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By applying Levinson's theoretical framework to the complicated domain of deictic phrases, this study examined and interpreted Tehmina Durrani's My Feudal Lord. The main linguistic component that serves as an anchor for conversation in specific spatiotemporal and social contexts was the deictic marker, which was the subject of this investigation. Knowing the different roles and effects of deictic markers in the novel's narrative setting was the goal of the study. The pragmatic principles governing the use of deictic phrases in communication were clarified by this study's close-textual analysis-based qualitative methodology, which drew on Levinson's pragmatic theory. The purpose of the study was to examine how character relationships, narrative viewpoint, and sociocultural nuances in the text are affected by deictic pronouns, demonstratives, temporal adverbs, and spatial expressions. The quantitative research looked at whether deictic phrases were used most and least frequently in the work. This investigation's fundamental idea was to apply Levinson's framework for interpretation in order to make sense of the practical implications of deictic utterances in "My Feudal Lord." This study thoroughly examined how deictic indicators interact with verbal acts, communicative implicatures, and beliefs in an effort to uncover the text's hidden meanings and its resonance in the socio-political context of modern-day Pakistan. Furthermore, the study underscored the significance of utilising Levinson's theoretical framework as a lens through which to perceive the author's narrative strategies and situated the analysis within the broader context of text interpretation and literary discourse. In the end, this study offered a thorough examination of the deictic phrases in "My Feudal Lord," improving our understanding of the pragmatic elements of language usage in literary works.

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that deals with a speaker's meaning beyond the literal meaning. Pragmatics has a highly significant role in our lives to improve social interactions and communication skills. It also clarifies how personalities interact with their viewers and analyses what language strategies they use to be listened to and followed. Mufti Tariq Masood is a well-known Islamic scholar believed in for his wisdom by a sea of people. He distributes his understandings through videos and podcasts. For that reason, researchers have gone for a pragmatic analysis of mufti Tariq Masood to explore his persuading style. For a detailed analysis, pragmatics is divided into subgroups. The researchers have preferred speech acts to breakdown the utterances spoken by Mufti Tariq Masood. Speech acts have three types: Locutionary, Illocutionary, and Perlocutionary. To simplify, researchers have examined these categories in tabular form, which classifies the speech acts. To study the role of these speech acts, they have made a selection of some podcasts and videos created by mufti Tariq Masood on his YouTube channel. They have listened to and observed carefully all the utterances made in these videos and categorised those utterances with their time laps in the table according to their categories. Based on the data collected, researchers have discovered that directive speech acts are more common than others. Mufti Tariq Masood performs a directive speech act to educate the Pakistani youth.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the question of a personal search for identity as well as the broader cultural concept of “feminine identity” in relation to domesticity and landscape in Deborah Levy’s Real Estate, published in 2021. The third and last instalment of Levy’s “A Living Autobiography” series is an account of a woman’s search for identity in the context of major life changes: no longer a wife, no longer a mother living with her children, and no longer young, the narrator (who is and is not the author, according to Levy herself) examines her own relationship with home, homeland, and houses in various geographical locations, including her dream house – her unreal estate. The spectral dream house, positioned at the intersection of the past, the present, and the future, together with land and a very specific type of fluid landscape, constitute an object of the narrator’s profound desire. By expanding on the topic of this longing, Levy engages in reflection on women’s wanting and its habitual subjugation to the needs of others. The paper demonstrates how in this way Levy enters into a dialogue with Sigmund Freud and his famous unanswered question “Was will das Weib?” Most importantly, it is shown how the narrator generally considers women’s – including female artists’ – place at home and in culture within patriarchy. Applying a feminist and gender studies perspective, as well as by combining hauntology with housing studies, this paper examines the key symbolism of Real Estate and ultimately reads the book as a feminist writer’s manifesto declaring “my books are my real estate,” while placing it against the background of older feminist tradition, represented by such writers as Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, and Annette Kolodny.

In Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance and Mr. Vertigo, characters who resemble free individuals turn into slaves. In both novels, the major characters find meaning in life by willingly submitting to a superior power. Both characters who exhibit traits of passivity become slaves as they experience weightlessness or levitation. This article uses a qualitative approach and thematic analysis to identify and analyze the theme of slavery in the two novels. It explores Nash’s reliance on chance, his fear of freedom, and his potential for becoming a slave, and examines the relationship between master and slave in Mr. Vertigo from a liberal humanist point of view. This study is the first of its kind to explore the theme of slavery in Auster’s novels. Furthermore, it delves into the metaphoric meaning of levitation. While Walt and Nash appear as free agents, they are in fact slaves. Instead of clarifying the real imbalance in the relationship between the characters, the texts conceal and romanticize their master-slave associations. Paradoxically, the masters are portrayed as comic characters in The Music of Chance, and Nash feels free when he is imprisoned. Moreover, in Mr. Vertigo, the master who tortures Walt physically and mentally is portrayed as a father figure and a sympathetic character. The texts valorize weightlessness, passivity, and submission to a superior power, and thus can be considered reactionary.

