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With all the literary and political differences between father and son, what is striking about their literary careers is the way they parallel each other: Kingsley was thirty-one when his first novel, Lucky Jim, was published (1953); Martin was twenty – four when he published The Rachel Papers (1973). Lucky Jim was a runaway best seller and a book that defined a generation. That was not quite true of Martin’s early books, but he had enough precocious reward. No other father-son tandem has produced a corpus as sizable and significant as that of Sir Kingsley Amis and his son. They have maintained not only a quality of writing, but also duration of productivity that other literary families have simply not matched.

The present paper focuses on the travel notes by Michel Vieuchange (1904-1930), a young Frenchman who decided to reach Smara, a holy Muslim city located in the middle of the desert, to describe it, and to draw a map. His notes are to be analysed through the prism of autobiogeography. The term used by Michel Collot means telling your life through the places that has affected you. In the case of Vieuchange’s notes the geographical descriptions intervene with the description of the personality of the traveler and form a whole. The paper shows that three cities, Tiznit, Tigilit and Smara, mark three stages of the travel and correspond to different aspects of Vieuchange’s personality.

This paper is made in continuation of the article of Fabrice Marsac, Witold Ucherek and Magdalena Dańko “De l’infinitive de perception dans la pratique traductologique” (Studia Romanica Posnaniensia 46/1, 2019); both papers fall within the framework of the bilateral Polonium program “On the translation of French perception structures into Polish” (n° PPN/BIL/2018/1/00181), implemented and financed by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA), the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE) and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI). In the present case, we intend to report on the content and progress of the part “multi-dimensional labelling” of this long-term French-Polish project. Therefore, we describe the formal encoding of structures, categories and functions of the items in the large multi-label corpus (French-Polish) we have been collecting since 2019.

This paper arises from the subject Errors in Spanish as a Foreign Language, taught in the Master of Teaching Spanish at Masaryk University of Brno, Czech Republic. Its main objective is to show how the analysis of lexical errors can be used as a tool in the training of non‑native teachers of Spanish, in this case, Czech and Slovak. To achieve this goal, firstly, the paper presents a brief review of the trends that have investigated errors in foreign language learning, such as contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage studies. Secondly, it analyzes a corpus of texts written by learners of Spanish according to the error analysis methodology (Corder, 1967), as an activity for the Master students. Thirdly, it shows a typological classification of different lexical errors found in the texts and it reflects on the possible connection between mistakes and teaching methodology. Based on the results of the analysis, the paper discusses the usefulness of the analysis of these errors not only for the training of non‑native teachers of Spanish as a foreign language, but also for a better understanding of vocabulary teaching.

In the Italian academic discourse research, Master’s degree theses used to be studied mainly from the perspective of linguistic competencies of their authors. However, strictly linguistic skills are not the only challenge for undergraduate, who must also convey intellectual content in appropriate discursive and rhetorical forms. The paper explores the patterns of a peculiar form of “collaborative writing”, i.e. the cooperation between the thesis supervisor and the student. Using the example of Master’s theses in linguistics, written in Italian as a foreign language, three basic didactic approaches are discussed in the paper. In the didactics of content the supervisors emphasize knowledge, i.e. linguistic concepts expected to be applied in a Master’s thesis. In the didactics of forms, the supervisors focus on the linguistic code, that is, on grammatical and lexical correctness of the Master’s thesis. In the didactics of forms of content the supervisors use regularities observed in academic discourse, such as genre and rhetorical structures, as valuable teaching resources likely to help students develop metacommunicative awareness.

This paper analyzes Scott Fitzgerald’s novels in light of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of capitalism. While Deleuze and Guattari’s capitalist social machine is a break from Marxism, it decodes the traditions that define subjective desires or concepts like beauty and ethics. Under capitalism, subjective desire arises as a capitalist desire and reproduces the capitalist power. In his novels, Fitzgerald addresses the idea of the American dream in a similar way. His characters often embody the contradictions of American experience such as success and failure, dream and nightmare, illusion and disillusionment. This paper critically analyzes Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of desire within Marx’s work and the role of the American dream in a capitalist system as a sort of antiproduction. It seeks to illustrate how the concept of love in Fitzgerald’s novels is tied to the idea of money and how their connection delineates, in the same way, the commodification of the desire that Deleuze traces in his reading of Marx. Accordingly, this paper also argues that similar to philosophy, fiction can be employed to provide a better understanding of our represented world.

