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This paper deals with the semantic notion “topic”, understood broadly as the notion of ‘aboutness’ as in “to talk about stars,” and describes its various forms of expression across ten European languages. The aim is to explore and characterise how topic is construed, that is, which underlying conceptualisations are involved in the metaphorical expressions used to refer to this notion. The description is based on ten parallel versions of A. St. Exupéry’s famous novel Le Petit Prince. The analysis highlights the most salient metaphors that are found in European languages and points at some differences in the topic markers used across languages. The most revealing conceptualisation of topic involves what I have called the revolving metaphor, in which the topic is seen as the centre around which our discussion or thoughts revolve, as in my thoughts revolved around her. The paper ends with a tentative discussion of to what degree the different topic metaphors can be considered dead or alive.

Stressing a balanced and constrained interplay between the individual and the collective and tending towards transdisciplinarity as a consequence, a socio-cognitive perspective prevails in second language acquisition research (Larsen-Freeman 2018). Advancing several theories, including the task-based approach, the ecological approach as well as sociocultural and socio-constructivist theories, the latest version of the CEFR (Council of Europe 2020) has adopted a transdisciplinary perspective. However, the nature of the transdisciplinary approach declared by the Framework (Council of Europe 2020) remains an empirical question. Thus, the present paper explores the extent to which the CEFR (Council of Europe 2020) abides by the principles of a motivated socio-cognitive perspective. The structure of the paper is the following. First, it outlines a transdisciplinary approach to second language development basing on cognitive linguistics, intercultural pragmatics and elements of the teaching learning process. Then, this socio-cognitive approach is sought in the CEFR (Council of Europe 2020). The analysis of the document demonstrates that the social and the individual perspective are symmetrical but not fully integrated, i.e. there is no common denominator linking the two approaches.

In the present paper, teachers’ implementation practices and views of practicality regarding a paired speaking test, part of a high-stakes national test of English as a foreign language (EFL) in the Swedish upper secondary school, were investigated. In Sweden, national tests are centrally developed but internally marked by teachers at the schools where they are administered. Two-hundred and sixty-seven teachers participated in a nation-wide online survey and answered closed and open-ended questions. The responses reflect how teachers implement and perceive the national speaking test in relation to purposes and guidelines. Furthermore, challenges relating to the implementation were also reported. The results showed that there were variations in how the national speaking test was implemented at the local school level. This has clear implications for standardisation, but must be considered in relation to the decentralised school system that the test is embedded in, which requires local decisions to be made and local responsibility to be taken. In addition, many teachers perceived that they did not receive enough support from the school management, indicating that clearer routines and administrative support are needed. Statistical tests were undertaken to explore potential differences related to certain background variables. It was found that school size accounted for some of the variation in teachers’ responses, with teachers at smaller schools perceiving the practical implementation of the oral tests to be more problematic and time-consuming. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the practice of high-stakes speaking assessment programs, focusing on the educational context of the current investigation.

In the present paper we focus on the comparison between medical language present in the narrative of some Italian writers: Antonio Tabucchi, Umberto Eco, Oriana Fallaci, Elena Ferrante, Dino Buzzati and fragments of medical reports that deal with the respective medical problems observed in the analysed novels/short stories: Il tempo invecchia in fretta, La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana, Il cappello pieno di ciliege, La storia del nuovo cognome, Sette piani.With the comparative analysis of stylistically distant passages, we intend to indicate common points in the use of the Italian medical language both in the scientific and literary fields, as well as identify divergent linguistic aspects in the representations of this reality. We also intend to demonstrate the need to understand various narrative modes at different levels of specialized language.Despite different narrative modes, the essence of the phenomenon itself is not lost. There is also a common space in which meet various representations of the subjective truth that exists regardless of the language.

Thanks to the increasing role of women’s readership, Swedish women writers in the second half of the Nineteenth century were both widely read at home and successfully translated abroad. This was also true for Italy, where novels written by women were by far the most translated group of works in the period in exam. This paper aims at analyzing the case of Emilie Flygare-Carlén’s five novels translated into Italian between 1869 and 1892, via French, as it often happens between two semi-peripheral languages such as Swedish and Italian.