The article analyses John Harwood’s The Ghost Writer (2004) as a neo-Victorian novel and places it against the backdrop of the multifarious definitions of the term. Like numerous other neo-Victorian novels, Harwood’s narrative revolves around the modern protagonist’s quest into the Victorian past. Gerard Freeman’s amateur research into his family history leads to the discovery of manuscripts authored by his Victorian great-grandmother. Subsequently, the ghost stories that stimulate the protagonist’s interest in an unknown part of his own ancestry are paralleled by his increasing sense of being haunted by Victorian spectres. This article argues that whereas, as a rule, in neo-Victorian fiction communication with the Victorian dead takes place either in the textual or the supernatural realm, Harwood’s novel combines the two modes, mixing the textual and the spectral. The intertextual allusions, epistolary components as well as intersections between the fictional narratives and the protagonist’s experience further obliterate the distinctions between literature and reality, between the living and the dead, between the Victorians and their twentieth-century descendants. It is argued that Harwood’s novel represents an intricate combination of several modes typically employed in neo-Victorian fiction. The essential duality of The Ghost Writer, in which nineteenth-century and contemporary plots run in parallel and occasionally intersect, is another recurrent characteristic of neo-Victorian narratives; however, compared with “romances of the archive” such as Byatt’s Possession (cf. Keen 2003), the protagonist’s repeated encounters with the material and immaterial remnants of the past, rather than liberating him, ultimately entangle him even further in the textual fabric.

The article starts from the observation that Irish fiction has recently shown a diversification, which can be summarised as follows: on the one hand there are works addressing the history of Ireland, on the other hand we see novels focusing on post-national topics (cf. Haekel). John Banville, who under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black also wrote crime novels, is a renowned representative of narrative fiction informed by contemporary philosophy and aesthetics, exploring questions such as memory, cognition, and personal identity. My article reveals how in his latest (and allegedly last) literary novel The Singularities (2022) his highly sophisticated character narration reaches a terminal point, as self-reflexivity, textual referentiality, and abstraction become unsettling. However, the complexity of placing his work in literary history has intensified by the appearance of three more novels published between 2020 and 2023 under Banville’s own name despite the supposed finality of The Singularities. Surprisingly, Snow (2020), April in Spain (2021) and The Lock-Up (2023) revisit dismal topics from Irish national history. These thematically (trans)national fictions also enhance the propositions of realism in Banville’s work. They present another hybrid form of narrative genres, blending crime fiction and historical novel, infused with philosophical reflection. The writer evades a categorisation. With The Singularities, Banville wishes to take his departure from the philosophical novel, as it seems with the intention to continue writing his new kind of murder mystery. The Lock-Up will be followed by another crime novel in October 2024. The Singularities, I wish to show in my analysis, points at the exhaustion due to a self-reflexive probing of the subject, the unreliability of knowledge, and the impossibility of truthful representation. Reality appears gloomy, yet in the end art surfaces as a source of freedom and imaginativeness for the individual and prospering kinds of fellowship.

This contribution examines five canticles found in four Middle English translations of the Book of Hours, with the focus on New Haven, Yale University Library, Beinecke MS 360. The texts of the canticles come from the Book of Isaiah, Book of Daniel and Gospel of Luke, and represent scriptural content of this medieval prayer book, next to the lessons from Job and selected psalms. Out of the seventeen extant medieval Books of Hours in English, four have been selected for this study: St. John's College, MS G. 24, British Library, MS Additional 17010, Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd. 11.82, and New Haven, Yale University Library, Beinecke MS 360. The former three have received an edition, while Beinecke MS 360 still remains to be edited and, to the best of my knowledge, has only recently begun to be analyzed in depth. Apart from the primers, selected for the present analysis are the two vernacular versions of the Bible available at that time, namely the Early and Late Version of the Wycliffite Bible. This study aims to establish the textual tradition of the canticles in the four Books of Hours with respect to each other and within the broader Wycliffite tradition. This will be achieved by comparing the texts with the use of text similarity measurements, and more specifically, the cosine distance method. The obtained results will be presented in tabular form and illustrated with fragments of the text. It is hoped that the analysis performed in this paper will shed light on the textual affinities of the scriptural content of Middle English primers. This study is parallel to the one presented in Hordyjewicz (2023), where my focus was on the nine lessons from the Book of Job.

A recent initiative in the Algerian education sector suggests integrating English as a compulsory subject starting from the third grade of primary level. However, it was noticed that the conditions in which the initiative has been undertaken might require much more time because the interval between the decision of English incorporation and coursebook design was too short for a well-thought teaching material. Additionally, many researchers have disclosed the rationale and need for integrating the notion of culture in combination with foreign language teaching. However, questions remain as to the forms of work, content selection, strategies employed and technologies that provide pupils with active interactions, and complete immersion. The present study explores the degree of cultural awareness among ten English Foreign Language teachers working at the Department of Letters and English Language, University of Ain-Temouchent. It points out to the various strategies they use while incorporating culture in teaching English. The study relies on a structured interview held with the selected participants. The results revealed that despite the paucity of cultural awareness among the teachers, they exert much effort to help their young pupils build on communicative competencies of the target and local cultures without overlooking their national identity. The results of this study suggest that English foreign language classes should be equipped with trained teachers and manageable resources to help improve the quality of English teaching. Teachers also need to integrate cultural aspects adequately to help young learners enhance their capacities to communicate across linguistic and cultural boundaries. In the aftermath, the study ends with a conclusion and provides some recommendations.

