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Contemporary ESL education focuses on screen-based reading, specifically in the context of university level learners. Also, a sudden shift from paper bound reading activities to screen-based tasks was inevitable in response to COVID-19 outbreak. In this regard, the case of inferential and advanced level reading among the young ESL learners of developing countries appears researchable because of the general low digital literacy of these learners. This study, therefore, aimed to investigate the effect of reading mode shift from paper to screen on the inferential comprehension performance among Pakistani ESL learners at university level. A total of 426 undergraduate learners were sampled from Bachelor of Science program in a well-known university in the city of Lahore, Pakistan. Inferential reading was conceptualized through Bloom’s higher order thinking skills, that is, Analyzing, Evaluating and Creating skills therefore the reading comprehension test was based on these skills. Adopting sequential test administration, first the paper-based reading test, and later the screen-based reading was given. The obtained data were analyzed using Rendell’s XCALIBRE and SPSS V. 26.0. The logit scale descriptives, learner ability (θ), and mean scores demonstrated that the learners performed significantly higher in the paper test as compared to screen test. Moreover, it was found that the effect of reading mode shift was larger in Creating skill. The findings may have significant implications for reading mode selection, enhancement of digital competence and effect of reading mode shift in developing countries with inadequate IT facilitation and digital literacy among ESL learners.

The article introduces attraction marketing methods employed by Russian monthly popular science magazine Diletant. The authors compared the printed version and the website. The paper magazine attracts the reader mainly by the topic name printed on its cover as a unique creolized text. The further semantics of the front media text includes various aspects of the main topic. Color highlights both topical issue and regular features. The comparative analysis with the online version revealed some significant differences. The website has a muted color scheme and minimal animation; it contains neither video nor audio materials. Like in the printed version, the function of attraction belongs mainly to illustrations and subtitles. Online Diletant is interactive in navigation, tests, and surveys, which are, however, the only form of interactivity: the site does not provide comments, forums, “likes”, etc. Such limited use of attention-seeking tools makes the digital version of Diletant uncompetitive and inferior to its paper issue.

Se presenta un estudio sobre la adaptación de un examen de inglés a estudiantes con diversidad funcional. El estudio profundiza en los desafíos que enfrenta un estudiante parcialmente ciego con una pérdida sustancial de visión y sin formación previa en Braille cuando intenta realizar exámenes escritos en la clase de inglés. Entre las dificultades encontradas el navegar en texto continuo con software de conversión de texto a voz (TTS), la dependencia de imágenes y el impacto de las limitaciones de tiempo. La investigación subraya la eficacia de las adaptaciones realizadas al formato del examen para abordar estos desafíos y mejorar la accesibilidad y la inclusión. Los hallazgos revelan resultados favorables para el desempeño y el bienestar del estudiante con diversidad funcional durante el examen adaptado. El estudio enfatiza la importancia de los estudios longitudinales para monitorear el progreso del dominio del lenguaje de estudiantes visualmente limitados a lo largo del tiempo.

It is unknown whether and to what extent cognitive individual differences may play different roles in paper versus computer-based second language (L2) writing. This exploratory study is a first attempt to explore this issue, focusing on the effects of working memory and language aptitude on the quality of paper versus computer-based L2 writing performance. Forty-two Spanish learners of L2 English performed a problem-solving task either digitally or on paper, took a working memory n-back test, and completed LLAMA tests to measure language aptitude. The quality of their L2 written texts was assessed in terms of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) measures. The results indicated that the role of cognitive individual differences may vary depending on the writing environment.

This study compared the effects of computer-mediated (CM) versus pen-and-paper (P&P) writing on written accuracy and feedback processing in tasks written and rewritten collaboratively following a pedagogical treatment in two intact authentic classrooms. The study involved 32 secondary education low-proficiency English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners writing two descriptive texts collaboratively and receiving in-class training in the identification and correction of grammatical, lexical, and mechanical errors. Participants were provided with unfocused direct error correction (EC). Error logs were used to facilitate noticing of teacher corrections (i.e., feedback processing). Dyads were required to rewrite their texts for evidence of feedback uptake. Results indicate that writing collaboratively on the computer with the availability of the Internet contributes to increased grammatical and lexical accuracy. No differences were found between writing environments regarding feedback processing or accuracy of rewritten texts.

The article presents an overview of research literature on the etiquettical conventional speech genre “wish” in Russian and foreign linguistics. The author compares definitions of the lexeme “wish” in various lexicographic sources, considers researchers’ approaches to determining the status of a wish and identifies some debatable problems of studying the genre. Particular attention is paid to the consideration of wishes within the theory of speech acts and the theory of speech genres. The article also compares researchers’ viewpoints on the debatable problems concerning pious wishes and evil wishes, as well as gives an overview of the works concerning grammatical and syntactic means of making wishes and typical models of the genre. The article provides the analysis of works with the existing classifications of wishes based on their structure and on being etiquettical/non-etiquettical, stereotypical/non-stereotypical, etc., as well as the analysis of works based on ideas about the field structure of the genre, where the core consists of clichéd wishes, and the periphery – of non-standard statements, or (according to another theory) explicit statements and imperative/modified wishes, respectively. The research points out the importance of investigating extralinguistic factors (gender, age, status-role relations of communicants) in the study of wishes. The paper reviews articles which deal with the comparison and collation analysis of wishes in different languages (Russian, English, German, Chinese, etc.). The conclusion outlines some directions for the further study of this genre in various areas and situations of communication.

