English and Czech children’s literature: A contrastive corpus-driven phraseological approach

The paper explores the recurrent linguistic patterns in English and Czech children’s narrative fiction and their textual functions. It combines contrastive phraseological research with corpus-driven methods, taking frequency lists and n-grams as its starting points. The analysis focuses on the domains of time, space and body language. The results reveal register-specific recurrent linguistic patterns which play a role in the constitution of the fictional world of children’s literature, specifying its temporal and spatial characteristics, and relating to the communication among the protagonists. The method used also points out typological differences between the patterns employed in the two languages, and the limitations of the n-gram based approach.

Comparative analyses of skincare product advertisements in Georgian and English

Across the gamut of media formats – from television to the Internet – beauty product advertising influences consumers on a daily basis. Each advertisement seeks to persuade potential buyers of the product's value, or even its necessity for the buyer's well-being and self-image. These techniques, sometimes manipulative in nature, affect consumers’ self-concepts. One of the signature strengths of the beauty advertisement lies in its ability to transform seemingly mundane objects into highly desirable products. In some cases, the beauty industry uses buzzwords and scientific words to convince consumers of a product's value; these linguistic devices describe the product's apparent capabilities and appeal to the consumer's ego by suggesting that the product will enhance the assets the consumer already possesses. All things considered, the present paper deals with a comparative study of skincare product advertisements in English and Georgian and focuses on the use of persuasive strategies, buzzwords and scientific terminology in the advertisements that manipulate and influence potential consumers.

Mitigated request speech acts in learner discourse

This paper is concerned with the usage of directive speech acts in the Czech Students’ Spoken English (CSSE) corpus, particularly with requests produced by Czech EFL undergraduate learners in role-play tasks. It aims to investigate request modifications, focusing primarily on identifying syntactic and lexical devices within the request head act that mitigate the imposition of requests. The findings indicate that Czech learners prefer syntactic mitigating devices, whereas the range of lexical internal modifiers employed is limited. Finally, the paper briefly comments on the students’ linguistic and pragmatic competence in producing requests for information

Women in love against the underworld: “Female savior” scenario in English, Russian and Turkish folklore narratives

The main idea of this work was to study gender representations in the English “Ballad of Tam Lin”, the Russian fairy tale “Finist the Bright Falcon” and the Turkish tale “Patience-Stone” through the analysis of language units with implicit gender semantics. These folklore narratives have important similarities featuring the female protagonist as the main plot driver and possessor of cultural wisdom. They follow the “female savior” scenario, depicting women as decisive and challenging the traditional role of a decorative victim.

The concept of power in computer-mediated communication

There has been a recent increase of interest in the phenomenon of power amongst linguists and also philosophers. The presented article attempts to consider power and ways in which it is exercised through language of computer-mediated communication (further CMC). This unique environment is determined by the specific conditions of an Internet chat room, such as anonymity and no audio-visual cues. In the theoretical part, Watts’s and Diamond’s investigations of power in various open and closed groups in oral communication are discussed and the notion of status is presented. The author divides the chat group corpus into individual sub-groups and tries to draw a graphical presentation, a sociogram, to show their complexity and distribution of power. However, the question remains how tight the sub-groups in CMC are or how interrelated they are with one another. In this respect, it is noteworthy to observe how a selected chat participant develops her status in various sub-groups and to analyze the means by which this possible status is achieved. The corpus was collected by the author herself. The main hypothesis is that the status of power changes quickly throughout chatting and it depends to a great extent on other cues such as address, non-verbal action displays, punctuation marks and so on. In other words, there are very few means by which to exercise power and hold it in this continuously changing and anonymous environment.

Modal verbs in English essays written by Czech secondary-school students

This paper presents the findings of a frequency analysis of modal verbs and their complementation in 390 English school-leaving essays written by Czech secondary-school students in a high-stakes B1 level exam. These constitute a learner corpus, CZEMATELC 2017. The study reveals a very high proportion of correct complementation patterns, but predominantly with lexical verbs at A1 and A2 CEFR levels. The most frequent errors are the complementation of modal verbs by past-tense forms of lexical verbs and the absence of complementation.

Disciplinary language at school: Sites of integration in content-and-language-integrated learning (CLIL)

The teaching of languages in Europe emphasises the learning of English, increasingly with a view towards using it in a professional and academic environment. One development over the last few decades in response to this demand for more specialised English proficiency has been the introduction of Content-and-Language-Integrated Learning (CLIL). One of the major benefits of CLIL lies in its potential in fostering language abilities that relate directly to the school subjects taught through the integrated learning of new content and new aspects of the foreign language. I aim to contribute here to our conceptualisation of this nexus by positing and presenting evidence for a dual perspective of disciplinary language. This definition embraces both the production of lexico-grammatical and discursive patterns appropriate to the subject being taught and the verbal and multimodal practices associated with acquiring them.

Attitudes toward the influx of anglicisms in the Georgian language

The article explores the use of English lexemes in Georgian informational-analytical electronic journals and discusses different approaches to the influx of Anglicisms. The paper highlights the fact that attention-drawing strands through intensive use of English vocabulary in journalists’ speech leads to an encounter with a number of English terms that do not fit the current standard of normative speech in Georgian. Nevertheless, the paper asserts that the influx of English lexemes in the Georgian language is predominantly caused by speakers’ desire for economy of form. Instead of providing a partial semantic or explanatory equivalent in their native language, speakers attempt to cover a complex or abstract notion by a straightforward, laconic English lexeme. The study maintains the idea that such non-native units appear to be more cognitively secure and semantically valid. They operate from the solid foundation of the source language and contribute mainly to the formation of syntagmatic units with strong predictability of a new flow of loanword integration into Georgian.

Language and international relations: Linguistic support for other academic disciplines

This article outlines the content of an elective university course designed for domestic and international students, combining language and international relations. The course is intended to make students more sensitive to the linguistic intricacies of a specialist variety of English. The focus is on its written modes, particularly writing and reading academic (professional) texts dealing with complex foreign policy issues. As a result, students are expected to enhance their academic writing skills. The linguistic component of the course is backed up with a review of world affairs. Conversely, the field of international relations theory is enriched by a systematic study of language effects observed in the respective discourse. The interdisciplinarity of this enterprise benefits students with different academic and cultural backgrounds.

Speech acts of request and apology realised by Czech students of English as a foreign language: Selected findings of a pilot study

During the second half of the 20th century, there was a shift in focus in second-language-acquisition research from linguistic competence to communicative and pragmatic competence (Hymes 1972, Canale & Swain 1980, Bachman 1990, Bachman & Palmer 1996, Usó-Juan & Martínez-Flor 2006). This resulted in a growing number of studies on speech acts in general. Motivated by a lack of studies on the speech acts of apology in conversations of Czech learners of English as a foreign language, my study aims to shed light on request and apology strategies used by Czech university students. The aim of this paper is to present the findings of a pilot investigation into the speech acts of apology and request. The first aim of the study is to compare two data collection techniques: the open-ended written discourse completion task (DCT) and the oral production task (OPT). The second aim is to investigate the use of request and apology strategies by Czech learners of English. The findings suggest that both of the data collection techniques produced very similar data. In terms of requests, most respondents opted for a conventional indirect strategy. In terms of apologies, respondents opted for statements of remorse, offers of repair and account.