In this paper, metalinguistic self-reflectory remarks on the German language, made by the author Saša Stanišić in his book Herkunft, are analyzed. After a brief introduction (1.), the state of research on and reception of Herkunft (2.) and a brief section on (auto)biographical writing and migration (3.), the theoretical backdrop, focusing on Roger Sell’s notion on literary pragmatics, is presented (4.). It is subsequently intertwined with Karl Bühler’s Organon Model and Klaus Brinker’s connection of text functions to Searle’s types of illocutions (5.) to form the framework of the analysis. Then, the focus shifts to the analysis itself (6.), which is centred around a chapter titled Bruce Willis spricht Deutsch [Bruce Willis Speaks German]. The article concludes with a summary of the main findings (7.).

This paper sets out to explore the expression of vagueness in eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific writing, specifically in the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts. Following Zhang’s (2015) pragmatic-oriented approach to vague language, vague expressions are viewed through the lenses of elasticity. This notion applies to the strategic use of vagueness insofar as it provides a space for the negotiation of pragmatic meanings in writer-reader interaction. The exploration of elastic language involves four lexical categories: (i) approximate stretchers, i.e., approximators and vague quantifiers, (ii) general stretchers, i.e., general terms, placeholders and vague category markers, (iii) scalar stretchers, i.e., intensifiers and softeners, and (iv) epistemic stretchers. The Coruña Corpus Tool has been used to elicit data, but classification and contextualised interpretations have necessarily relied on manual analysis. Findings reveal that elastic language fulfils a variety of relational functions in scientific writing, including making generalisations when the information is either not available or relevant for the purposes of communication, marking shared knowledge and group membership, or self-protection.

In spite of the existence of a variety of syntactic approaches, it is generally acknowledged that the verbal clauses are a central topic of the syntax. In contrast, verbless clauses which contain no verb element, and often also no subject, are not included in the prominent theoretical approaches to the syntax. Although there are many similarities between both these categories of clauses, there are also many differences, especially with respect to the way they are usually treated. Verbless clauses are mostly described as a reduction of finite clauses or an exception to the syntactic structures. This paper is offered as a contribution to the long-standing discussion related to the grammatical status and usage of the constructions without a finite verb. A corpus-based analysis of these constructions shows that the verbless clauses tend to occur in various forms and contexts. Moreover, the results of this study suggest that in many cases verbless clauses are able to fulfill specific communicative functions, which cannot be expressed by any other syntactic units, including finite clauses.

Finding adequate and interesting content is a challenge teachers and writers of foreign language learning materials frequently come across. In this paper, we evaluate how suitable, vocabulary-wise, movie reviews are for English language teaching and learning purposes. Employing the method of lexical frequency profiling, we study a 1.3-million-word corpus of American movie reviews, and find that a knowledge of about 5,000 words is needed to achieve the minimum reading comprehension level (at 95%-vocabulary coverage), whereas as many as 13,000 words are needed for reaching the ideal reading threshold (98%-vocabulary coverage). We conclude that, non-adapted, movie reviews as a genre are only suitable for advanced learners. In addition, the study shows that movie reviews are not an excellent source of formal vocabulary, but are an excellent source of opinion vocabulary, and we therefore suggest that the teaching and learning target in terms of vocabulary for movie reviews in ESL/EFL contexts should be on positive and negative words expressing opinion.

The advantages of using storytelling as a communication strategy are currently discussed in marketing, psychology, advertising, medicine, and education. It is described as an inborn skill that people relate to and which makes people listen. Storytelling is also described as an educational method (Dumović 2006, Pedersen 1995) and as a communication tool (Dahlstrom 2014, Sundin 2018) that can be used widely in education. The purpose of this paper is to analyze features and functions of storytelling used in academic lectures. For this purpose, three lecturers in Russian and three lecturers in English were analyzed. By means of a mixed-method approach, including discourse analysis and content analysis, it was established that all the lecturers used storytelling as a communication strategy for explanatory and contact-establishing purposes. The conclusion is made that storytelling was used by the Russian and the English-language lecturers to provide their audience with clear and engaging explanations. The lecturers constructed their stories using factual information, emotional and evaluative lexis, verbs of action, as well as discursive strategies that helped them to engage the audience in the topic of the lecture (e.g., the inclusive pronoun we and different kinds of questions). Though the stories have much in common, some differences between the stories in Russian and in English are identified. Based on these results, it is suggested that further contrastive studies of storytelling in academic settings can benefit those who are planning on presenting to an international audience or preparing to teach in an intercultural context.