The present special issue (SI) is a collection of position papers and empirical studies intended to advance disciplinary conversations on the learning and teaching of second or foreign language (L2) writing in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) contexts. It does so by analyzing critically past research, providing new empirical insights obtained in controlled and classroom-based studies conducted in various educational settings with diverse populations, suggesting worthy avenues to be pursued in future research agendas, and drawing implications for practice.

Published in 2021 by Presa Universitară Clujeană, ”A Lifetime Dedicated to Norwegian Language and Literature” is a celebratory scholarly work compiled and edited by the members of the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature at the Faculty of Letters in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in honour of Professor Sanda Tomescu Baciu, founder of The Norwegian Language and Literature BA program (1991), of the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature (2001) and disseminator of Norwegian culture, language and li-terature for over thirty years. Throughout her entire career, Professor Sanda Tomescu Baciu has never ceased to raise interest in Norwegian studies, and strive to offer her students the best academic resources, a warm and welcoming learning environment and also countless scholarship opportunities. Her contribution to the popularization and the increasing fascination with the North is immeasurably valuable to the academic community, not only in Romania, but also internationally. Her colleagues and editors of this volume have carefully selected and arranged a collection of congratulatory messages and academic essays from various fields encompassed in the Scandinavian studies.

Published in 2021 by Presa Universitară Clujeană, ”A Lifetime Dedicated to Norwegian Language and Literature” is a celebratory scholarly work compiled and edited by the members of the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature at the Faculty of Letters in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in honour of Professor Sanda Tomescu Baciu, founder of The Norwegian Language and Literature BA program (1991), of the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literature (2001) and disseminator of Norwegian culture, language and li-terature for over thirty years. Throughout her entire career, Professor Sanda Tomescu Baciu has never ceased to raise interest in Norwegian studies, and strive to offer her students the best academic resources, a warm and welcoming learning environment and also countless scholarship opportunities. Her contribution to the popularization and the increasing fascination with the North is immeasurably valuable to the academic community, not only in Romania, but also internationally. Her colleagues and editors of this volume have carefully selected and arranged a collection of congratulatory messages and academic essays from various fields encompassed in the Scandinavian studies.

In 2021, there are reportedly 2,755 billionaires on Earth, with an estimated total net worth of $13.1 trillion. Every year the newspaper Forbes conducts the list of World Billionaires, but we need to acknowledge that, not all billionaires and their wealth gets reported. Usually, the net worth is reported by calculating the number of stocks with the number of shares that the person owns. We take into consideration that the number we see in the newspaper exists only on paper, but the amount of money in the bank account of Billionaire does, not reflect that kind of wealth in any shape and form. Paper wealth differs from “real” or actual wealth, which is the value of the physical assets that are at the disposal of an individual or company. Many individuals and corporations fall victim to the paper wealth trap. On paper, it looks as though the assets logged are worth a certain amount, but the real assets in hand do not add up to the same. In order to assess, the real wealth individual has to realize the asset in the market by selling the asset mentioned below. If the taxpayer sells these assets, it has accumulated capital gains, then the taxpayer is subject to capital gains taxes. By using the tax planning strategy “Buy, Borrow, and Die” the wealthy individual avoids paying the capital gain tax on the assets that they have. This principle suggests buying and holding assets as they appreciate tax-free, as well borrow using the assets as leverage and using debt to reduce or eliminate income and estate taxes, and maximize aftertax wealth accumulation, as well after the taxpayer pass away the heirs, sell the whole wealth is tax-free, and the debt is paid with the tax-free proceeds.

This study investigates the linguistic organization of the introduction sections of academic papers from the Veterinary Medicine field in terms of the two basic systems that determine how one clause is related to another: taxis (degree of interdependency) and logico-semantic relation (Halliday; Matthiessen, 2014, p. 438). All the clauses from the introduction sections of five published academic papers were analyzed. The results showed a high recurrence of simple clauses and embedded clauses in the corpus. In the clause complexes, the preference is for paratactic extensions. The results of this analysis may help understanding the functioning of academic writing in English language in this specific field.

This study analysed the information-argument structure of the Introduction sections of sociology research papers, to identify differences across three types of sociology research: Investigative research, Development and Evaluation research, and Descriptive research. The information-argument analysis framework bears some resemblance to rhetorical structure frameworks following Swales’ CARS model, but focuses on the argumentative aspect of text and how information is used to support argument claims. The coding scheme specifies information types, subdivided into those that imply an argument claim and those that play the role of argument support. Seventy papers were sampled from ten sociology journals for analysis. Sequential association rule mining was used to identify sequential information-argument patterns. The study identified significant differences in information-argument profile across the three types of research papers, as well as differences in sequential patterns. Methodology contributions of the paper include the coding scheme for information-argument types in research papers, and the method of analysing sequential patterns.

SYSTEMATIC BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PAPERS ON PUBLISHED DIALECT MATERIAL

Culture is a way of life and embodiment of civilizations that is expressed through a language. The transfer of culture is a significant aspect of audio-visual translation as translators deal with more than just the written texts on surface level. Translating culture-specific items on paper cutting is an intercultural communication. However, translating cultural items in subtitling could cause challenges and problems for translators during the translation process. In this qualitative study, the translation strategies and challenges were explored in the subtitling of a Chinese cultural documentary on the art of papercutting titled The Life of Paper-cutting (剪紙人生; Jiǎn zhǐ rén shēng) retrieved from YouTube. The original video was subtitled to identify the challenges in subtitling. The strategies and challenges were first identified and then the process was described. It was found that the most appropriate translation strategies were omission, direct transfer, equivalence, and adaptation. The analysis revealed that the challenges were mainly technical, cultural, and linguistic. The findings can be used as a guide to utilise the translation strategies effectively in subtitling translations of similar audio-visual products to tackle the challenges faced in the Chinese to English translation of culture-specific items.