The present paper investigates variables affecting strategic learning of foreign languages. The theoretical approach starts from analyzing strategy classifications and evolves into highlighting the several factors that determine strategy use when learning foreign languages. Further on we investigate individual differences between learners, the learners’ personal experiences, situational and social factors, as well as affective factors and strategic competence. Having started from the theoretical premise that strategic learning is the superior approach to foreign language learning, the paper concludes that a successful learning experience is highly dependent on the language instructors’ understanding of the multitude of variables at play when it comes to learner strategy choice.

This paper discusses the use of African American Vernacular English as a literary dialect. The analysis is based on a corpus containing data collected from two 19th century American novels: ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ by Mark Twain and ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The speech of two characters of African American descent is under scrutiny: Jim and Aunt Chloe. The first part of the study provides an overview of the sociohistorical context in which AAVE originated and subsequently developed. The paper also highlights several morphosyntactic features attested in AAVE and the last part aims at identifying such features in the speech of the two African American characters aforementioned.

Teacher education programs have a long, perpetuated expectation for how to teach (Shulman, 1987). The overwhelming focus in teacher education programs on planning, instruction, and assessment obscures the ultimate goal of education; that is, to help every student become happy and lead a fulfilled life. This paper offers a perspective to cultivate preservice teachers who value humanity and therefore go beyond disciplinary knowledge and pedagogical practices. Humanity creates order in society, not arbitrary rules or authority. Yet, this aspect is often lost in higher education that focuses on professional skills over the cultivation of students’ humanity (Muscatine, 2009). We argue that teacher education needs to attend to humanity and pave the way for peace and happiness for human beings. Teachers’ roles are not just to deliver knowledge to students but to plant the seeds of hope and joy through education. To achieve this goal, we explored various humanistic approaches from Freire’s (1993) critical pedagogy, Valenzuelz’s (1999) subtractive schooling, Ginwright and Cammarota’s (2002) social justice approach, Comstock et al.’s (2008) relational-cultural theory, and Ikeda’s (2010) human education. This paper seeks to approach humanity as a theoretical and methodological basis for reclaiming the promise of teacher education.

Postcolonialism speaks of those people, who have been militarily, politically, and perforce culturally subjected to another nation. This branch of criticism is worth practicing because it plays a very important role at least in the lives of the oppressed all over the world by providing them with pain relief; a pain that still continues to gnaw away at the souls of a large colonized population. Although at the mention of post colonialism most people think of African and Caribbean countries and of black people, this paper signifies that the first and oldest British colony had been Ireland; that exploitation does not make a distinction between black and white. This paper is going to find traces of anti colonialism or decolonization in Joyce’s Ulysses and to show that how using the colonizer’s language, the Irish novelist implicitly writes back to the empire and what extent Joyce’s personality has been under the influence of post colonialism. The paper also reiterates that although Joyce regarded Irish Nationalism and Irish Literary Revival as useless and failing, he never surrendered to the language and culture imposed by the colonizer.

Despite the many international human rights declarations affirming the equality of men and women, and the techno-scientific accomplishments of humanity, in many non-Western societies and indigenous cultures there are still much discrimination against women. The discrimination and violence against women on the basis of their sex and their being perceived as subservient to men by some cultures, societies and persons are morally unacceptable. Discrimination and violence against women are wrong for they offend against the ontological status of women as human beings; violate their human dignity/ rights as persons. The arguments that some persons have used to treat women as unequal to men are flawed. It is an issue of morality for it speaks of how human beings should act. This paper uses a critical analytic, hermeneutics and evaluative methods to examine the issues. The issues of gender equality will be dissected and interrogated. The value in gender equality through all these methods will be highlighted. The paper finds that there are gender inequalities still prevalent in some parts of the world. The paper concludes that all societies, cultures and persons have a moral duty to struggle against gender inequalities. This will help to create a more harmonious world.

This paper intends to argue for the necessity to preserve the Christian identity in the secular world, in which the believer is called to live in. The manifestation of this identity is seen especially in the area of ethics. It is analysed the way ethics is interpreted in postmodernism and in Christianity. On the one hand, the postmoderns want to equalize the biblical perspective on ethics, which supports the good and evil antithesis. Stanley Hauerwas talks about differences between Christian and Postmodern perspective in the area of ethics. The reader is invited to compare the two systems of moral values, and come up with some conclusions. It is demonstrated that Christianity bases its morality on Scripture. On the other hand, the postmodern perspective allows all the voices in the society to support their own view. The author presents the actual tendency to ignore the classical values, such as good and evil. There is also a tendency to remove guilt. In this paper it is argued that from the biblical perspective of moral antithesis is rooted in creation. The sacred text argue that because man ignored the divine commandment from Genesis 2:16-17, he committed a moral action with dramatic consequences for all human race. The biblical books written by the so called “Deuteronomistic School”, are guided by the central idea of “blessings and curses”. By doing good, man is expected to be blessed, and by doing evil, he is expected to be punished.

