Nasleđe

U-PRAGMATICS AND E-PRAGMATICS: MAKING A CASE FOR I-PRAGMATICS

Vladimir Žegarac — 2015-12-31

This article presents an argument which shows that there is a natural point of contact between the social-descriptive and the cognitivepsychological relevance-theoretic approaches to communication. The argument is based on an analogy between the concepts of Universal Grammar, E-Language and I-Language, developed within generative linguistics, and the relevance-theoretic model of the cognitive mechanisms and psychological processes of human communication and cognition. I make a case for identifying and investigating culturespecific pragmatic competence in cognitive, relevance-theoretic terms and I try to show how this proposal provides a principled basis for a cognitive psychological concept of pragmatic competence which could be termed I-Pragmatics and which is the natural point of contact between the universal mechanisms of communication and other cognitive domains, including the social ability module.

“HIDING BEHIND BOLOGNA”

Katarina Rasulić — 2015-12-31

This paper presents a cognitive linguistic account of metonymic and metaphoric meaning construction in the English language discourse related to the ongoing higher education reform process in Europe widely known as “the Bologna process”. The analysis of the non-literal uses of the toponym Bologna in the pertinent discourse shows that the conceptualization and the discursive construction of the contemporary European higher education are significantly shaped by metonymic mappings in which Bologna serves as a “catch-all” metonymic vehicle with a range of often indeterminate target concepts, and by metaphoric mappings in which the conceptual complex bologna (for x) is structured in terms of various (and often inconsistent) source domains (motion, space, building, machine, plant, person, organized group, economy/trade, food/cooking), which results in unclear referential meaning and yet predominantly negative associative meaning. The theoretical considerations concern the benefits of the interdisciplinary dialogue between cognitive linguistic, (critical) discourse analysis, and relevance-theoretic approaches to meaning.

POLYSEMY OF THE LEXEMES HOME IN ENGLISH AND DOM IN SERBIAN2

Sabina Halupka Rešetar — 2015-12-31

Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Johnson 1987, Lakoff 1987) and Conceptual Metonymy Theory (Radden and Kövecses 1999, Radden 2000, Barcelona 2000) the paper presents a contrastive analysis of the lexemes home in English and dom in Serbian. The analysis of the material taken from monolingual dictionaries of English and Serbian (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Macmillan English Dictionary, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Rečnik srpskoga jezika) shows numerous similarities between the metaphoric and metonymic extensions of meaning of the given lexemes that may be attributed to the common European cultural frame which English and Serbian appear to share. Specifically, two corresponding metonymic extensions and one metaphorical extension have been found in both languages. Some minor crosslinguistic differences have also been noted in the ways in which metaphors operate in English, but a more detailed corpus analysis of the whole lexical field of house/kuća is required in order to support the conclusions reached in this paper.

HOW MUCH TIRED ARE YOU? APPROACHES TO VOCABULARY COMPREHENSION

Mirjana Mišković Luković — 2015-12-31

This paper presents one radically semantic and one radically pragmatic approach to vocabulary comprehension. As a means of illustrating the workings of the respective approaches – the Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Relevance Theory – one lexical field has been selected for analysis. The aim is to provide an objective assessment of the different approaches to lexical meaning in use by encouraging the reader to derive his/her own implications regarding potential merits and demerits of the theories. Most of all, the reader is prompted to engage in the contemporary discussion of the semantics/pragmatics interface, especially at the level of lexis, by understanding the rationale behind the two extreme positions.