This study investigated the influence of English on patients’ experiences in healthcare settings in Bangladesh. A survey was conducted among the patients to explore their English proficiency levels, comfort, and language preferences in medical settings. Statistical analyses showed a highly significant correlation between English proficiency and comfort level (r = 0.797, p < 0.001), indicating that individuals with higher English proficiency levels felt more comfortable receiving medical services. It is important to note that other factors contributed to this relationship. The study also found that women reported lower levels of comfort with medical documents and drug labelling in English (t(48) = 2.770, p < 0.05). Additionally, level of education was found to be a significant factor influencing comfort levels (F(5.44) = 7.85, p < 0.001), with individuals with lower levels of education reporting more discomfort. Furthermore, this study provides strong evidence supporting a distinct preference for the native language Bangla in medical communication (χ2(2) = 38.680, p < 0.001), particularly among individuals with lower levels of education. These findings emphasize the urgent need to implement healthcare policy improvements in Bangladesh that actively promote and foster native languages. This would ensure that all patients, regardless of their language proficiency or demographic background, receive equitable high-quality care in healthcare settings. Moreover, this study contributes to the ongoing discourse and discussion surrounding healthcare communication in multilingual societies, and strongly advocates the implementation of policies that prioritize and accommodate the linguistic preferences of patients.

The presented article examines the notion of taboo in translation in Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be The Verse” and its three Polish translations by Jerzy Jarniewicz, Jacek Dehnel and Maciej Froński. In the first part of the article, we find information on Larkin's reception in Poland and translations of his poems. We also learn that in addition to supporters such as Barańczak, Jarniewicz and Dehnel, he also had well-known opponents, the most famous of whom was Czesław Miłosz The second part of the article deals with the idea of different types of taboo is presented together with an analysis of Larkin’s dealings with this notion. The types of taboo discussed here are: profanity, ancestors, immediate family and God. Larkin seens to be breaking all of them, yet retaining a classic verse structure and certain elegance that present a great challenge to his translators In the third part, we look closer at the three Polish translations of “This Be The Verse”, focusing on how the subsequent translators have dealt with its taboos. They all had a difficult task, which they accomplished in a variety of ways, all of which have been carefully researched and described. Finally, as the author, I also present my own version of Larkin's translation of the poem, but leave its assessment to subsequent researchers.

Ghanaian tradition, like other African traditions, revolves around cultural values and beliefs. These cultural values and beliefs vary as a result of the different cultural contexts in Ghana. One of the most popular traditions in Ghana is the use of songs as a form of entertainment and a mouthpiece for satirizing society’s ills. Mohammed Ismail Sherif Kwaku Frimpong, popularly known as Black Sherif, is a musician who employs the oral genre of Ghanaian music to unveil some of the pertinent issues in Ghana. This study uses the lyrics of the selected songs as data, which are transcribed and textually analyzed to situate Black Sherif’s music as a pathway through which the young people divulge critical issues confronting them and the vulnerable in the country. The study explores how the artiste presents entertaining yet thought-provoking songs as a manner of expression and foregrounds the culture of Ghana through the use of diction, imagery, and symbolism. It argues that the young people play constitutive roles in nation-building by promoting the Ghanaian culture through the songs they write, so society should grant them an audience and heed what they say. The findings reveal that the economic situation of the country has rendered young people jobless and frustrated and that the ghetto lifestyle has emerged as a popular culture in Ghana.

Blue Bayou (2021), a film by Justin Chon, presents issues of imagination, postmemory, and identity through self-referential techniques. Referring to Marianne Hirsch’s theory on postmemory, this article examines how this film represents imagined moments and how they serve as a postmemory of the history of Korean immigrants, and how this kind of forgetting constitutes the American shared experience. The findings and discussion show that imagined moments in Antonio's subconscious function as postmemory for Antonio, while the film itself serves as a postmemory for America’s imagination. It can be argued that Blue Bayou deliberately acknowledges itself as a film and as fiction to present the world that America imagines and understands. We argue that Blue Bayou conceives memory, fosters imagination, and acts as a documentation for the audience as well as for America’s fragmented memory.

The September 11 attacks were world-changing events. Contemporary historians divide the history of the modern world into pre- and post-9/11. The metropolitan reaction was controversial. The Metropolis united against what is dubbed "the axis of evil." It attacked an array of Islamic nations. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) portrayed two Muslim expatriates from Pakistan and Afghanistan who experienced post-9/11 America firsthand. The protagonists presented two distinct understandings of extremism and fundamentalism. This article employed Said's (2003) theories to analyze the concepts of “the diasporic figure” against the backdrop of “the metropolitan society.” It argues that the cultural, political, religious, and social conflicts between the diasporic figure and the metropolitan society are shaped by Orientalist narratives. The novels depict various aspects of the diasporic identity. They try to negotiate between several conflicting narratives. However, Orientalism defines the frameworks of these conflicts because these conflicts and resulting confusions are rooted in the long history of metropolitan Orientalism.