Stand-up comedy is an oral dramatic performance that is commonly enacted by a solo-performer or a duet before a live audience. Some existing literatures examined it largely from humour and entertainment to the neglect of its deeper societal values. Therefore, this paper investigates its new trend in gender discourse through its oral structural form by discussing the social responsibility of mothers on proper monitoring and parenting of the girl child. Besides, it also investigates the linguistic devices employed by the selected female comedian to reveal the roles of female comedians as the gatekeepers and conscience of society. Five digital video discs of live performance recordings of Helen Paul, a Nigerian female comedian, were purposively selected. The selected live recordings were based on the informing sociological realities and choice of satiric mode. The paper employed Schechner’s Performance, Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic theories were used to analyse the informing sociological realities and choice of satiric mode. The data were subjected to performance and literary analysis

The purpose of this paper is to sketch a working definition of holiness, by offering a brief, comparative, and critical tour d’horizon of the notion, on the basis of five influential socio-religious accounts, namely those put forth by Emile Durkheim (taboo), Jonathan Söderblom (mana and tabu), Rudolf Otto (the numinous), Emmanuel Levinas (ethical meaning), and Mircea Eliade (sacred vs. profane). The paper ends with a theological wrap-up in lieu of conclusion.

The phenomenon of globalization has led to many globalized societies. Globalized societies are societies that have experienced and are influenced by the features of globalization. In globalization, time and space have shrunk and the world’s peoples and cultures are now more interlinked and interconnected through transportation and information communication technology which has led to the movement of human capital and transmission of ideas and cultures. Globalization has facilitated the meeting of different religions and cultures. In many societies today you now have people of different religions and cultures living/working side by side. Religious pluralism and multiculturalism are now ideological standpoints as they are now sets of beliefs of how society should be organized. This paper will hermeneutically examine these phenomena and the challenges that they present. Through analysis the paper argues that both religious pluralism and multiculturalism are facts of globalized societies not to be ignored. The paper concludes that religious pluralism and multiculturalism can be managed for harmony in society. These done globalized societies will experience more social harmony and concord.

This paper discusses two topics which are very popular nowadays among the academics dealing with foreign language teaching, namely: intercultural competence and pragmatic error. The author notes the fact that those two notions appear separately, because the starting points for discussing them are usually different fields of science. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that on one hand the two notions need to be treated uniformly, and on the other, that the pragmatic error should be included in error classifications which are references for both the authors of handbooks as well as people educating future teachers. For that purpose, the author defines intercultural competence, presents various approaches to error and its classification in teaching, and then explains what pragmatic error is and describes its linguistic characteristics.

The paper is a case study, part of a larger and older research project on the reception of modernist American literature in the cultural press of communist Romania in the 1960s. If the 1950s were the toughest years, in terms of censorship and physical atrocities, the 1960s could be considered the milder ones, while also anticipating the enlightened 1970s. We have been analyzing the Romanian cultural press as going beyond the role of an interface between an ecriture terminal and a network of readers: firstly, via translations, more or less accurate, secondly, through interviews and memories from journalists, fellowwriters, friends, family members, as reproduced from publications belonging mainly to the Eastern / Communist Bloc (Cuba included). Our research is also based on investigations run in the archives of the former secret police, the infamous Securitate. The relation between censorship and ideology, between institutionalized and self-censorship is underlined, as well as their effect in the act of literary translation. Our paper focuses on Hemingway as a result of him being the most popular representative of the Lost Generation at the time, in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. The main text we had in view was How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? by Lilian Ross.

Social harmony is an imperative for the development of society. Without social harmony there is bound to be conflicts, violence, and social turmoil that impede the wellbeing of society. A key factor that can promote social harmony is when people live out the meaning of their names. This is what Confucius called Zhengming (“rectification of names”). For him the rectification of names implies every citizen living out the full import and meaning of their names and roles. Without rectification of names society will continue to be bedeviled by disharmony. Like many other societies the African continent is bedeviled with social disharmonies caused by poor leadership, bad governance, corruption and embezzlement of public funds, kidnapping and hostage taking, youth restiveness, illegal migration, environmental degradation, etc. It is difficult for there to be social harmony when citizens are experiencing social deprivations. The paper will use critical analytic and hermeneutic methods to examine the doctrine of rectification of names as proposed by Confucius. The paper will also apply this doctrine to the situation of social disharmony in Africa. The paper finds and concludes that there is need to use the ideas of Zhengming to mitigate social disharmonies in Africa.