The main aim of the event is to celebrate the success of the journal Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching (https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/ssllt), which was launched little over a decade ago but has still managed to be ranked among the best journals in the field. The event will also provide a forum for presenting cutting-edge research related to different facets of L2 learning and teaching in a wide range of contexts and demonstrating how the results of such research can inform everyday classroom practices. The conference will be of high relevance to academics, researchers, teacher educators and materials writers, as well as language teachers at different educational levels wishing to enhance their instructional practices.

The American Name Society is issuing a call for papers for the Modern Language Association Convention 2023 which is scheduled to take place January 5-8, 2023 in San Francisco, California.

يتتبع هذا البحث تشكُل الشخصيات وطريقة بنائها في رواية "أوراق شمعون المصري"، في محاولة لاستكشاف دلالات الشخصيات ومدلولاتها، من خلال الوقوف على تصنيفها وعلاماتها السيميائية، وانطلق البحث في تتبعه لشخصيات النص من المقولات النقدية لفيليب هامون، واعتماد رؤيته في إبراز دال الشخصية ومدلولاتها.سار البحث في اتجاهات متوازية ليُبرز من خلالها بنائية الشخصيات داخل النص السردي، اعتمادًا على أن الشخصية علامة سيميائية تتشكل من دال ومدلول، وتحقق ذلك من خلال تقديم نظري تضمن الرؤية السيميائية للشخصية الروائية. وتبِع ذلك الجانب التطبيقي الذي تضمن تصنيف شخصيات النص المدروس وفقًا لتقسيمات هامون: (شخصيات مرجعية – شخصيات إشارية – شخصيات استذكارية)، ويستكشف البحث كذلك مستوى وصف الشخصيات، سواء عبر دال الشخصية (الأسماء)، أو عبر مدلول الشخصية (طرق تقديم الشخصية كميًا ونوعيًا).AbstractThis research is about how the characters are formed and built in the novel, "The Papers of the Egyptian Shimon", in an effort to explore the connotations of the characters, by identifying their classification and semiotic features. The research based its tracking of the characters of the text on the critical statements of Philip Hammon, and adopting his vision in highlighting the character and its connotations.The research proceeded in parallel directions to highlight the character's constructiveness within the narrative accomplishment, depending on the character being a semiotic sign consisting of a signifier and a connotation, and achieving this through a theoretical presentation that ensures the character's semiotic vision. This was followed by the applied aspect that included classifying the characters of the studied text according to Hamon's divisions: (reference characters - signaling characters - memorabilia characters), then stopping the search in front of the character description level, tracking the character's signifier (names), and the character's connotation (ways of presentation the character quantitatively and qualitatively).

We report the results of a bibliometric study of 696 empirical articles (EAs) published in TESOL Quarterly (TQ) over its lifespan (1967-2019). We report overall and periodic reviews (1967-1979, 1980-1989, 1990-1999, 2000-2009, 2010-2019) concerning the following themes: (1) contexts and participants, (2) research foci and theoretical orientations, and (3) research methodology and data sources. A typical article was written by a single author addressing a learning/teaching English issue related to undergraduates in US universities. The most common research foci were instruction, learning, and assessment. A quarter of the articles did not have a specifiable theoretical orientation, and for those that had, the main theoretical orientations were linguistic/scientific, linguistic/cognitive, and social. The most frequently used research methodologies were quantitative, qualitative, and eclectic, and the top three data sources used by researchers were elicitation, multiple sources, and observation. Based on the findings, we make suggestions for future research in TESOL. Overall, the present review and analysis of published EAs give readers a birds-eye view of the research gravity in TQ over the last 52 years.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the educational landscape in a way unseen before. Educational institutions are navigating between offline and online learning worldwide. Computer-based testing is rapidly taking over paper-and-pencil testing as the dominant mode of assessment. In some settings, computer-based and paper-and-pencil assessments can also be offered side-by-side, in which case test developers should ensure the evidence of equivalence between both versions. This study aims to establish the equivalency evidence of different delivery modes of the English Competency Test, an English language assessment for civil service officers developed and used by the Human Resources Development Education and Training Center, a civil service training institution under the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Indonesia. Psychometric analyses were carried out with the Rasch model to measure the unidimensionality, reliability, separation, and standard error of measurement estimates. The findings demonstrate that the paper-and-pencil and computer-based versions of the language assessment exhibit comparatively equivalent psychometric properties. The computer-based version of the English Competency Test is proven to offer a reliable and comparable alternative to the paper-and-pencil version.

Effective presentation is a skill wanted by many. This competence is of great relevance for scientific lectures and can be transferred to other speech situations such as student seminar papers or oral presentations. How to achieve the intended speech effects and how to act rhetorically competently is often explained in the scientific literature. However, this monograph is also devoted to the unintended effects of speech, taking into account their causes.