PITCH HEIGHT AND PITCH RANGE IN SERBIAN EFL STUDENTS’ READING AND SPEAKING TASKS

Tatjana Paunović — 2015-12-31

The use of prosodic/intonational cues in spoken communication is attracting growing attention from both theoretical and research perspectives, which is particularly important for L2 teaching, where the appropriate use of prosodic cues is a vital communicative goal. In EFL study, the prosodic cues related to F0 and pitch range manipulation, used as markers of various intonation functions, are particularly important. In this paper, we present a study involving first-year English Department students and their use of F0-related prosodic cues – pitch range, pitch level, and movement – in reading and speaking tasks. The findings showed that EFL students used pitch-related cues appropriately to signal unit boundaries and prosodic prominence, while for interactional and illocutionary signals the use of both pitch range and pitch contours was much less appropriate. The pitch range used for reading dialogues was only slightly higher but not wider, and the participants neither expanded the pitch range for focused utterance parts, nor did they compress the pitch range for backgrounded and parenthesised parts. The reading task proved to be more challenging than speaking in some aspects, but the participants used a narrower, mid-level pitch range in speaking, as well as inappropriate, rising pitch contours.

TEACHERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON THE USAGE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS AND LMSs IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

Savka Blagojević — 2015-12-31

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a web-based system that allows learners to authenticate themselves, register for courses and complete them, and take assessment tests. The aim of this paper is to determine the extent to which English teachers in Serbia are familiar with LMSs and use them in foreign language teaching. The main instrument used in data collecting is a questionnaire that comprises ten close-ended questions and two open-ended questions designed to define teachers’ familiarity with the key terms related to LMSs and the type of applications they use in their teaching process. The survey has included 31 respondents – English teachers from Serbian highereducation institutions. The results of the questionnaire show that the majority of the respondents are familiar with the abbreviations associated to LMSs but not with E-learning. Although the examined teachers agree that the usage of LMS can improve the process of teaching and motivate even shy students to participate in class activities, only 29% of the teachers know how to use the system, while 19% of them are still unsure about it. The respondents also consider LMS to be an easy and quick way for sharing teaching materials among students. Thus, it can be concluded that the implementation of LMS into university teaching curricula may lead to a new kind of learning resources development and learning management, while the conducted survey and similar ones can offer an insight into students’ and teachers’ perspectives on formal learning/teaching by means of LMS and social networks.

TEACHING SPEAKING SKILLS IN EFL IN LOWER ELEMENTARY GRADES IN STATE SCHOOLS IN SERBIA

Marijana Matić — 2015-12-31

The aim of this paper is to look into the opportunities learners may have in lower elementary grades (namely 3rd and 4th grade) in state schools in Serbia for building and developing the speaking skills in English, the quantity and quality of exposure to English in class as well as into the results of methods which teachers use in the classroom when teaching the speaking skills. The paper further looks into the fluency, vocabulary and the range of constructions which learners use, and investigates whether the teaching methods comply with the needs of the modern global society, including the extent to which learners are instructed so that they may become competent speakers of English as a foreign language. At the same time, methods of instruction are examined in order to see if they match the level of cognitive development of young learners. The methods of data collection are both quantitative and qualitative. They include questionnaires, class observations, semistructured interviews and focus group interviews. The methods of data analysis include multiple regression (quantitative) and narrative (qualitative) analysis. The results show that little systematic attention has been given to developing the speaking skills in 3rd and 4th grades of elementary schools. A limited exposure and use of the methods which do not focus on the systematic development of the speaking skills as well as a low demand for productive communication imposed on learners, jointly contribute to an underdeveloped level of the speaking skills. In the long run, such practices are inevitably futile: adult speakers of English as a foreign language may be cognizant of the English language system and at the same time exhibit low conversational capabilities.

ECHOING THE TOPICALISATION TRANSFER

Željka Babić — 2015-12-31

Literary texts present a plethora of challenges for linguistic research due to the depths of readings and interpretations they provide. When texts are translated, each new translation is a challenge that invites fresh analyses and approaches to a newly produced literary piece. This paper presents an analysis of a translation of Ivo Andrić’s The Story of the Vizier’s Elephant into English. It focuses on the analysis of clauses used as discourse segments, including complementation and topic continuity. Even though the main aim is to research morphosyntactic and syntactic means used by the translator, the attention is also paid on psycholinguistic traits that reveal the presence (or absence) of the translator’s voice as the Other.