This paper aims to illustrate examples of exercises that are used during the practical course of Romanian as a foreign language. The course is entitled Oral and Written Communication I and is taught during the first semester of the preparatory year of Romanian language for foreign citizens at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. The exercises address topics pertaining to the first concepts assimilated in any foreign language (family, personal space/home, the university context, daily activities in personal, social or special situations – at the doctor’s, travel, etc.), both orally and in writing. For more clarity and accuracy, the paper relies on examples taken from the personal experience of teaching a group of 25 foreign students.

The paper deals with Italian helping verbs (modal, aspectual, causative verbs) and light verbs which form complex predicates and with the rules that guide its use in Italian descriptive grammars published in Italy between 1953 and 2005. The author shows that those forms in both – traditional and contemporary Italian descriptive grammars are treated at the level of word classes whereas it could be more appropriate to discuss them as clause elements as they form complex predicates. In our opinion this way of describing such verbs is due to the tradition in Italy to focus on a form and not on function of an element. What is more, Italian grammarians tend to omit in Italian descriptive grammars noun predication and the role of semantic predicate (n pred.). The goal of the paper is to present the advantages of an integrated approach to helping verbs (modal, aspectual, causative verbs) and light verbs in modern Italian. The author emphasizes its importance for contemporary Italian FL syntax teaching

The aim of this paper is to address the issue of teaching politeness in textbooks dedicated to learners of Italian as a foreign language. It is assumed that in today’s ever-changing world, full of conflicts and challenges of various kinds, polite communication has become of increasing importance as it helps overcome differences between the participants of the act of communication and promote a peaceful coexistence. Politeness is a phenomenon particularly sensitive to the situational context: the forms considered appropriate vary according to the parameters such as place, channel, age or status of the interactants. Since the complexity of politeness and the variability of its exponents make it difficult to teach, the purpose of this research is to analyze if and how the current textbooks of Italian deal with this aspect of communicative competence. The paper examines which aspects of politeness are taught and with what methods. The analysis is based on the selected textbooks of Italian published in Italy and Poland, in order to compare their approaches.

The present paper is aimed to analyze how certain concepts of political identity are translated into poet-ics of identity in contemporary Spanish narrative. The analysis covers four novels published since 1998, written by Spanish authors and which achieved high rates of sales and positive critical recognition. The study was not limited to specific immigrant groups in order to reflect a variety of experiences and political positions represented in the texts. The paper is a study of the image and functions of immigrant characters in selected Spanish novels of the last three decades: Háblame, musa, de aquel varón (1998) by Dulce Chacón, Ventajas de viajar en tren (2000) by Antonio Orejudo, Cosmofobia (2007) by Lucía Etxebarria and En la orilla (2013) by Rafael Chirbes. Sociologists and psychologists indicate three main classes of negative attitudes towards immigrants (citizen insecurity, threat to cultural identity and competitiveness in obtaining resources). Within this context the article aims to determine to what extent the literary representations of immigrant characters constitute reproductions or transgressions of culturally prefabricated images of the Other and explores the different narrative and ideological functions these characters play. The paper also studies the presence of discourses that support social exclusion of immigrants and the means of subverting them.

The conjunction como si select usually in the subordinated adverbial clauses (modal, conditional and comparative) the tenses of the subjunctive mood cantara / cantase and hubiera / hubiese cantado. However in some papers is mentioned the possibility of the construction of como si with the tenses of indicative mood. This paper contains the analysis of the modal selection after como si and, particularly, the possible substitution of subjunctive by the indicative tenses. The analyses is realized on the ground of the corpus of Real Academia Española (CORPES XXI, CREA, CREA. Versión anotada).

