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The article presents a study of the process of comprehension of an input joke and its subsequent retelling in writing by Polish advanced students (n=36) of English as a foreign language. The research question was whether people are guided by stereotypical social gender roles and cultural schemata during comprehension and production of a joke involving events that make up a story. The joke included references to female (wife) and male (husband) participants as well as a secretary (gender not specified), names Gloria and Mike and a number of objects such as: violets, chocolates, handbag or laptop. It was predicted that the VM version of the joke (the version with the name Mike, supposedly male secretary) would take the participants more time to interpret as compared to the VF version (with Gloria as a most possible candidate for the secretary role). This hypothesis was indeed confirmed, but the experimental subjects did not take significantly more time to write their versions (VM and VF conditions) of the story. The qualitative analysis demonstrated variable cultural bias during the construction of the participants’ roles and relations, often against or in the absence of clear instructions in the input to do so.

This work provides an analysis of the fictional dialogue of the first chapter of Faith, a novel by the British writer and novelist, Lesley Pearse. The choice of the novel itself is not considered key. It is most important though that it is a recent novel, with up-to-date topics relevant to an ordinary person. The research question that this author attempts to answer is the extent to which the FD (fictional dialogue) of the first chapter of the novel is similar to real talk and conversation. To this end the FD as a mimetic camouflage is discussed against selected cognitive, processing and pragmatic models of speech, talk and discourse. The analysis suggests that in many respects the FD of the first chapter of Faith is indeed a gross simplification of the processes that real talk involves. However, this is only to be expected given the contention that it only constitutes the writer’s construal of a prison conversation between women inmates. The FD contains only selected features of real talk. These, however, suffice for the reader to mentally simulate an entire scene.

The unique strength of the current work is the author’s attempt to create his own framework for investigating construal, (…) drawing on a number of theoretical perspectives that have never before been brought together for this purpose. Thus, the empirical part of the monograph is deeply situated within the field of Second Language Acquisition, with its focus on the processing of language by L2 learners. (…) Since construal as such, the pivotal concept of the monograph, is a notion developed within Cognitive Linguistics, the major theoretical orientation of the book is quite obviously on theories developed within this field, (…). However, the author is not satisfied with such a narrow focus and expands his framework by connecting the concept of construal to the theoretical perspectives developed in other disciplines, such as philosophy, psycholinguistics, or cognitive psychology. An important and innovative approach to the notion of construal proposed in the volume is viewing attention, with its related concept of cognitive salience, as the most superordinate process in construal. This novel approach opens up exciting opportunities for future research projects, which will certainly be stimulated by the many excellent ideas and the sound and logical theoretical framework present in the current work. Reviewer Prof Anna Cieślicka

International audience; This study examines the possibility of extending Multifactorial Usage-Feature Analysis (Profile-Based Approach) to describe abstract conceptual structures such as those identified in Idealised Cognitive Model (ICM) research. The approach is argued to resolve two methodological limitations with the analytical framework of ICM. These limitations can be described as (i) a lack of means for identifying social variation in the structure posited and (ii) a lack of means for falsifying the structures identified with the framework. Multifactorial Usage-Feature Analysis is corpus-driven and quantified, permitting a multidimensional picture of the models that accounts for social variation as well as falsification through repeat analysis. The study focuses on the concept of FEMININITY. Instead of limiting the analysis to metaphoric structure, it takes a keyword lexical approach. The data are synchronic and restricted to a specific genre / register of American English.

International audience