This paper reviews and reflects on developments in classroom-based research on second or foreign language (L2) writing from 2001 to 2020, based on scholarship drawn from the Journal of Second Language Writing, the flagship journal of the field. The review covers a total of 75 classroom-based studies and examines the major research themes and key findings under three research strands: (1) students and student learning of writing; (2) teachers and teaching of writing; and (3) classroom assessment and feedback, as well as the key theories and research methodologies adopted in extant classroom-based studies on L2 writing. The article ends with a discussion of the practical implications arising from the review, as well as potential research gaps that inform future directions for L2 writing classroom-based research. By providing a state-of-the-art review of developments in classroom-based research on L2 writing, this article contributes to a nuanced understanding of salient issues about learning, teaching and assessment of writing that take place in naturalistic classroom contexts, with relevant implications for both L2 writing practitioners and researchers.

The purpose of this article is to find approaches to understanding of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry in the eleventh grade classroom. The author presents written and oral assignments that can lead students to an understanding of the lyrics through independent reading comprehension. Each assignment creates a problem situation at the lesson. Acquisition of new material in such an approach is creative, that is, it takes place via looking for new information in a problem situation. The group of students in this case serves as a “collective researcher” (L. S. Aizerman), and the answer is sought throughout the whole lesson. Such assignments create an unexpected situation in which readymade typical answers do not work, the same as searches on the Internet. The assignments were used by the author at literature lessons in non-profile and in social-humanities classrooms. The article analyzes extracts from written works and essays of eleventh grade and the author explains his approach to their evaluation. The logic of classes on the poet’s lyrics (love and civil poetry), which end with a discussion of the poem “Requiem”, is described in detail. While reading of the poem “Clasped hands under a dark veil ...” in class, the teacher dwells on the psychological plot in detail, which allows the students to see not only the complexity of the psychological plot but also some continuity of Ahmatova’s and Tyutchev’s lyrics. The article also describes several tasks on the poem “When in the yearning of suicide ...” related to different editions and cultural-historical context; suggests various suitable ways of comparing the poem “Dante” and “Lot’s Wife” in a secondary school literature classroom, formulates a topic for an option class on Akhmatova’s poetry, and describes fragment of the lesson on the poem “Requiem”.

This paper considers vṛddhi as an inherited feature in Modern Standard Hindi. As a phenomenon, vṛddhi is most commonly discussed in reference to Old Indo‐Aryan (OIA), particularly with a focus on inflectional patterns in Sanskrit. However, the inherited pattern in New Indo‐Aryan (NIA) languages presents specific analytical challenges and its status as a morpho‐phonological feature in the present‐day languages is not straightforward to establish. In this paper, the focus is given to the operation of vṛddhi in denominal derivations in both OIA and present‐day Hindi. This leads to a discussion of the evolution of vowel systems in the history of Indo‐Aryan. Regarding the question of how synchronic vṛddhi‐alternations can be accounted for theoretically, I present two possibilities: (i) that vṛddhi constitutes a phonologically active process of vowel lowering/tensing in Hindi; and (ii), that vṛddhi is a suppletive phenomenon synchronically, and thus, not derived by phonological rule.

Andi (Nakh-Daghestanian; Russia) displays a typologically remarkable phenomenon: adverbs of numerous morphological and functional types inflect for agreement with a clause-level controller. To the extent that adverb agreement has been observed elsewhere, it is commonly taken to signal that the items involved are semantically oriented towards the participants they agree with, aligning the phenomenon with secondary predication. This paper demonstrates that Andi works differently: the widespread clausal agreement seen on Andi adverbs is insensitive to participant orientation. While agreement exponence on adverbs is morphologically complex, a simple structural principle (modelled here in Minimalist terms) ensures that clause-level agreement is always with the absolutive-case argument. The Andi facts thus provide evidence for a typological distinction between those languages where clausal agreement on adverbs can serve a semantic function and those where it cannot. A potential challenge is posed by the exceptional “biabsolutive” construction, where both subject and object appear in absolutive case and either may control adverb agreement, suggesting a role for some additional non-structural factor. However, on independent grounds this paper identifies the two arguments as belonging to distinct structural layers; this apparent flexibility in controller choice merely reflects the ability of certain adverbs to modify either layer.

This article deals with the multimodality in modern English-language advertising. The influence of advertising on consumers has been a subject of many investigations among linguists. In this present paper, I build on the theoretical and practical data gained by researchers who studied virtual influencers in multimodal advertising, discussed the unique characteristics of the suggestion realization strategies in political advertising, evaluated advertisement discourse influence formula in terms of positive and negative orientation of the advertisement, investigated various functions of different contact languages in advertising, the phenomenon of multimodality in the Polish advertising of pharmaceutical products with the audio-visual spots. Scholars also used a pragmatic approach to advertisements in Britain and Japan and conducted a multimodal discourse analysis of malaria drugs advertisement. However, the role of multimodality in the context of pharmaceutical advertising remains understudied. Advertised pharmaceutical products have an impact on human consciousness. Misleading or inaccurate information can seriously affect consumers, including adverse health outcomes. The unique nature of pharmaceutical advertising makes pharmaceutical advertising different from other types of advertising, like political or consumer advertising. The material for this study consists of 500 samples in both paper and electronic formats. I hypothesize that the multimodal character of pharmaceutical advertising, incorporating both verbal and non-verbal elements, significantly enhances its persuasive impact by influencing consumer emotions and encouraging them to select specific pharmaceuticals. To prove this hypothesis, I identified patterns of interaction between verbal and non-verbal components through the prism of words, images, signs, and symbols. In this research, a multimodal approach allowed to uncover both the intended meanings and the subtle manipulation tactics used in pharmaceutical advertising.