W. H. AUDEN’S POETIC SENSE OF HISTORY

Tomislav Pavlović — 2015-12-31

The essay focuses on the part of W. H. Auden’s poetry that demonstrates his lifelong interest in history. The analysis starts with the poems composed during the 1930s that reveal Auden’s historical affinity and strengthen his reputation as a modernist poet. The attention is then drawn to the poems included in the collection entitled Homage to Clio (1960) which show Auden’s deep insight into the crucial aspects of historiography that in modernist epoch took quite an unexpected turn. Auden’s denial of historicism, seen as a part of Nietzschean heritage, is correlated with T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s meditations on the problems of history and tradition. The poems we analyzed refer to the problem of the malleability of historical truth, traditional, objectivist vs. idealistic and uncritical historiography and the gradual degradation of the classic idea of history embodied by Clio. In spite of the fact that Auden did not offer any new concept of history the touch of his poetic genius, magnificently displayed in his musings on history, makes them the true monuments of his epoch.

VIETNAM REVISITED

Lena Petrović — 2015-12-31

The paper is a response to what has been recognized by the filmmaker Clay Claiborne, the author of the 2008 documentary Vietnam: The American Holocaust, as an urgent need to face the suppressed truth about the Vietnam War as the best vantage point from which to examine the mechanism of historical repetition. The continuity of war and violence, despite declarative promises of peace and stability, is the paradox that since the WWII has increasingly engaged the attention of historians, cultural critics and commentators, and artists. In the first part of the paper the views are represented of those among them who come from different fields yet, like Claiborne, use the benefit of the same, post-colonial, hindsight to reach the common conclusion about the holocaust, not as a unique aberration, but as historically recurrent and culturally conditioned phenomenon. The strategies used to justify and perpetuate it – the second major focus in this part of the paper – are not limited to deliberate falsification of historical facts though, for beyond what Harold Pinter called “the thick tapestry of lies” concealing the crimes of the past, there is the willingness, generated by western myths of racial supremacy, to believe the lies and/or condone the crimes. Within this (imperialist, patriarchal) mythic tradition, a particular kind of split identity is produced by, and reproduces in its turn, the kind of violent history we tend to take for granted: I argue, along with J. Habermas, L. Friedberg, C. Nord and H. Giroux, that the factual truth will stop short of the transformative effect, political or moral, we traditionally expect from it as long as the deep-seated affective alienation from whatever has been construed as the other that constitutes this identity remains unrecognized and unattended. Confronting such forms of radical inner dissociation, considered normal or desirable in patriarchal culture, have been, at least since Shakespeare, art’s ultimate raison d’étre. In the second part of the paper I provide what I consider one of the supreme examples of literary deconstructions of western identity forming traditions – Dusklands, Coetzee’s novel about the continuity of consciousness bringing together the geographically and historically distant events: the colonial massacres of the African Hottentots and the genocidal assault on Vietnam. Rather than offering a thorough examination of this richly layered novel, the aim of my analysis is to point to the ingenious strategies, particularly to the ironic intertextual allusions to Hegel’s master/slave paradigm, Coetzee employs to represent the ‘demanifestation/denazification’ of western historical sense as a process parallel to that of dismantling of patriarchal identity.

REALISM IN THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN SHORT STORY

Vladislava Gordić Petrović — 2015-12-31

Starting from the premise that the short story observes the laws of narrative and the tenets of realism on its own terms, the paper will explore the realism in the work of two prominent American short story writers: Ernest Hemingway and Ann Beattie. Although considered to lack the “breadth”, scope and universality of the novel and also accused of being fragmentary and subjective, short story can use its brevity to claim its nearer kinship to poetry and yet not violate its realistic frame. Declaring the need for compression, the form combines the increased rigor in detail selection and word choice with an emphasis on suggestive language, in order to convey emotion and render judgment with seeming objectivity within the confines of its generically limited space.