This study assumes that former President Rodrigo Duterte and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. used different types of deixis in their first State of the Nation Address (SONAs). Supporting this assumption is the theory of Deictic Expressions by Stephen Levinson. This study is descriptive qualitative. Findings revealed that former President Duterte and President Marcos Jr. used different types of deixis in their speeches. The most dominant type of deixis used by former President Duterte is personal deixis, which obtained the highest frequency, particularly the pronoun "I". In contrast, the most prevalent deixis used by President Marcos is "personal deixis", particularly the pronoun "we". It is concluded that personal deixis was the most dominant type of deixis among the five types used by the two speakers in their speeches. Future researchers are encouraged to conduct a future study that will focus on the usage of deixis in books or speeches.

Compared to English varieties spoken in the inner circle (e.g., Australian English and New Zealand English), the English variety spoken in Indonesia, especially in acoustic phonetics, is still understudied. Using the Praat computer program, this acoustic study investigates the English vowel production of fifteen Indonesian females and males. The formants (F1 and F2) of their English vowel in words heed /hid/, hid /hɪd/, head /hɛd/, had /æ/, hod /hɑd/, hawed /hɔd/, hood /hʊd/, who’d /hud/, hud /hʌd/, and heard /hɝd/ are measured and then compared with the vowels produced by American English speakers. Regardless of the speakers’ gender and English skill levels, the vowels [æ] and [ɑ] show the most significant differences between Indonesian and American English speakers. The difference in this study is conditioned more by linguistic factors, i.e., phonetics and phonemics, than by non-linguistic factors, i.e., gender and English skill level. The findings of this study offer a discussion of how acoustic evidence resulting from language education may shed light on possible language contact situations.

The article examined the quality of the translation of the hymn “Sweet Hour of Prayer” (1845) into the Indonesian lyric “Inilah Jam Ku Berdoa”. The study used a qualitative method with an inductive orientation. The primary data were collected from the American Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal (1985) and the Indonesian hymnal Lagu Sion (2013). The secondary data were obtained from books and articles about Translation Quality Assessment (TQA), systemic functional linguistics, and SDA hymnody. House’s TQA model was implemented by assessing overt and covert translation errors and by analyzing the profiles of the source and target texts. It was found that the textual profile and function of the target text (TT) do not match those of the source text (ST). Furthermore, it was discovered that the translation of “Sweet Hour of Prayer” from English to Indonesian was not adequate in quality due to manipulations that reduced the lyric to a covert version.

This conversation on translation theory and practice with Michael Nieto Garcia and a mixed group of State University of New York (SUNY) students took place on 29 October 2019 at the Potsdam campus in New York State. The talk/interview was conducted by the invitation of Professor Richard M. Henry for his Literature and Translation Studies course (LITR520), and it was supported by the Dorf Yes fund at SUNY Potsdam. Some additions were made to the interview transcript to provide explanatory context and to articulate key points. A concluding thoughts section was added to summarize some translation takeaways.

The recent (2014) inauguration of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a reconstruction of an archetypal Jacobean indoor playhouse, on London’s Southbank, has led students and scholars of early modern theatre once again to focus attention on original playhouse performances, just as they did when its older sibling Shakespeare’s Globe opened its doors in 1996. The earlier assumption that the differences between open-air amphitheatres and indoor playhouses conditioned the way plays were written and acted is now enjoying a new lease on life, and yet there has been little research conducted in order to substantiate this otherwise perfectly logical intuition. Drawing on the insights of drama theorist Manfred Pfister as well as the linguistic concept of deixis, this article compares the language and plotting of three plays by the Jacobean playwright John Webster: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi and The Devil’s Law Case. Each play was first staged under significantly different circumstances within the theatrical landscape of Jacobean London, which makes them a singularly illustrative case study of how an early modern English dramatist adapted his style in order to meet the demands of the city’s diverse performance conditions.

Unmarried mothers and children born out of wedlock are notoriously absent from the Carolean stage, which, on the other hand, saw an abundance of rakish gallants and prostitutes populating sexually charged plots. It is not a coincidence that the only two plays premiered between the 1660s and 1700 featuring an unmarried woman with a live child come up precisely with the arrival of William and Mary. This paper analyses the ways in which these plays—The Squire of Alsatia (1688) by Thomas Shadwell, and The Marriage-Hater Matched (1692) by Thomas Durfey—use the unmarried mother to convey a moral message that echoed William and Mary’s project of moral reform. However, these women are portrayed in radically different ways in both comedies. Although she takes a customary position of scorn in The Squire, the unmarried mother gets to be a good-hearted heroine that is eventually redeemed in The Marriage-Hater, a very challenging position for Durfey to portray which required of intra and extra textual devices to support her redemption without appearing to condone vice.