An attack on Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on October 7th, 2023 drastically changed the 24-hour news cycle. Palestinian militant groups orchestrated a blitzkrieg on IOF headquarters in the Gaza Strip borders in such an organized military precision, earning an appellation Tūfān al-Aqsa (literally, ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’). To soothe its fury, IOF declared an all-out war on Gaza targeting resistance groups, and immediately embarked on a military operation against Hamas’s authority and its ability to wage any military actions against IOF in future. Concomitant with the war has been an increasingly bitter war of words by many pro-Israel media outlets world-wide. The present paper examines the media coverage of the war in the aftermath of the assault as can be illustrated in the finely-employed emotive-loaded language by the BBC. The paper reveals that the language has been rich in emotive overtones and clearly pictured that the IOF as being victimized by the groups’ brutality, and envisaged the groups as cowardly thugs which should be liquidated with no mercy. The paper shows that the power of the language aims to deflect international condemnation of the military operation inflicting heavy casualties on innocent Gazans and attempts to show full solidarity with Israel.

This paper introduces a theory of mind that positions language as a cognitive tool in its own right for the optimization of biological fitness. I argue that human language reconstruction of reality results from biological memory and adaptation to uncertain environmental conditions for the reaffirmation of the Self-as-symbol. I demonstrate that pretrained language models, such as ChatGPT, lack embodied grounding, which compromises their ability to adequately model the world through language due to the absence of subjecthood and conscious states for event recognition and partition. At a deep level, I challenge the notion that the constitution of a semiotic Self relies on computational reflection, arguing against reducing human representation to data structures and emphasizing the importance of positing accurate models of human representation through language. This underscores the distinction between transformers as posthuman agents and humans as purposeful biological agents, which emphasizes the human capacity for purposeful biological adjustment and optimization. One of the main conclusions of this is that the capacity to integrate information does not amount to phenomenal consciousness as argued by Information Integration Theory. Moreover, while language models exhibit superior computational capacity, they lack the real consciousness providing them with multiscalar experience anchored in the physical world, a characteristic of human cognition. However, the paper anticipates the emergence of new in silico conceptualizers capable of defining themselves as phenomenal agents with symbolic contours and specific goals.

Lotmanian cultural dynamics involve change through textual interaction. Texts, offering vehicles for information, play a central role in this, with cultural change happening in two modes: gradual and explosive instances of texts that alter the semiosphere. This paper focuses on the process of explosion–an unpredictable mode of change in Lotmanian theory–through a metaphorical methodology, by introducing the concept of semiotic bomb. A semiotic bomb works here as a theoretical object that tries to harness the effect of explosion within the semiosphere. The concept of semiotic bomb serves as both a way to examine what is necessary for explosion to happen and as a theoretical exercise in attempting to predict the unpredictable in culture. We contend that cultural change must be understood in terms of sign configurations and information transmission through Charles Morris’s behavioral semiotics, and that this basis works as a complement of Juri Lotman’s cultural dynamics by grounding textual information on behavioral change and resignification. Taking a note from information and semiotic warfare, we look at what it takes for culture to foster change through the prism of Lotman’s theory, and how we could conceptualize intentional change through information manipulation and presentation. The paper offers a novel look into the logic of explosion within the semiotic theory of Juri Lotman and proposes conceptual avenues for exploring, analyzing and tentatively implementing the concept of explosion by the proposed idea of a semiotic bomb.

The paper explains how our mind creates a meaning in a wordplay. The model of mental maps (Author, 2020) based on the theory of conceptual blending (Fauconnier,1997, Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) and the geneplore model based on the theory of creative cognition (Finke, et al, 1992) presented in the paper describe the operations in the mind related to generating, exploring and transforming ideas and/or linguistic and non-linguistic units that result in the emergence of a new meaning embedded in the wordplay. To illustrate the cognitive processes in meaning construction, the paper refers to the humorous language of Big Friendly Giant in Roald Dahl’s The BFG in its original English version as well as its translations into Polish and Portuguese.

The paper contributes to the discussion of the polysemy of spatial prepositions looking at the conceptual structure of the preposition beside. Introducing the syntactic criterion to the process of trajector/landmark identification, the paper shows that beside gives access to a three-dimensional conceptual category, extending both upward and sideways, and that its polysemy arises when the conceptualizer focuses attention on the basic level of the category, the level of senses.

Intensifiers in English appear to be at the junction of grammar and lexis thanks to an unachieved process of grammaticalization. They are sometimes also subjected to pragmaticalization processes. This paper discusses the case of the intensifying adverb ‘really’. After laying down the theoretical framework used to analyze the various uses of this intensifying adverb, this paper presents the various uses of really through a corpus-based study. The focus is then put on the criteria that make ‘really’ a grammaticalized adverb before investigating to what extent it can be considered as an instance of pragmaticalization.