Diaspora is the first step towards an encounter with the other, forcing a re-negotiation of one’s cultural identity. This quest for the self, known as diasporic consciousness, is thought to be disruptive, having the power to de-essentialize national narratives. While diaspora does shake the core of individuals, this paper differentiates diasporic from hybrid consciousness as two distinct discourses of self. Maintaining a diasporic consciousness means to sustain the idea of a physical ‘home’ that has been forever lost. The constant desire to ‘return’ underscores an unconditional alliance to the homeland and its diasporic footprint. Consequently, the diasporic experience does not necessarily produce transgressive forms of cultural identification. On the contrary, those who dwell on diasporic consciousness reify national discourses abroad. The language of nationalism remains intact, and ‘native’ and ‘other’ constitute themselves through a dialectic but mutually exclusive relationship with devastating consequences for those who cannot cope with the binary. The alternative to diasporic consciousness is Bakhtinian heteroglossia, for it exposes national discourses as ‘epic,’ and de-territorializes ‘home’ to find it in language. Hybrid narratives of self connect diverse memories, images, and experiences into individual stories of identity that ultimately transform official discourses of national, gender, religious, and racial identifications.

Food is a major concern in popular culture and in literary studies at present and there are numerous novels, movies, and TV-shows that focus on food and its various functions – literary, cultural, and social. Food, which is a highly politicised subject, is one way in which cultural translation takes place as it is used to create an understanding of cultural transfer processes and their implications.This paper aims to explore how representations of food accentuate the theme of migration and serve as sites for cultural translation in A change of skies by Yasmine Gooneratne (1991), Love and vertigo by Hsu-Ming Teo (2000), and Nina’s heavenly delights by Pratibha Parmar (2006). In addition to representing the source and target cultures, food illustrates the immigrant’s position in-between cultures, thus emphasising cultural hybridity, in particular through the fusion of food from the source and the target cultures.

This paper considers how the homogeneity of the capitalist narrative of “tourism is good for the economy,” that has been sponsored and perpetuated by the official governmental institutions since the 1960’s Francoism’s desarrollismo period to present day, did not transfer its economic blessings to all social actors. On the contrary, it has generated social conflict, a border of self-interest between the institutional agencies and the local, which has elided possibilities of home-grown prosperity for the locals. The narrative of a homogeneous economic bonanza has created a fantasy that has irrevocably affected the city’s authenticity as an urban space. It has also codified its struggle under pintadas callejeras (written graffiti): “Tourism Kills” written all over the city. This declaration of confrontation presents the citizens of Barcelona with a simple metaphor that represents global mass-tourism as the equivalent of the beginning of the end for the local way of life.

Southern Italian dialects exhibit a peculiar morphosyntactic device in licensing possessives in non‑definite noun phrases, i.e. the insertion of the functional element de followed by the definite article. This strategy shows striking similarities with the functional element A(-) employed in Romanian to introduce a possessive or a noun phrase marked as a genitive when it is not linearly preceded by a noun phrase marked as definite. This paper proves that an identical syntactic structure is detectable in both groups of varieties which stems from the definiteness requirements of the genitive.

This paper tries to provide a thorough analysis of Ivan Turgenev’s appropriation of King Lear, the Shakespearean tragedy, as it appears in the novella King Lear of the Steppes (1870), from the perspective of translation and adaptation studies, and how this was adapted to 19th - century Russia. This analysis highlights the role of cross-cultural relations and its influence on the evolution of target literatures. The comparison with Shakespeare’s source text shows evident similarities but also differences, all of which raise multiple questions from the perspective of philosophy, history and ideology, among others. In fact, the interpretation of Shakespeare’s work, in Turgenev’s work and in the Russian literature as a whole, has become essential to understand the intellectual development of this country since the 19th century, as well as the rise of some debates about the Russian cultural identity, which still continue today. By focusing on Turgenev’s novella King Lear of the Steppes, the relevance of processes such as appropriation and adaptation for the development of national literatures will be underscored and how these foster debate and discussion within cultural systems. And, in order to illustrate this, it will also be highlighted that Shakespeare’s King Lear was in fact based upon several previous medieval sources and suffered multiple changes and adaptations over the centuries, which proves that knowledge transforms and adapts to the literary, cultural and ideological features of each period of time and society.

