaching and learning, humour must be relevant and appropriate to the context. However, what constitutes appropriate and relevant humour is unclear. Past studies have focussed mostly on classifying appropriate and relevant types of humour. Additionally, students’ and teachers’ perceptions of what these constitutes are likely to differ, meaning that the effectiveness of the humour used by teachers may vary depending on the context. With this in mind, it is important to consider teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the appropriateness and relevance of humour. For this paper, five award-winning teachers and 10 students were interviewed regarding their perceptions and experiences of the use of humour in university teaching. Four themes were identified that relate to teachers’ and students’ perceptions regarding the appropriateness of humour: Appropriate humour is relevant humour; Appropriate humour happens at a suitable time and in a suitable manner; Appropriate humour enhances teachers’ credibility; and Inappropriate humour is disrespectful humour. Three themes were identified related to the relevance of humour: Relevant humour is related to the learning content; Relevant humour is related to daily experiences in life; and Irrelevant humour is humour that students do not understand. On the basis of this study, this paper offers pedagogical suggestions for teachers who wish to use humour effectively by taking into consideration what humour is considered appropriate/inappropriate and relevant/irrelevant.