The present paper analyses the language used in three articles written by academics and a journalist’s blog on the topic of Brexit and its impact on academic life. The methodology used is that of the apparaisal theory which in its turn draws on findings of the systemic functional linguistics and discourse analysis. This approach focuses on the interpersonal meanings conveyed by the authors, on their feelings and attitudes about a certain topic as well as on the voices, others than that of the author that may be present in the text. After a brief outline of the approach, the paper examines the way in which linguistic resources such as modalization and projection, as well as key lexical items may introduce stance in discourse, highlighting the differences of engagement found in samples of media discourse versus samples of scientific articles

The paper aims to present the potential, for foreign language students, of the exolingual interactions online in public and open forums. For the analysis of students’ commentaries, I apply the observation categories that were first elaborated for the analysis of posts published in press sites. I focus on narrative commentaries in which web users organize phenomena and events discussed in public discourse and try to give them their individual interpretation. I consider this kind of interaction on press sites as contrib-uting to the civic debates: I argue that they can be also integrated in observation categories used to describe and analyze exchanges between students discussing social issues in reference to foreign lan-guage media information. In the paper I present two kinds of commentaries: those written by native speakers in public forums and those written by FL students in response to public commentaries.

This paper aims at examining the causes of the emergence of French subordinate Noun-Noun com-pounds. It is well known that the Noun-Noun pattern in French remains marginal compared to other lexicogenic processes, especially N-PREP-N or N-A, and it is supposed that its appearance as well as its progressive development took place during the last two centuries (19th-20th). The aim of this paper is to examine more in detail when and why French Noun-Noun structures emerge. As for the first question, empirical data from the Frantext corpus allow to hypothesize that both the type and the token frequency of French Noun-Noun compounds remain stable since the thirties of the nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War and that after this period, especially during the sixties, it begins to grow exponentially. Contrary to Arnaud’s estimate (2003, p. 141), no significant change in frequency or productivity was observed around the middle of the 19th century. As for the second question, the author claims that the emergence of subordinate N-N compounds was triggered by an increase in the productivity of the attributive N-N compounds, for which there is no competitive pattern in French. The theoretical rationale of this hypothesis is anchored in paradigmatic approaches to word formation, with specific reference to the formalization made according to the Construction Morphology framework (Booij, 2010).

Acronyms are lexical units that have been thoroughly explored in terms of their morphology or pronun-ciation. However, their semantic value has not been entirely determined yet. The present paper aims at investigating the manner in which a semantic value of an acronym, and particularly a difference between proper and common acronyms, influences techniques applied to translating them. In order to achieve the aforementioned objective, on the basis of the cognitive theory of proper names, the authors have distinguished Polish and French acronyms being ergonyms as well as acronyms belong-ing to proper names and these designating item classification. The paper concerns the analysis of both Polish and French translations of ergonyms in foreign language press and French common acronyms in the Polish press. The performed analysis allows observing a tendency towards transferring acronyms-ergonyms that play the role of a rigid designator rather than full names in the target text. By contrast, the techniques of translating common acronyms differ, depending on whether they designate phenomena typical of the source culture or universal ones.

This paper builds on my previous work, “God in Public: A Prolegomena to Public Theology in the Romanian Context,” where I made an argument for the need of public theology in the Romanian context and offered a brief introduction to the nature of this new field. Now I present several issues that would need attention in a public theology in our context. One such issue, to begin with, is the atrophy of the capacity for dreaming, for envisioning a better world, of the capacity for imagination and hope. Most of people living through the difficult period of a long transition period, with such a high rate of corruption, poverty and uncertainty, have lost any hope for a positive social change. There are no solid institutions and structures in these young democracies and people are really struggling to live a normal life. Similarly, other crucial dimensions of life have been downplayed and so in need to be recovered, such as work, family, civil society, justice, to name just a few. It is argued that a public theology for Romania and for the entire region of Central and Eastern Europe would need to address exactly these kinds of issues: a vision for a better world, Christianity and nation-building, faith and work, faith and society. The paper concludes by pointing to several example of platforms that are very promising for public theology.

There are different formal structures which requests can be made with depending on the register used and the degree of courtesy. During the teaching process, these structures are introduced according to their recursiveness and difficulty, and not necessarily due to their courtesy. This can cause mismatches between the perception of requests in L2 and in L1. In this paper we intend to analyze if this is really the case, or if there are no differences in the perception of these structures in L1 and L2.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of applying the Invited Inferencing Theory of Se-mantic Change in order to establish the semantic evolution of idioms with literal correlates, in particular somatisms or kinegrams. The methodology is applied to analyze the testimonies (until 1700) of Spanish somatism cerrar los ojos in a diachronic corpus of Spanish language (CORDE), so as to find out what inferences generated contextual meanings that conditioned its lexicalization as idiom, semanticizing sym-bolic meanings related to death, sleep, knowledge, irrationality, submission or trust.