The relevance of this study is conditioned by the fact that the study of languages in the comparative aspect contributes to the identification of common and specific features of linguistic material, the description of the national picture of the world, cognitive thinking, linguocultural features of native speakers, interaction and mutual enrichment of languages, the solution of linguistic and linguodidactic tasks, which is part of the modern system of linguistic research. The category of gender, being one of the most complex and universal grammatical characteristics, is a subject of close attention of linguists. The importance of its study is conditioned by the need for a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of the grammatical and lexical-semantic potential of this category in languages with different structures. In modern linguistics, research in this area focuses on cognitive, gender and functional aspects of the category of gender. This study aims to examine the category of gender from the point of view of its grammatical and lexical-semantic realization in differently structured English, Tatar and Russian languages. This paper considers the formation of gender category of some nouns, reflects the system of morphological, syntactic and lexical features of feminine, masculine and middle genders in the languages under consideration. The article gives the specificity of representation of this category by lexical and grammatical means of languages, analyses morphological and semantic ways of nouns' relation to grammatical gender. In the paper a comparative analysis is carried out, the general and specific features of this category are determined on the basis of the languages under study. The results of the analysis can be used in further linguistic research, as well as in teaching a foreign language with reference to the native and/or previously learnt foreign language.

The paper analyses several classes of pronouns in the Soikkola dialect of the Ingrian language, namely interrogative/relative, indefinite, and negative pronouns. These classes of pronouns belong to one of the most underdescribed parts of Ingrian morphology, so the main goal of the paper is descriptive. Special focus is placed on the analysis of variation within pronoun classes. While variation in interrogative/relative pronouns mostly concerns minor aspects of their formation, indefinite and negative pronouns show many competing variants. In the case of indefinite pronouns, this variation arises from indefinite suffixes with different origins and functions. Negative pronouns have another source of variation: the morphophonological processes that can occur when a pronominal stem is concatenated with the negative particle kaa/kää. In all these classes of pronouns, we usually observe idiolectal and free variation, while contextual and register variation occurs less frequently.

This paper investigates the engagement with Greek progymnasmata exercises shown by the first rhetorical handbook in Syriac: Antony of Tagrit’s On Rhetoric (ninth century). Despite lacking any specific reference to progymnastic authors or texts and having its own peculiarities and foundations, the rhetorical theory presented in Antony’s treatise bears many connections to the progymnasmata, which will be presented here. Moreover, the paper positions Antony within the Abbasid world and, while keeping a specific focus on the Greco-Syriac connections within Syriac rhetoric, explores the impact of the “Abbasid factor” on this tradition.

Studying the intersection of food and identity is essential, especially when it interlaces with diasporic cultures. Through the process of immigration and acculturation, food acquires new shapes, meanings and accents, influencing, informing and even transforming our relationship with the world. Incorporating concepts from diasporic discourse such as culinary citizenship, third space and performativity, this paper demonstrates how the use of food narratives and practices in literary works plays a vital performative role in conveying the experiences of individuals living away from home, dealing with displacement and navigating their evolving transnational identities. Food is a cultural zone where different identity determinants intersect and engage in debate. This paper explores how some women writers from different diasporas use food for two primary functions: 1. to negotiate their female characters’ identity in displacement and produce the possibility of replacement, all while navigating the complexities of preserving or reconstructing their cultural identity; and more critically; 2. to enlighten their intended readers about the existing challenges, pains, prejudices and tensions in the assimilation process. In this context, food strategically performs as a discursive and multilayered agent, establishing diversity awareness, challenging exclusionary attitudes and stimulating cross-cultural interactions. Food performativity is both constitutive and reflective of transnational identity construction across political borders—a point not to end here but to begin.

Renowned for his infamous painting Christ in the House of his Parents (1849-1850) or for The Tragic Story of Ophelia (1851-1852) which brought him domestic and international fame during his lifetime as a British painter, John Everett Millais (1829-1896) is known as one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848), a group of young and idealistic artists determined to instil vibrating energy and novelty into contemporary art which they considered to have been stifled by the prevailing conventions of the Royal Academy. Millais’s works display microscopic attention to pictorial realism and manifest an almost fetishistic attention to photographic detail; and yet, it is despite this covert technique (or maybe particularly due to it!) that Millais’ art manifests a certain politics springing from an exceptional daring in the way his paintings function as genuine social and cultural parables. Therein, the current paper looks into three of Millais’ paintings (namely, Bridesmaid (1851), Isabella (1868), and The Captive (1882)), as mirrors that reflect and challenge while obliquely commenting on and criticising Victorian social norms (particularly those related to gender, gender roles, binary oppositions and desire) through the depiction of food. Hence, the main focus of the paper is not merely uncovering Millais’ food aesthetics and the way he uses food as a subject of aesthetic interest but rather looking into Millais’ food politics (and poetics) and the way food becomes a vehicle for expressing deeper societal concerns, class distinctions, moral lessons, and cultural exchanges.

In the media, the theme of the Holocaust has always been most powerfully illustrated visually, with images or videos depicting skeletal human beings on the verge of becoming twodimensional, almost transparent. In the remaining footage of WWII horrors, one can see that those Jews who were kept in Nazi prisoner camps, and who were lucky enough not to be gassed on arrival, still had to cope with the scarcity—or even total lack—of food, which would eventually turn them into living skeletons. In literature, the theme of the Holocaust has been approached differently, with writers constantly striving to find the best words and phrases to appropriately describe the bodily sensations of those for whom food had almost become an intangible item. This paper intends to show how Jodi Picoult’s novel The Storyteller (2013) manages to make its readers mentally visualise the horrors of the Holocaust through the close interconnectedness of (at least) two types of hunger: the physical hunger for food that might enable prisoners to survive another day, and the hunger for texts and stories, which nourish the mind and soul. The pursuit of justice, as well as the need for absolution from guilt, are other types of hunger that this paper analyses, with a view towards a more applied approach within the scope of the study.