The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s highly political magnum opus, is concerned with the struggle of its heroine against the overarching Puritan patriarchy, and relates her resistance, denial and finally her reconciliation with the society that had outcast and defamed her. This paper examines the religious transformation in The Scarlet Letter, particularly in its protagonist, Hester Prynne according to the dialectic of subversion and containment. While the Puritan society condemns her acts, Hester subverts aspects of this religious theocracy and contains them in a new light. These points of subversion and containment are the critical focus of this study, as espoused by new historicist Stephen Greenblatt and cultural materialist Jonathan Dollimore. Hester’s subversions include her resilience against the presumption that she has committed a sin, the consecration of her own actions, criticism of predestination and doctrine of grace. Alternatively, her containments present the reader with an alternative political vision that embraces freedom of conscience and individual religion of the heart. Ultimately, this essay argues that Hester, by the end of the tale, displaces the Puritan theocracy and envisions a secular society in which a privatized sphere of activity is granted to individuals to exercise their political and religious liberties.

This paper highlights formal and thematic expressions of discursive conflicts in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. It focuses on Hawthorne’s use of the “dialectical sentence,” a type of sentence attributed to German dialectical thinkers, principally Theodor Adorno. Voicing two contradictory views in the same breath, the dialectical sentence provides formal expression of irresolvable discursive conflicts. Hawthorne’s dialectical sentence serves as a suitable medium for expressing the conflict of interests between the Pyncheon and Maule families. The discursive conflicts are expressed through a set of binary terms, including Pyncheon/Maule, novel/romance, present/past, reason/rumor and science/ superstition. The first term in each binary usually serves for the Pyncheons and the second, the Maules. Thus, expressed in dialectical sentences, the narrative voice oscillates between an irony which reflects the values of the former family and an enthusiasm which reflects those of the latter. Coming down firmly on neither side of the conflict, and through avoiding reconciliation, the novel takes on a dialectical structure which keeps the resolution of the discursive conflicts, as a utopian element, for a time outside the novel’s timeframe.

This article examines how women’s ornithological literature facilitated their participation in scientific research and political activism in the nineteenth century. Despite the many confining associations between women and birdcage imagery in Victorian culture, female involvement in the observation of birds was instrumental in the period’s transferring of women’s activity from the private to the public sphere in Britain, the United States and colonial South Africa. By focusing on birdwatching as an early form of what Alan Irwin defines as citizen science (1995), it is possible to explore how women’s ornithological nature writing encouraged environmental advocacy, thus fomenting female autonomous expression in the male-dominated field of natural history. The texts analysed here therefore anticipated ecofeminist approaches to avifauna, allowing for women’s subversive excursions into nature which dissolved the restrictions of the normative ‘angel in the house’.

In 1953 there was a projected collaboration between Dylan Thomas and Igor Stravinsky: an opera whose libretto was to be written by the poet and set to music by the composer. Unfortunately, due to Thomas’s death that same year, this plan never materialised. The aim of this article is to offer a detailed exploration of the context within which this project originated and what it entailed for the poet, especially in relation to the direction where Thomas’s work was taking him before his death. The opera with Stravinsky could have been the culmination of the poet’s work inasmuch as it brought together his love of sound, rhythm and music, the horror of the war, his fascination with language and the near-extinction of human life. Moreover, the artists were able to exchange a series of letters before Thomas’s death. The second contribution of our article is the publication of Stravinsky’s letters to Thomas, which have not been previously published. Whilst the narrative of their encounters and relationship has been shaped in certain ways by different writers, a close examination of the primary source materials—the accounts of friends, the content of the letters and the circumstances in which they were written help shed light on this highly promising, but uncompleted, project.

This article engages with noise studies to foreground their importance in the perception and the creation of the Other in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind. The essay draws from Michel Serres’s The Parasite and Marie Thompson’s Beyond Unwanted Sound to contend that the pair sound/noise structures the characters’ response to difference and alterity. While initially pitting sound vs noise and English vs Spanish, the article shows how those pairs are impossible to maintain as the novel moves from the Other as noise to the self as noise. Although initially associated to the externality and vulnerability attributed to a Spanish-speaking woman stranded by the side of the road, noise becomes center stage, a parasitic presence that restructures reality and creates a void in signification. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the errantry of noise dismantles protocols of ordering and labeling and creates new configurations of power. There is no longer self vs Other, inside vs outside, belonging vs non-belonging as noise spreads vulnerability and relationality.

The aim of this article is to determine why the prototypical form of high/epic fantasy cannot effectively address the present environmental, social and political problems gathered under the umbrella term of the Anthropocene. Drawing on Marek Oziewicz’s concept of planetarianist fantasy and scholarship on the Anthropocene, as well as on examples of selected fantasy series (J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry, and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time), this article investigates the sub-genre’s most persistent components and juxtaposes them against issues related to ethnicity, species interconnectedness, non-human agency, sustained urban development and urban ethics which are raised by Anthropocene debates. This analysis will illustrate why the form of high/epic fantasy requires reconfiguration so that it can continue to evolve together with the needs of contemporary readers.

The use of pronouns shows the author’s intention to address the reading public or the presence of the target readership in texts. This paper focuses on second-person pronouns, which are especially revealing of the author`s desire to engage the reader by endowing on them an active role in the negotiation and construction of knowledge. For the same reason, we will also analyse the use of the word reader. Science writing is thus understood as a dialogue between the two groups of participants involved in knowledge creation. Two usages of you have been detected in previous works using the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC): general and dialogic. The former might be interpreted as a generic “one,” “everybody;” the latter, considered as an in-group strategy that embraces both the writer and the reader. The detailed analysis of the pragmatics of the second person pronouns and reader in Corpus of English Chemistry Texts (CEChET) and Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT) will hopefully shed some light on the object-centred nature of scientific writing.