The paper analyzes the stylistic variation of implosive /s/ in Guayaquil Spanish. The aim is to verify the sociolinguistic status of /s/-weakening according to Labov’s three-level hierarchy: linguistic indicators, markers, and stereotypes. It is argued that the aspired allophone [h], by representing a clear pattern of stylistic variation, can be qualified as a marker, and since it receives metalinguistic commentary from the speakers, it is also a stereotype in the Guayaquil speech community. The analysis contains a quantitative study of /s/ variation on a corpus of radio speech (CHARG) and a qualitative confrontation of the results with responses gathered in a language attitudes survey.

This paper intends to begin a conversation on public theology in the Romanian context. The launching of the Global Network for Public Theology and of the International Journal of Public Theology some 10 years represent two significant markers for this new field of study. Public theology is a serious engagement of Christian faith with the public domain in all its social, political, cultural and economic spheres of life in society. It is proposed that the engagement of theology in conversation with issues of public domain becomes not only relevant but extremely urgent if we consider the historical, postcommunist, post-dictatorial, transitional context of Romania and the entire region of Central and Eastern Europe, where faith was privatized and excluded from the public discourse for many decades. It is argued that in this context one of the most important and urgent tasks of the church as well as of Christian theology is to become an authentic witness in the public realm, toproclaim and embody the gospel as public truth, i.e. a theology concerned with and addressing the entire reality of life in society.It is thus shown that a crucial preoccupation for Christians in Romania and in this part of the world isan articulation of a solid public theology of culture, of work, of social justice and reconciliation, a public theology for the common good and human flourishing.After a brief presentation of a particular aspect of the Romanian regarding religion and public life, the paper offers an introduction to this new field of study by looking at some definitions, characteristics, approaches and tasks of public theology.

This paper examines sociolinguistic features of conversational interactions among characters in Achebe’s A Man of the People. The aim is to differ from the largely stylistic examination of the text, and therefore, to study conversations in the mediated arena of literature to see how societal structures and beliefs are projected through the voices of fictive characters. For data, all the conversations in the text were sampled and analysed, using ethnographic theories with particular reference to Hymes’ SPEAKING. Our findings reveal that social and contextual variables such as cultural norms, topics, gender, situational impositions, etc. influence the interactions between and/ or among the characters in the text. These, as our findings reveal, constrain the linguistic choices made by the characters. These social-contextual variables also facilitate readers’ understanding of both the text and the world views advanced by the writer through the voices of the characters. This paper concludes that analyzing literary texts most especially prose works using Hymes’ SPEAKING aids a better understanding of the texts and the world views projected in the texts.

This paper asks whether the traditional European nation-state has eroded or transformed as a consequence of European integration. In order to answer this research question, several aspects are being analyzed. Since more and more decisions that are taken on the supranational political level have a direct impact on the daily lives of the so-called European citizens, the author argues that Europeanization represents a tremendous challenge for traditional nation-states. The European Union evolved to a unique supranational entity that takes on many state-like functions, although it is not (yet) a state. Nevertheless, European nation-states still remain at the heart of the political decision-making processes, because the European Union is a) mainly founded by nation-states, b) there is no European army and c) the European Union is unlike nation-states unable to tax its citizens. The paper concludes that there has rather been a transformation and not an erosion of the traditional European states. Statehood is now being shared between nation-states and the supranational European level.

This paper proposes a contextualization of the didactic comic book Aguinha!! De Cabo Verde às Canári-as... e vice-versa. The comic book in question emerged as part of the institutional project financed by European funds, but at the plot level it hides any explicit affinities with Europe. For this reason, we chose to analyze the contents of the book in the transinsular order and to draw both on the concept of environ-mental education and on border thinking. It is also proposed to frame this comic book as a complementary, non-autonomous didactic material

This paper presents an analysis of mythopoeic elements in three novels by Mia Couto. Starting from Mircea Eliade’s definition of myth, we look for elements of the Living Cosmos with its axis mundi, centre and periphery, chaos and harmony and quest in the novels. Such structure of the analysis allows us to consider the cultural colonization and decolonization of contemporary Mozambique. We conclude that the analysis of the mythopoetic schema in Mia Couto’s novels demonstrates a crisis of cultural harmony in the contemporary Mozambican state and nation. On the other hand, however, the mythopoetic reveals a horizon of cultural and traditional models of persistence that save not only from chaos but above all from the dehumanization of society.

This paper discusses the stages of the translation process and their ideological features. Teaching transla-tion, which includes an explanation and a simulation of the whole process, is supposed to acquire a new ideological dimension since it takes place in the classroom. The translation process is defined as a series of negotiations and decisions made by several “ideological subjects” involved in carrying out a particular translation service. The simulation of this processis suggested as a didactic method of teaching translation and indicated as a useful introduction into the market of professional translation. The study emphasizes a more active performance of students in learning translation. It also includes some didactic recommendations and explanations of the ideological burden always present in the practice of transla-tion. The paper is mainly based on the Manipulation School approach in Translation Studies.