Poor Things has achieved remarkable success, surpassing $100 million globally and becoming Yorgos Lanthimos’s highest-grossing film. This accomplishment highlights the film’s broad appeal and its ability to engage audiences with its unique blend of dark comedy, magical realism, and rich thematic content. The present paper aims to analyse Poor Things (2023), adapted from Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel and reinterpreting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for a modern audience. The film follows the journey of Bella Baxter, a resurrected woman navigating a surreal, gothic version of Victorian London, as she evolves and grapples with questions of identity, morality, and empathy. This paper seeks to uncover a potentially overlooked thematic dimension in the film – its subtle engagement with veganism. By examining the narrative and thematic elements, the paper reveals how Poor Things subtly aligns with vegan principles, particularly in Bella’s growing empathy toward animals and her rejection of meat. While veganism is not explicitly emphasised, it emerges as a significant undercurrent, deepening the film’s exploration of ethics and the interconnectedness of all living beings. Through this lens, the paper positions Poor Things as a multifaceted cinematic work that not only reinterprets classic literature but also engages with contemporary ethical issues, showcasing Lanthimos’s ability to provoke thoughtful reflection through cinema.

The present paper illustrates and discusses decisions made by the translator when rendering the texture and the taste of Bosnian-Herzegovinian traditional drinks into English, as described in The Bosnian Cuisine (2016), which, apart from collected recipes, contains excerpts from travelogues and literary works. In the paper, I refer to the adjective and the noun phrase equivalence or the lack of equivalence thereof in the English language, whereas special attention is given to using footnotes and brackets in translation, as well as to the negotiation process between the translator and the proofreader whose L1 is English. Based on corpus analysis, it can be concluded that the majority of decisions made regarding the nouns denoting traditional dishes were made to preserve the original names and to resort to footnotes and/or bracketing in order to render the reading experience and sensory modalities more accessible to readers, bearing in mind that they may not have tasted or seen the drinks mentioned, but also taking into consideration the wider socio-cultural context.

The political future of debating candidates is often shaped by the degree of credibility based on argumentative strategies. Today, political argumentation has gained particular relevance, especially due to its psychological impact on voters. In political debates, opponents who possess different political backgrounds employ diverse linguistic and prosodic styles. Through linguistic analysis of selected audio and video materials, we identified several linguistic methods that achieve the objectives of divertissement, competitiveness and personification in political debates, which are the main characteristics of this type of political discourse. The differences between ordinary utterances, remark-utterances, simple overlays of remarks, role exchanges and intentional interruptions are also considered as manipulative means, as we argue that these are deliberate and determined by the speakers’ communicative strategies. We focus particularly on the dialogic nature of televised debates, which in this type of political discourse operates on two-levels: “politician – opponent”, and “politician – audience”. Participants in televised debates use various argumentative strategies to influence both their opponents and voters, often deliberately aiming to discredit their opponents and create a contrasting background for manipulation. For this analysis, we focused on the interception strategy, one of the most commonly used in political debates. In the paper, we examine the speech behavior of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as a tool to create their media portrait and personify their political programs. Thus, the article focuses on the strategy of interception and its prosodic realization by means of such non-verbal tools as pitch variations accompanied by deliberate interruptions, remarks, refutations and increasing volume of voice which contribute to argumentation in political debates. In other words, the paper aims at benefiting to identify the role of prosodic means in argumentative political debates. The research methodology involves the code biology approach by applying experimental phonetic and phonological methods. Our analysis reveals that prosody is crucial not only in shaping political discourse but also in reflecting politicians’ viewpoints. We tried to match prosody with argumentation, which contributes to synthesizing naturalness in political speeches. Interruptions disrupt the prosodic structure of the statement and conflict with phonetic signals of role switching, such as high/low pitch or terminal tone variations. Opponents convey confidence through pitch variations: the low pitch is an indicator of assertiveness and certainty, whereas the high pitch suggests uncertainty. High pitch occurs when the new information (rheme) is introduced, while low pitch reflects previously stated information (theme). High pitch can also be a strategy to express emotions or a tool to make the opponent give up and concede the role.

This paper investigates an apparent gap in the distribution of nasal + stop clusters, as well as certain aspects of the diachronic emergence of this gap, in Latin and Hungarian. The phenomenon investigated is the absence of a frequent consonant cluster ([nt] in Latin, [ŋk] in Hungarian) from a position at the end of verb stems. An important property of the missing consonant cluster in both languages is that it also functions as a person marker in the verbal inflection. It is argued that in Latin this gap is functionally motivated: it represents a case of syntagmatic pressure to avoid repeating the same sequence at too close an interval. In Hungarian, by contrast, the absence of [ŋk] from verb stem-final position is arguably unrelated to the identical phonological form of the 1Plural affix and is simply the result of accidents of diachronic development.

This paper collates and reviews previously proposed etymologies of the Turkic word ev, eb, üj etc. ‘house’. Moreover, as the etymology of this lexeme is still uncertain, it aims to once again analyze the available material and attempts to establish a convincing etymology. Another important aim of the paper is to clearly demonstrate which issues connected with the topic can be considered established and which require further study.