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of English animal-related terms used figuratively with reference to types of parenting. To be more precise, we make an attempt to investigate the scope of the conceptual metaphor PARENTS ARE ANIMALS. What ignited our interest was the ubiquity of linguistic metaphors featuring animal terms employed with reference to types of parenting present in everyday language, thus we have decided to delve into what types of animals are typical source domains in metaphors of this type. The methodology adopted is the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, originally proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and further developed in numerous subsequent publications, especially those by Kövecses (2003, 2005, 2010, 2015, 2017a, 2017b). Our results are supported by evidence from the online Corpus of Contemporary American English and News on the Web Corpus, which may be said to corroborate not only the conceptual nature of metaphors as such, but also their impact on social cognition.

The linguistic aspects of Alzheimer’s disease have received much less attention from qualitative viewpoints than from quantitative research perspectives. For this reason, the present article proposes the application of the linking algorithm provided by Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) to a corpus from English-speaking patients with Alzheimer’s, namely the Pitt corpus. A sample of verb predicates from this corpus has been analyzed according to the steps provided by the grammar. Thus, the aims of this article are, on the one hand, to identify and describe the linguistic deficits found in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease and, on the other, to show the feasibility of this grammar in the description and possible early diagnosis of this neuro-degenerative disease. The results manifest a greater proportion of simple sentences with respect to coordinate, cosubordinate and subordinate sentences, as well as compensation strategies and problems with lexical retrieval.

Speakers can project different personae when engaging in stylistic practices, which can be characterised by a consistent or variable use of linguistic features. This becomes relevant when addressing how politicians attempt to position themselves in communicative interactions through their use of language. The present study takes a third wave approach to the analysis of Donald Trump’s sociolinguistic behaviour across various speech events by focusing on the indexical mutability of PRICE/PRIZE and R-Dropping. The results evidence intra-speaker variation in Trump’s populist speech style used for interactional and political purposes in that he alters his use of + mainstream and non-mainstream forms as he operates across speech events. Thus, Trump exhibits a different sociolinguistic performance across different contexts, where he also takes a different approach towards the management and projection of his public persona, and therefore, transmits different social meanings through his language use. The results further suggest that the context, format and audience of the political event and the social meanings indexed by the selected linguistic features are what condition Trump’s sociolinguistic behaviour. We conclude that Trump’s speech style is characterised by the meaningful choices he makes about the linguistic resource to be used in a specific context and its corresponding social meaning.

This study aims to take a usage–based constructionist approach to observing the emergence of constructions in L2 speakers of English from a bird’s eye perspective and aligns some of them with CEFR levels. To do this, five equally balanced subparts from the EFCAMDAT corpus were compiled and analyzed using TAASSC and SPSS. The findings present strong evidence for and confirm previous studies that speakers at lower proficiency levels use fixed or prototypical expressions and do not deviate as much from conventional ways of combining constructions, i.e., collexemes. As proficiency increases, their constructicon gets lexicogrammatically richer and less prototypical, as such prototypical examples serves as training wheels for further expansion. While there seems to be evidence for low–frequency constructions to follow a developmental path through CEFR levels, high–frequency constructions do not seem to follow this path. In the end, the study presents a set of constructions aligned for each CEFR level, which appears to be in line with the characteristics of CEFR levels described at englishprofile.org.

The first article details an endeavour to answer the call for all educators to promote sustainability. Brock’s paper outlines a teacher education sequence in an English course at a Swedish university. The four activities illustrated aimed for sustainability competence through picturebooks.

The focus of this study was to examine the peritextual information as well as the insider/outsider status of the book creators of Chinese and Chinese American nonfiction picturebooks, aiming to evaluate the authentic quality of multicultural nonfiction picturebooks.

The authors detail an action research project in a Swiss school around the graphic novel adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s Stormbreaker. The project provided language learners with opportunities to show their potential through their own creative adaptations of the spy story.

This report describes a study conducted in a 9th grade English class, which addresses how literary texts about the First World War opened spaces for the life skills of critical thinking and empathy in an English language classroom in a lower secondary school in Norway.

With the help of Chris Wormell’s picturebook, The Big Ugly Monster and the Little Stone Rabbit, this contribution illustrates how drama can be combined with text-based generative AI tools to benefit young English learners’ critical AI literacy development.

Jocelyn Wright reviews "Rehumanizing the Language Curriculum", edited by Megan Echevarría (2023).

Introduced by Alyssa Lowery, the chosen recommended reads comprise of narratives that sensitively bear witness to the historical and contemporary tragedies that affect millions while fulfilling the societal expectation that children’s literature must offer optimism and hope.

