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In this article we consider development of professional communicative ability as the main stage in educating future foreign-language teachers. A link is drawn between teaching practice and forming professional communicative skills through literature. This article includes monitoring results of a group of students, who took part in a professional communication training session focused on biography and works of A. K. Tolstoy. The lyrical, historical, satirical poetic and prose works by Aleksey Tolstoy attracted the students’ attention. The choice of the author of this work is rationalized through the current year, which is the 200th anniversary of Tolstoy’s birth. During the session all the participants learned, discussed and analyzed stylistically and literary works of this famous author and the works forming professional communicative skills. The conclusion of our study is that educational activity is impossible without practical training and a perfect highquality material for that is fiction. Such methodically well reasoned trainings outcome in a rise of linguo-pedagogically, aesthetically, artistically, culturally developed teachers with high motivation and striving for self-improvement. The training session we have conducted, may go on in a deeper study so that the results of this study will be used as a basis for developing a new teaching method aiming educating institutions of any level.

Middle Welsh is a language with a restricted set of morphosyntactic distinctions for grammatical relations and with relatively free word order in positive main declarative causes. However, syntactic ambiguity rarely, if ever, arises in natural texts. The present article shows in a corpus-based study how syntactic ambiguity is prevented and how morphological features interact with two referential properties, namely animacy and accessibility, in order to successfully identify grammatical relations in Middle Welsh. Further lower-tier factors are the semantics of the verb and the wider narrative context. The article complements recent insights suggesting that subject-verb agreement is not only determined by wordorder patterns, but also by referential properties of subjects.

Polysemy is a semantic phenomenon which occurs when one lexical item has more meanings which can be seen as related to each other. It is to be distinguished from the other extreme pole of ambiguity, homonymy, which occurs when two or more unrelated meanings are by means of an etymological accident tied to the same orthographic and/or phonological form. Even though polysemy can be considered as a non-issue, since discourse easily solves all of the problems of possible ambiguity for use in everyday language use, accounting for it (in an systematic manner) in terms of how polysemy is represented in the mental lexicon and how to account for the criteria governing the meaning distinctions and the interaction of meanings, for example, is a challenge still not fully met. The paper first gives an overview of the existing theoretical accounts of polysemy which arose over the course of the last two centuries to meet one of the said challenges, namely how polysemy is represented in our minds. The discussion is followed up by a conclusion of the predominant and most plausible theoretical view on multiple meanings stemming from the presented philosophical, semantic, and cognitive frameworks and models.

The aim of this work is twofold. On the one hand, the intention is to provide analysis of the issue of euthanasia. On the other hand, this approach necessarily leads to a discussion toward the provision of an adequate definition of euthanasia. Therefore the article, first of all, refers to the multi­layered aspect of the term euthanasia. To avoid ambiguity and other uncer­tainties while providing the definition of euthanasia, the authors carefully perform a conceptual analysis. This leads to the establishment of a clear distinction between actions which, due to their motives or their method of execution, cast a shadow on the meaning of this medical procedure. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 179041: Dinamicki sistemi u prirodi i drustvu: filozofski i empirijski aspekti]

The article concentrates on the targets and linguistic expression on mockery in contemporary jokes on gender. The jokes have been collected from the humour websites www.cha.lt, www.anekdotai.us, www.linksmas.net, www.anekdotai.biz, www.anekdotai.org, www.che.lt. The aim of the research is to find out what types of characters are usually chosen as targets of jokes and what linguistic means are employed to create the comic effect in them. In addition, the article deals with the conception of humour and joke as a genre and provides the key theories of humour research. The study has been carried out applying the method of qualitative content analysis. The results of the study suggest that the choice of the target of mockery in the jokes is often determined by the stereotypes that are common in society and by the tendency to express aggressive emotions in them. Usually the targets of mockery in the jokes are female characters, such as blondes, wives and mothers-in-law. There are approximately three times fewer jokes about men in comparison to women. The most common linguistic means employed to express mockery in the jokes are sarcasm, ambiguity, absurd and irony. It is common to come across cases of a few linguistic means in one joke as well. There has been a connection found between the employed linguistic means and the target of mockery as well as the society's view to it. The article could be valuable to linguists, folklorists, sociologists and psychologists who investigate the linguistic expression of humour, the effect of emotions on humour and the image of social groups in contemporary jokes.

Mandarin Resultative Verb Compounds, different from any simplex words, have complicated θ-structures, since both the verb (Vcaus) and its complement (Cres) have the capacity of assigning their own thematic roles. The thematic roles assigned by Vcaus form the θ-structure's main structure, and those assigned by Cres form the embedded structure. Sometimes an entity plays a role in the main structure, and at the same time plays a role in the embedded structure. If the two roles are identical, they are "coindexed"; if they are different, they form a composite role. RVC's θ-structure is further compounded when ambiguity occurs and when causation is taken into consideration. The ambiguity of RVCs can be attributed to the different combination of thematic roles. As for causation, the two causative roles, causer and cause, can be assigned to thematic roles according to certain constraints.