This paper aims to investigate the Classical proverbs listed as equivalents to the Catalan proverb L’amic, prova’l primer ans que l’hages menesterby Sebastià Farnés in his volume entitled Paremiologia catalana comparada. In this paper, I will establish these Classical proverbs’ sources, consider their authenticity and correspondence withthis Catalan proverb, and increase the number of Classical sources, since this Catalan proverb bears witness to its Classical tradition and is related to philosophical and literary passages that can be considered as previous manifestations of this tradition. These Greek and Latin passages are compiled and compared so as to determine the different ways in which the idea included in this Catalan proverb was expressed over time. The conclusion is that the consideration about friendship presented by this proverb is embedded into a long textual/ideological tradition whichultimately refers to the sage Solon, the poet Theognis and the philosopher Theofrast, although there may be connections with the Judeo-Christian tradition as well.

The aim of this paper is to present some of the social and cultural difficulties which appear during the process of teaching and learning political and diplomatic language at the Preparatory Year (Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest). The identification of the aforementioned difficulties is based on a six-year experience in teaching this specialised language to foreign students who intend to study in Romanian different scientific areas, mainly related to law and political sciences. The paper examines various situations in which the socio-cultural background of the foreign students becomes a barrier to the proper comprehension of political and diplomatic concepts, as well as to the corresponding terminology.

With translation used, then banned, then reinstated in TEFL, the mixed expectations employers have from prospective workers about their linguistic competence entail distinct nuances the classroom context takes in what regards translation. Boris Naimushin’s concept of a fifth skill has important consequences in the shift from a secondary role of translation in support of the other four skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) to a purpose of its own. The paper explores the border zone between professionalized translation and learner’s translation starting from Naimushin’s hypothesis. It aims to support the use of translation in language teaching while warning on the implications on the labour market of the existence of non-professional translation and translators. The references to Romanian learners reflect some specific aspects in the perception of translation as part of the foreign language experience. The paper also provides a few considerations on the impact of translation on learners of different levels suggesting that, should translation be included as a fifth skill, it should ideally have its own distinct descriptors in correspondence to those of the CEFR, for each level. This is another challenge in distinguishing between professional and learner’s translation, but very relevant for employers who specifically want to recruit speakers of other L2 languages for jobs other than professional translation, but involving translation competences.

The aim of this paper is to present a first dialectometric approach to the geolinguistic distribution of the Romance varieties using a new corpus based on the Atlas Linguistique Roman (ALiR) which is currently being developed at the Centro Ramón Piñeiro para a Investigación en Humanidades. However, the dialectometrization of ALiRwill allow us not only to analyze the linguistic distance among the varieties of Romania Antiqua, but also to shed light from a quantitative perspective on several issues that have historically raised controversy. Specifically, this paper deals with the Romance subgrouping of the Catalan language, an issue that has been recently reopened by Radatz (2012).

The studies on Polish francophone literature put an emphasis on a selected group of authors (Potocki, Mickiewicz, Krasiński) and on some literary genres (diary and travelogue). The aim of this paper is to study the work of a lesser-known feminine writer, Anna Nakwaska, member of cosmopolitan literary milieu and author of several short stories and novels, written in French. Applying selected concepts of spatial literary studies, the first part of the article proposes to perceive the publishing strategies of Nakwaska as a tool for introducing Polish feminine literature in a broader European context. In the second place, the study of some Nakwaska’s short stories show her interest for a literary presentation of several geographical problems, including demography (put in the context of antisemitism) and regional ecology. The use of Polish toponymy brings a foreignization of the francophone fiction.

In our paper we show how Black writers (those of Africa and those of the Black diaspora in Europe and America) have contributed to the intellectual work centered on the idea of Africanity. We explain to what extent literature, as one of the domains of culture, reflects different visions of Africa, as formulated in the discourse of the World Congresses of Black Writers and Artists (Paris, 1956 and Rome, 1959). With refer-ence to the official texts presented or elaborated during these events, we expose in which way literature is involved in the decolonial remapping of the geocultural place of Africa and in the remodeling of the postco-lonial literary geography while pointing out the precursory or heralding character of certain postulates whose echoes will be heard during the festivals of negro and pan-African art of the 1960s and whose relevance is also confirmed nowadays.