English is a critical subject at every stage of the Nigerian educational system, so it is imperative to guarantee success that corresponds with the substantial resources and time invested in teaching and studying. This research looked at the influence of teachers' attributes on using resources to teach English grammar in English by adopting a descriptive survey research design. All English language instructors employed in public and private secondary schools in Ilorin were the subject of this investigation. This study’s sample comprised 268 English language instructors. A questionnaire created by the researchers was utilized. The data gathered was subjected to reliability assessment using Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation (PPMC). There was a 0.81 correlation coefficient. Mean and percentage were chosen to respond to the study questions posed. The One-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and the independent t-test were used to evaluate the generated hypotheses at the 0.05 significant level. The results show that the most regularly utilized resources for teaching English grammar were print materials and textbooks, audiovisual aids, models and manipulatives, and digital technologies. It was recommended that curriculum designers continue to promote more realistically oriented materials, as this will help to engage students more and support the efforts of teachers.

Empirical studies revealed the EFL students’ writing problems, such as incomplete paragraph development and conjugation accuracy. These problems affected the overall text coherence. These problems have inspired teacher researchers to investigate alternative instructional techniques to improve the flow of ideas and conjugation accuracy of EFL students' paragraphs. This current research aims to investigate mood and paragraph structure analysis effectiveness to develop the conjugation accuracy and flow of ideas fluency in EFL students' paragraphs. This study followed an experimental design utilizing control and experimental groups. The research subjects comprised 30 2nd-year undergraduate EFL learners who were at an intermediate level of English proficiency. Data for this research were collected using multiple methods, including tests, documentation, and interviews. The research results revealed that mood analysis and paragraph-structure analysis were effective techniques for improving the conjugation accuracy and idea flow fluency of EFL students' writing. Thus, it is recommended that mood and paragraph structure analyses be alternative techniques to teach paragraph writing.

This research aims to examine the relationship between banking sector development and economic growth in Albania, focusing on specific indicators such as bank capital to asset ratio, non-performing loans, credit to the private sector, deposit money bank assets to GDP, inflation rate, and GDP growth. The study is grounded in the finance-growth nexus theory, which posits that financial development fosters economic growth through improved capital accumulation and resource allocation. The framework considers how banking sector health influences macroeconomic stability and growth. The research employs a quantitative approach using secondary data from credible sources such as the World Bank. The econometric model assesses the impact of banking sector indicators on economic growth in Albania over the period 2012-2021. Findings confirm that banking sector development significantly impacts economic growth in Albania. High levels of non-performing loans hinder growth, while enhanced credit to the private sector and robust bank capital ratios promote economic development. Policymakers should focus on reducing non-performing loans and strengthening the banking sector’s capital base to foster sustainable economic growth. Effective financial regulations and policies are crucial to ensuring a stable and efficient banking sector that can support long-term economic prosperity in Albania.

The correlation between the writing and speaking abilities of students at SMP Muhammadiyah 2 Pekanbaru in recount text was the primary focus of this research. The purpose of this study was to determine the significance of the relationship between students' writing and speaking abilities in English recount texts. This study used quantitative methods. The subjects in this study are the SMP Muhammadiyah 2 Pekanbaru class IX students for the academic year 2023. The whole class IX of SMP Muhammadiyah 2 Pekanbaru becomes the sample for this study, which adopts total sampling technique. used two tests: a speaking and writing test on recount text. The findings indicated that students' writing got low score of 50 and a high score of 95. In contrast, the maximum score for students' recount text speaking ability was 90, while the lowest score was 50. Moreover, correlation coefficient found that students' writing and students' speaking abilities in recount text have a positive correlation, and the correlation between those variables were high. The study recommended that students should do more practice in writing to make them more understandable and able to construct a good sentence. Besides that, the students should practice speaking every time to improve their speaking.

• This paper deals with usage of English borrowing words in Iraqi Arabic dialect as one of the linguistic phenomena that we are currently experiencing due to globalization and the use of English language as a global Language. This study focused on limited borrowing words that are used while conversation used by indirect interview. The study aims to clarify the relationship between the use of words in English and Arabic Language and how there is an impact between these two Languages. The study also aims to use most common words in Iraqi accent Arabic borrowed from English Language. The study further concluded that borrowing allows the recipient language to expend its vocabulary. However, the borrowing from any donor language have to undergo certain processes to make them fit appropriately into the recipient language. This study also deals with the borrowing English words that has penetrated the Iraqi Arabic Language during the past few decades. The process of borrowing from English language took place indirectly due to trade, education, etc., and this brings new words to Arabic Language. The study is based on an analysis through conversation in English activity. The researcher found that there are words taken from English language, but not exactly like English in pronunciation or spelling because of alphabet between two languages and also the influence of mother tongue on language, and this led to a change in pronunciation.

Technology is currently developing rapidly, all elements including the world of education are also experiencing this development. There is no doubt that digital-based technology has been enjoyed by educators and students in school learning as an information medium for exploring knowledge. This study is aimed to identify the students’ perception towards digital literacy. This research used quantitative with survey approach. The instrumen of this research is questionnaire. Questionnaire was distributed to the students by google form. In other words, the results of this research are students’ perception of digital literacy can be categorized moderate level with score 2,94. It can be concluded that the internet is a very important for students, especially for searching information and doing school assignments. The implication of this research that considering the importance of the internet for students, there needs to be education about online security, privacy and ethics of internet use so that students can be wiser in searching for information.