This article aims to provide a revisiting of the novel Things Fall Apart (1958) by the Nigerian essayist and writer Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) as regards the established notion in postcolonial studies which claims that African literature solely writes back to the western paradigm. The central thesis of this paper is that Achebe’s seminal first novel exhibits self-referential moments as do metafictional texts of the 1990s (Mwangi, 2009) to particularly focus on local nuances as well as colonial criticism. This self-reflexive technique foregrounds aspects of content and form that are especially evident in the use of proverbs. In this sense, we attempt to assess the significance of the internal heteroglossia staged in proverbs which venture unexplored thresholds between the “self” and the “other” and enact a new aesthetics characterized by the umbrella of minor literatures (Deleuze and Guattari [1975] 1986; Bensmaïa, 2017). Proverbs as locus of such hybridization (Bhabha, 1994) and heterogeneity grant a space for the “other” in the Anglophone narrative and also allow the deconstruction of the notion of “other” for African purposes. In a complementary fashion, our concern will be to explore how this heterogeneity is reproduced in the three Spanish translations done by Jorge Sarrió (1966), Fernando Santos (1986) and José Manuel Álvarez Flórez (1997), all of them published in Spain. Accordingly, we approach the analysis of interlingual heterogeneity (Spoturno, 2010) founded on an operation of deterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari, [1975] 1986) by comparing how the Spanish translators have rendered these configurations of heterogeneity and hybridity present in the original proverbs into the translated texts and, at the same time, by accounting for the strategies used for their recreation (Bandia, 2006; Tymoczko, 1999; Murphy, 2010).

This paper studies the Hispanicisms employed in 25 English popular romance fiction novels published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon. The texts belong to the corpus compiled for Research Project FFI2014-53962-P, which focuses on an interdisciplinary analysis of romances set mainly in the Canaries (Spain), but also in other Atlantic islands. In these romances, most of the authors resort to code-switching, i.e. the insertion of Spanish words, phrases and sentences, as a literary strategy. After offering a description of the socio-cultural framework of this type of works and a brief review of some studies on Hispanicisms, we will examine the semantic fields and the socio-pragmatic functions that these Spanish words and expressions seem to play in the English discourse. Our findings reveal that the Hispanicisms used in the texts are not merely restricted to the semantic field of ‘romance and love’, and that the socio-pragmatic functions they play go beyond the referential function. We suggest that the variety of functions detected seem to contribute to the performance of a kind of macro-function of representation of the bilingual contexts and identities the novels portray.

The object of this paper is to present and analyze the main features of the extensive publication of Italian adult comics in Sweden in the 1980s and 1990s. Bibliographic and quantitative research has been conducted in order to supplement the bibliography of the Italian literature in Sweden compiled by Schwartz (2013). The results allowed for the conclusion that comics constituted a very significant share of translated Italian literature of the period, and the importance of individual publishers was higher in this segment. Making use of key concepts of Bourdieu, it is shown that adult comics in Sweden were assigned low cultural value compared to Italy. After a brief comparison of the situation of adult comics in both countries, regarding the role of mediators and the issue of cultural legitimacy, it is argued that this cultural transfer eventually led to a clash that culminated with the Freedom of the Press trial against Pox magazine. For a number of reasons, adult comics in Sweden have never achieved a sufficient level of cultural legitimacy and have remained on the margins of the cultural scene. The difficulties faced by Italian adult comics in Sweden are illustrated by a brief analysis of the reception of An Author in Search of Six Characters by Milo Manara (1992).