The paper is an attempt at showing how the mentions and quotations of contemporary geographic dis-courses inserted in the Balzacian texts and paratexts are there to outline the features of a new novelistic æsthetic. We will start from the following observation: the Balzacian novel and its encyclopedic ambi-tion are contemporaneous with the first attempts of some geographers to found a unified science from a diversified set of knowledges and practices. Therefore, modern geography may appear as an adversary of Balzac’s own ambition of totalization and we will show that geographic discourse, rather than being a model for him as other scientific discourses are, is distorted in his novels, deprived of its epistemological value and reduced to a science without knowledge.

This paper presents the role a specialised corpus can play in the ontoterminological modelling (Roche 2007b) of the balance of payments (IMF, 2009). It presents the domain of the balance of payments and the characteristics of a corpus of texts produced in English, in French and in German by thirteen central banks and statistics offices, which will be used for terminological work. The analysis leads to a typology of the texts grouped in the corpus. Far from only providing examples for knowledge collected from experts, this corpus will be analysed from the very stage of elaborating the concept system.

Imaginary genres have always played with language and lexicon in order to build their worlds. The sci-ence fiction genre, in particular, creates a lexicon on the borderline between literary creation and scientific and technical terminology so the stories can be framed elsewhere or in the future. The translation of these invented words can be a real challenge for translators because of their very nature as hybrids, but also because of the science fictional megatext. The translation treatment from English into French of these neologisms, known as “fiction terms”, shows different strategies of lexical (re)creation. Following a terminological approach, this paper presents a contrastive analysis of lexical creation strategies and morpho-syntactic structures between the two languages on a list of science fictional terms from the audiovisual field and extracted from a corpus of science fiction novels.

This paper examines the profiles of the concept of Poland based on a corpus of foreign propaganda texts published in French and Slovak in 1968. The texts analysed come from three magazines: La Pologne, Polsko and La Revue Polonaise, created by political decision of the communist leaders to disseminate a positive image of Poland abroad. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that the three profiles of the concept of Poland, aimed at first, second and third-world audiences, are different from each other due to differences motivated by extra-linguistic factors, and in particular, the various objectives of the country’s foreign policy. The study is inspired by the work of the Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics on the linguistic representation of reality. Its methods make it possible to identify variants of the representation of an object through the examination of textual data, such as the ways of naming it, the semantic relations of synonymy and antonymy, or the series of its aspects mobilised in the discourse.

In this paper, we present the problems encountered during our research in the field of nominal predication in Polish, in particular concerning nouns referring to properties and character traits. In a previous work on predicates referring to various activities and behaviors, carried out with the use of electronic corpora (the National Corpus of Polish Language, as well as electronic sources available on the Internet), we obtained a dictionary of verb-noun collocations with high lexical coverage comparing to traditional dictionaries (not based on electronic corpus research). Using the same corpus data and methodology as before, we conducted a study of the class of predicative nouns referring to properties and character traits. However, the results obtained following the application of this method proved to be unsatisfactory. In this article, we consider the reasons for this in order to optimize research methods later in our work.

The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive, theoretical overview of how proverbs are used as a communicative and discursive strategy, taking into account the speaker’s communicative intention. I will pay attention both to the benefits of the use of this type of formulaic sequence in the construction of the speech, and to the illocutionary force and pragmatic implications entailed by these utterances. In order to do so, some considerations will be required – the encoding of the meaning of the proverbs, the decoding process by the addressee, and the way proverbs are inserted in the discourse. This paper inspects the importance of such factors as the need for articulation of fluent speech, the assumption of cultural patterns, the appeal to proverbiality that aligns the speaker with power structures of the community, or the masking of the speaker’s voice behind a collective entity in order to socialize and release tensions related to interpersonal contact.

The present paper aims at analysing the trajectories of the Romanian intellectuals immediately after the Revolution in 1989, and the fall of Communism. During the Communist years, the term itself (intellectual) had been used with ideological connotations. The intellectual (as a social value) was discussed according to the Marxist ideology, taking into consideration his concrete usefulness and his contribution to the Communist society. Immediately after 1989, the fundamental dilemma faced by the Romanian intellectual represents the necessity of the implication of the intellectuals inside the society or, on the contrary, the isolation in an Ivory Tower of creation. The second challenge aimed at the necessity of synchronizing the Romanian elite with the European one; the topics for debate in Western and Eastern Europe during the Cold War were fundamentally different. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the influence and the commitment of the Romanian intellectuals in reshaping the Post-Communist Romanian society.