Studying at postgraduate level always requires learners to do a large amount of reading for some certain academic purposes. This becomes more notable when reading must be done in a strictly limited amount of time. On this account, postgraduate students must come up with particular strategies for reading. Thus, from the critical thinking perspective, the current study was conducted to investigate the M.A. English majors’ use of reading strategies, especially critical reading skills. Through questionnaire and interview, data for analysis were collected from 30 M.A. students of English and five lecturers of English, who already completed their postgraduate program, at Thu Dau Mot University. The results showed that the participants could employ skimming and scanning. However, they seemed to be passive in evaluating sources and did not pay much attention to note-taking skills, which are considered really necessary in writing literature review for a research paper or a thesis. The findings suggest that critical reading skills should be taught at the beginning of the course in order to help M.A. students develop their critical reading skills and support them in doing their mini research projects.

Game-based learning (GBL) is an innovative approach that involves students in identifying game elements that are relevant to the context set by the teacher. This method has proven to be effective and increasingly relevant in educational settings. This study aims to explore secondary EFL students' perceptions towards the use of Game-based learning (GBL) in secondary schools, using a descriptive qualitative research design. The main focus of this study was to investigate how Game-based learning (GBL) can effectively increase student engagement and motivation. The results showed that Game-based learning (GBL) not only serves as a learning support tool, but also promotes improved learning outcomes as well as develops students' adaptability. Based on these findings, some recommendations for the implementation of Game-based learning (GBL) in the context of secondary education are proposed, hoping to enrich future teaching strategies. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the potential of Game-based learning (GBL) in education.

This research aims to find out EFL tertiary students’ challenges and strategies in learning news anchoring in speaking class. Data were collected through two instruments including test and questionnaire with 24 participants taken as sample through purposive sampling technique. Test was used as instrument to categorize the sample into 8 high achievers, 8 middle achievers, and 8 low achievers. The research was a kind of descriptive research using Walizer’s (1990) formula to analyze the five-likert scaled questionnaire and the data were interpreted using descriptive quantitative method of analysis. The findings of the research revealed that the EFL tertiary students faced four challenges in learning news anchoring such as challenges in pronouncing some technical terms, challenges in speaking fast like a news anchor, challenges in memorizing the news script, and challenges in delivering news with news anchor-like intonation. Furthermore, the findings of the research also found six strategies mostly used by the students in learning news anchoring such as practising frequently alone at home, watching the news anchor video shared by the lecturer in the class, imitating the lecturer’s example of performing news anchor in the class, learning from lecturer’s explanation, watching news anchor on television and watching news anchor video on Youtube. Since high achievers were found to use more than one strategy in learning news anchoring, the present research recommended the students to use more than one strategy to succeed in learning to be news anchor in speaking class.

Vocabulary mastery is crucial for facilitating the acquisition of language skills. This research aims to identify students' difficulties with vocabulary mastery in English Language Education at the university level. A quantitative research approach was used, focusing on first-semester students in Class A as the research sample and Class B for test trials. The sample consisted of 33 students (13 males and 20 females) from the English Language Education program at FKIP Universitas Islam Riau. The study employed a vocabulary test in multiple-choice format, and simple purposive sampling was used to distribute the test. The test link was shared via the class chairman, and SPSS version 25 was used for data analysis. The research identified students' difficulties in vocabulary mastery through their test results. The results indicated an average student score of 69, categorized as "Good." Specifically, 3 students scored between 86 and 100 ("Excellent"), 16 students scored between 66 and 85 ("Good"), 11 students scored between 46 and 65 ("Fair"), and 3 students scored between 26 and 45 ("Poor"). Thus, most students performed in the "Good" range on the vocabulary test. The analysis revealed that students faced significant difficulties with prepositions, verbs, and pronouns. In contrast, nouns and conjunctions were less challenging for students. Among the vocabulary areas, prepositions were particularly difficult for students, indicating that questions involving prepositions were the most challenging.

An introduction to the special issue from our guest editors.

The Massacre at Paris. Marlowe brought the horrors of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre onto the London stage in 1593 at a time when England was facing a threat of invasion from the expansionist powers of Europe. The Massacre at Paris demonstrates vividly what was at stake if such an invasion were to be successful: Protestantism in England would face an existential crisis, just as it had done in France in 1572. While previous critics have focused on Guise’s representation in the play, this article examines the character of Navarre because in the early 1590s Henri IV was key to England’s defence, but he was a controversial figure who divided the international Protestant alliance. As a result, many of its members refused to provide the French King with the military and financial support he required to fight the Catholic League. To reflect his divisive nature, Marlowe portrays Navarre in an ambiguous light in The Massacre at Paris and thus raises questions about whether the historical Henri IV and the Huguenot nobility had the qualities necessary to defend England and the future of Protestantism. This article will investigate how Marlowe exploited contemporary anxieties about the Huguenot leadership by highlighting their failings during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. By raising the spectre of the Massacre, Marlowe forced his audience to confront the terrifying question of whether England’s principal ally would be strong and trustworthy enough to keep the extremist Catholics from the English coast, or whether he would leave them to be slaughtered like the Huguenots in Paris.