In a study conducted at the Copenhagen Business School, 1,794 students completed questionnaires on lectures given by 31 non-native English-speaking lecturers in 12 EMI programmes. They were asked to rate the lecture, the lecturer and the lecturer’s language. Statistical analyses revealed a correlation between the students’ perceptions of the lecturers’ general lecturing competence (defined as knowledge of subject and teaching skills) and their perceptions of their English language proficiency (Jensen et al. 2013). In return for their assistance, each lecturer received a feedback sheet on how to improve their communicative effectiveness. The feedback was given by experienced tutors of English who had extensive experience of teaching and assessing English in an everyday ELF context. This paper sets out to investigate what sort of recommendations were provided, concentrating on the 24 lecturers whose L1 was Danish. An examination of the tutors’ comments showed that they could be divided into two main categories: formal language skills and pragmatic or metadiscursive features. The observations on language features are presented using a slightly adapted version of Lavelle’s (2008) “good-enough-to-teach-model”, whilst the comments on metadiscourse could be divided into four categories: sequential structure, hierarchical structure, connectives, and “fillers”. Although some ELF research has suggested that effectiveness in ELF settings depends more on pragmatic ability than on language proficiency (Björkman 2010; Jenkins et al. 2011: 301), the analyses of the tutors’ comments to the 24 lecturers in the present study show that both aspects should be attributed importance.

This article analyses Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and his short story "Three Friends" (2006), which are the testimony of the changes affecting current Ireland, especially those concerning the roles and engagement between females and gays. Drawing on Abraham and Torok's The Shell and the Kernel (1994), my main contention is that Tóibín's texts explore the trans-generational transmission of trauma and memory in an Irish context. Also Grabriele Schwab's Haunting legacies (2010), which explains the transference and haunting of trauma from both Holocaust victims and perpetrators to their descendants, will give a fuller understanding of The Blackwater Lightship and "Three Friends". I will demonstrate that different generations of Irish women, or Irish women and their (gay) sons hurt one another, being both victims and perpetrators. This paper also analyses the effectiveness of the language of trans/inter-generational memory and conflict, especially when paradoxically transmitted through strategic silences and meaningful gaps. Thus, Tóibín's texts look at the past and how it is codified and transmitted at a family level to eventually herald a message of renewal.

John Updike's Terrorist (2006) tackles the fraught theme of the 'homegrown' Muslim American terrorist. The novel's suspenseful plot, culminating in the young terrorist's capitulation following the intervention of his high school counselor, contains logical inconsistencies that appear to lessen believability or to demand the suspension of disbelief for the sake of a certain air of surreality, which may echo the would-be terrorist's own sense of his environment. This paper explores the idea that logical and thematic inconsistencies in the novel, including deep ambivalence in the depiction of the female characters, are devices deliberately put in place to highlight a gendered psychodrama and construct a strongly patriarchal worldview, both of which offer near-experiential insight into the young terrorist's own perspective.

Metaphor is universally recognized as a means of structuring language and thought and has long been the subject of linguistic research. However the manifestation of metaphor at the sentence structure level has yet to be studied in detail. This paper deals with the peculiarities of conceptual metaphor instantiation in English syntax and focuses on conceptual metaphor as a tool of conceptualizing real-world situations – both abstract and physical – and as a factor determining the syntactical structure of an utterance about a situation. It investigates the mechanism of metaphorical transfer manifested at the level of syntax, its grounds, limits and types, and shows the metaphorical potential of sentence patterns.

We provide here a brief summary of the most significant errors of Faroese speakers in the production of English consonants, and advice on how these can be remedied. The analysis is based on audio recordings of six informants from Eysturoy in the north of the Faroes. Altogether, a total of 3,547 occurrences of sounds were analysed. Results show that Faroese speakers have problems with certain phonemic contrasts which are very similar to those facing many other non-native speakers of English. However, they also exhibit errors which are less usual worldwide (e.g. pre-aspiration of fortis stops). There are at the moment no textbooks for Faroese learners of English, nor any descriptions of their pronunciation difficulties; this paper is a first attempt at filling that gap.

Includes the following reviews: p. 111-113. Stig Johansson. Bergh, G., Herriman, J. & Mobärg, M. (eds.), An International Master of Syntax & Semantics. Papers presented to Aimo Seppänen on the occasion of his 75th birthday. p. 113-115. Mats Mobärg. Fox, K., Watching the English. The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. p. 115-117. Liss Kerstin Sylvén. Einarsson, J., Språksociologi. p. 117-118. Maria Proitsaki. Moskow, M. A. & Olinder, B. (eds.), Criss-Cross Tales: Short Stories from English-Speaking Cultures. p. 118-120. Anna Fåhraeus. McDonald, R. (ed.), Shakespeare: Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000. + Pollard, T., Shakespeare's Theatre: A Sourcebook. + Smith, E. (ed.), Shakespeare's Tragedies.