The paper outlines research identifying key elements of the ‘new knowledge’ frame in popular science Telegram channels. Highlighting categories that can be used to describe this frame, authors propose principles for developing an algorithm to search for it. The article demonstrates that the terminals’ automatic recognition of the frame ‘new knowledge’ is accomplished by developing a multistage search algorithm that involves describing programmed units located within the different-level linguistic means, creating a qualitative sample, and drawing conclusions about the inclusion of the category in the algorithm’s requirements. The paper employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to identify trends in various types of media to make some basis for further development of a supervised ML system. An analysis of 288 units from popular science Telegram channels reveals that the location and frequency of framing techniques in texts indicate the quality and level of audience preparation. The results of the study have demonstrated that the term ‘new knowledge’ is explicated via the set of semantics components that form the following microfields: a) The course of study; b) The result of study; c) The subject of research work; d) Comparison between new knowledge and old knowledge; e) Novelty of knowledge; f) Denial of previous knowledge. The aim of the frame description is to develop an algorithm that can identify units within this frame in real speech materials of social media. This will aid future research on objection’s stylistics and enable the development of AI systems that can be trained to recognize objection styles.

Interest in innovative technological strategies and modern digital tools has increased significantly due to the need to manage large amounts of unstructured data. This paper reviews current paradigms and services for automated summarization, developed based on interdisciplinary research in linguistics, computer technologies, and artificial intelligence. It focuses on syntactic and lexical techniques employed by neural network models for text compression. The paper presents performance examples of such AI-powered services as QuillBot, Summate.it, WordTune, SciSummary, Scholarcy, and OpenAI ChatGPT. The contemporary automated models proved effective in using extractive and abstractive methods to generate summaries of varying quality and length. The extractive approach relies on identifying the most significant sentences from the original text, while abstractive algorithms create new sentence structures that preserve the main idea of the original content. Automated summarizers effectively utilize text compression techniques that are inherent to human approach to text processing, e.g., they exclude redundant information, simplify complex structures, and generalize data. These technologies provide high accuracy and coherence in the generated summaries, though each summarization model has its limitations. Optimal results depend on the specifics of the task at hand: extractive models provide brevity and precision while abstractive ones allow for deeper semantic processing. Automated summarization is becoming an important tool in various fields that require effective analysis and processing of large text data.

The content of the paper is based on reactions that are stimulated by Alexandr Stich’s ideas in his study on the concept of language culture and its content. In his statements there is a hidden conviction about the need for a “reasonable” approach to language culture. Although the attribute reasonable in this context is questionable, the paper discusses the possibility of determining such an approach. The author’s conception is based on the conviction that the natural meaning of our behaviour and actions consists in cultivating a way of life that corresponds to our humanizing determination in the evolutionary process. From this follows the thesis that a reasonable way of human life is governed by the authority of its natural basis. This also applies to the way of cultivating the language. Language users show this by tending to linguistic behaviour that corresponds to the nature of their native language. If the democratization of a literary language has reached such a degree that its users accept it as a mother tongue, it is reasonable to cultivate it in accordance with its natural basis. The task of linguistic theory is to analyze this basis and draw “reasonable” conclusions for the approach to literary language cultivation. The attribute “reasonable” means that this approach is generally accepted in a community that is guided by the principle of rationality alone.

Numerous research studies addressing the differences in the use of lexical bundles in academic English by L1 and L2 writers interpret these differences as a deficiency or deviation that L2 writers need to eliminate. In this paper, we argue that this “deviant” use is not essentially the product of insufficient knowledge of English and/or Anglophone norms of academic writing but rather a transfer of the academic conventions of non-native speakers, rooted in their local culture. To confirm this hypothesis, we reviewed some previous studies and analyzed the use of lexical bundles in dissertations and research papers written in English by graduate and post-graduate students from Russia and Cameroon. The Russian corpus (38 texts of 576,186 words) was compiled from publicly available papers and dissertations written by bachelor’s and master’s students at the Higher School of Economics; the Cameroonian corpus (21 papers of 680,146 words) was compiled from papers contributed by students and teachers of the University of Yaoundé I. Using content analysis, corpus analysis, and the comparative method, we found that the most significant differences in the use of lexical bundles were connected with the peculiarities of the Russian and Cameroonian academic writing styles and cultural norms. Our study, therefore, reinforces the need to consider a more inclusive and culturally sensitive approach to the use of lexical bundles by L2 academic writers and take into account their diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. It will expand our knowledge of the linguistic features of different varieties of English and provide a deeper understanding of academic traditions in different languages and cultures.

This paper presents a theory of audience-resistance and speaker-denial. The paper commences with the problem of definition, encompassing an analysis of the scope and nature of denial and resistance. The data for this study were primarily obtained from mainstream and social media postings in two languages: English and Arabic. The article primarily draws on discourse and socio-cognitive frameworks. The paper’s principal question is how and why Arab and English speakers may resist or deny a remark. Previous research on resistance to figurative language has focused predominantly on the rhetorical trope of metaphor and on what drives the English political and media elite to reject a metaphoric expression. However, this raises an important question that is rarely asked: how and why do members of the general public resist verbal metaphors, and what about other tropes such as hyperbole and metonymy, other languages such as Arabic, and other modalities such as images and art forms? The paper argues that the existing literature on meaning negotiation and/or human dialogic action and behavior is riddled with fundamental theoretical, methodological, and analytical flaws. The paper aims to fill in this gap and has significant implications both for conceptual metaphor theory and for (non-)deliberate language use.