“THERE WAS NO BACKGROUND MUSIC”

Tatjana Bijelić — 2015-12-31

Written in the language of the host country as a way of selftranslating and conveying multiple connections within transnational contexts of migration and diaspora, contemporary narratives by women authors from the former Yugoslavia, who have resided and published their works in the United States, have received insufficient critical and scholarly attention. In order to contribute to a new and developing field of research on migrant (autobiographical) literature that voices East European and (post-)Yugoslav women in diaspora, this paper offers a contextual reading of To Die in Chicago, a literary memoir by Nadja Tesich, a Serbian-American author whose works abound in references to the narrator’s mediating position between the homeland and hostland spaces of her “third geography”. Anchored in the narrator’s matrilineage and the primary mother-daughter bond, the memoir tackles the issue of persistent patriarchal values in a familial and wider immigrant community while problematizing the notion of home and adjustment to living in the 1950s America. Dealing with certain aspects of immigrant pain and otherness, the paper briefly examines the narrator’s trajectory from the narrow space of the port of entry to her inevitable internalization of hybrid spaces of in-betweenness.

IDENTITY AND VICTIMHOOD IN CANADIAN LITERATURE

Biljana Vlašković Ilić — 2015-12-31

In her Survival: Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Margaret Atwood observes that those who suddenly find themselves teaching Canadian literature, something they never studied before, are encountered with two essential questions: “What’s Canadian about Canadian literature, and why should we be bothered?”. In countries other than Canada, these questions become even more important, since many students who study English language and literature are exposed through much of their education mainly to the world-wide famous British and American works and authors, and never think of Canadian literature as a separate entity. Due to this, it is imperative to answer Atwood’s questions, and show that in teaching and studying Canadian literature, its national and cultural aspect should also be taken into consideration. The paper argues that much of Canadian literature relies on the quest for an identity which is distinctly different from the American, English, or French. Selected examples from the literary works of some of the most famous Canadian authors serve to illustrate that the quest itself is often hindered by the symbolic gap between Canada’s colonial past and its modern present, as well as between Canadian wilderness and Canadian urban territories. Consequently, Canadian literature abounds with literary figures who are represented as victims, whose victimhood should be perceived as an essential part of Canadian identity.

MEMORY IN A POST-APOCALYPTIC LANDSCAPE

Katarina Melić — 2015-12-31

This paper aims at understanding the postmodern victims’ struggle for survival in a post-apocalyptic, unnamed metropolis depicted in Auster’s novel In the Country of Last Things. It is a story about the loss of the known, recognizable world and the struggle to stay alive in a dystopian space. On the city streets, Auster’s characters experience loneliness, disconnection and personal disintegration, which are the dominant topics in this novel published in 1987. Individual as well as collective memory emerge from violence, destruction, war and despair in a fictional landscape of destruction and chaos. Auster’s imaginary country, which can be easily understood as an allegory, is peopled by characters trying to emerge from chaos, to preserve any memory mainly through narrative. As it appears, narrative is one way of preserving identities and language, memory and surviving.

NOTES ON THE ROMANTICITY OF A FADE-OUT: SHELLEY, BLAKE AND JEAN PAUL RICHTER

Nikola Bubanja — 2021-10-11

To contextualize the readings of the two poems, the paper reviews the known “textual circumstances” of Shelley’s “Music when soft voices die” and Blake’s “Leave, O leave me to my sorrows”, before examining Jean Paul Friedrich Richter’s views of romanticity as “spaciousness” (even the “spaciousness” of sound). The readings of the two poems in the framework of the aforementioned textual contextualization and Jean Paul’s prose, show not only a similarity between the poems themselves and between the poems and Richter’s prose, but also a connection between the concepts of “spaciousness” and Weltschmerz as they are read in the poems.