Prasa mniejszości niemieckiej była w okresie II Rzeczypospolitej dość zróżnicowana, o czym świadczą liczne publikacje, choćby autorstwa Tadeusza Kowalska czy Wiesławy Kaszubiny. Sytuację taką można by wytłumaczyć faktem, iż ludność niemiecka, zróżnicowana pod względem społecznym, wyróżniała się znacznie wyższym niż przeciętny dla całego kraju poziomem świadomości czytelniczej. Znamienną cechą prasy niemieckiej była duża liczba gazet o charakterze politycznym, wśród których znajdowały się pisma o kierunku nacjonalistycznym, socjalistycznym oraz ugodowym. Na uwagę zasługują tu takie tytuły, jak: Lodzer Freie Presse, Lodzer Volkszeitung, (...) Neue Lodzer Zeitung, Der Deutsche Weg, Deutscher Volksbote czy Der Deutsche Wegweiser. Obok prasy politycznej ważne miejsce zajmowały wydawnictwa o charakterze wyznaniowym, które w wielu wypadkach miały za zadanie uzupełniać określone treści polityczne. W dalszej kolejności, również dużą popularnością wśród mniejszości niemieckiej w Łodzi cieszyła się prasa związków zawodowych, gospodarcza oraz kulturalno-oświatowa. Prasę dla kobiet, dzieci i młodzieży reprezentowały natomiast takie tytuły, jak: Jugendruf, Kinderfreund, Die Jugendwarte, Praktischer Vereinsleiter, Zeitschrift Jur Christliche Jugendführung. Zjawiskiem towarzyszącym rozwojowi prasy okresu międzywojennego - zarówno polskiej, jak i mniejszościowej - była trudna sytuacja finansowa wielu pism, które w wielu wypadkach przybrały charakter efemerydalny. Na brak środków nie narzekały natomiast gazety, takie jak narodowosocjalistyczna Freie Presse czy Der Deutsche Weg, które mogły liczyć na pomoc z Rzeszy. Były one redagowane na dość dobrym poziome, prowadziły stałe rubryki, jak wiadomości polityczne z kraju i ze świata, informacje lokalne czy sport, poza tym drukowały powieści w odcinkach, felietony oraz dodatki, mające rozszerzyć ofertę i zapewnić rozrywkę swojemu czytelnikowi. Również prasa ugodowa, reprezentowana przez dziennik Neue Lodzer Zeitung, oraz socjalistyczna, Die Volkszeitung, nie ustępowała swym poziomem innym gazetom łódzkim. (shrink)

This paper aims at highlighting the role of higher education institutions in Lodz in the regeneration of urban space and in building the international brand of a university town. Higher education institutions in Lodz are managers and administrators of many historic buildings that testify to the identity of the city and its rich historic legacy. Besides renovating these buildings, universities provide them with new functions by opening them up to local and international communities. Innovation in regenerating cultural heritage (...) may become a distinguishing feature of both Lodz universities and international city’s brand strategy. The key challenge to Lodz is to complete the global regeneration of a post-industrial city in social, cultural, economic, and spatial dimensions using EU funds. (shrink)

The book is addressed to all readers interested in cognitive science, and especially in research combining a logical analysis with psychological, linguistic and neurobiological approaches. The publication is the result of a collaboration between the Department of Cognitive Science at University of Lodz and the Department of Cognitive Science at Lund University. It is intended to provide a comprehensive presentation of the key research issues undertaken in both Departments, including considerations on meaning, natural language and reasoning, linguistic as well (...) as numerical competence, the theory of decision making, modelling of conceptual representations, cognitive and game theoretic approach to social interactions. (shrink)

The goal of the article is to compare methods of financing ARs and ERs based on the data from the 1st half of 2013 and 1st half of 2014 from the K. Jonscher 3rd Municipal Hospital in Lodz. All the stays in the AR/ER in the 1st half of 2013 and the 1st half of 2014 were analysed. Based on the presented data, it can be clearly seen that the new method of financing AR/ER services proposed by the NFZ (...) will beyond doubt have negative outcomes, and will certainly not improve the financial situation of hospitals. (shrink)

The article discusses the history of academic co-operation between the British and Commonwealth Studies Department at the University of Lodz and the Australian Embassy in Poland. Over the years the co-operation took the shape of a regular academic exchange and led to substantial academic, educational and cultural projects on Australia which resulted in a number of book-length studies.

The information about patients being murdered by Lodz ambulance doctors using pancuronium bromide , published in the Gazeta Wyborcza,1 was repeated in the international press—for example, in the British Medical Journal.2 The account of a Gazeta Wyborcza reporter who had been working as an undercover stretcher bearer and witnessed the reported events, does not prove that any murder was committed. It was the media that presented the information in a negative light. So far the police have not charged anybody (...) with murder. The ambulance workers and doctors who were selling information about the dead to funeral parlours have been detained.Although it has not been proved that any patients were murdered in Lodz, the way the matter was treated by the media could lead one …. (shrink)

In view of the subsequent career of the leading Lutheran theologian Paul Althaus, the student letters reproduced here obtain considerable biographical weight: 1913 doctorate in Göttingen, 1914 habilitated and a privatdozent, during the war an volunteer orderly, then a hospital and provincial pastor in Lodz, 1919–1924 Professor in Rostock, 1924–1966 Professor of systematic theology and New Testament exegesis in Erlangen. Althaus' letters shed light on the family and confessional traditions in which he originated, just as they do on his (...) connections with a fervent church as well as a national and patriotic life. In addition, they illustrate the outstanding powers of observation and formulation as well as the intelligence and wide interests of the young student, all qualities of importance for his later career. In addition, the student letters of the 18–19 year old Paul Althaus describe the conditions of studying in Tübingen a hundred years ago. The professors then instructing there, among them, especially Adolf Schlatter, are also vividly described in their various roles, just as the letters richly narrate aspects of the general conduct of studies, life in fraternities – Althaus was active in the Nicaren, a non-duelling Christian association – as well as the many student rambles through the woods. (shrink)

Impoliteness in student emails to faculty can have negative consequences. However, the nuances of perceived impoliteness by faculty with different language backgrounds have not been thoroughly studied in the literature. This paper explores how emails written by non-native English-speaking students are perceived impolite by faculty depending on social identity variables such as native speaker status, gender, and seniority. Participants read six emails and rated their perceptions of the emails on a questionnaire. The items on the questionnaire were about lack of (...) face enhancement, use of face threat, acknowledgment of imposition, and not giving a choice in complying with requests. Results suggest that in their perceptions of the lack of face enhancement, senior faculty seemed to be more tolerant than their junior counterparts. Further, non-native speakers of English were found to be more tolerant of the lack of acknowledgment of imposition. However, no significant association was observed between the social identity of the faculty and their perception of face threat nor between social identity and giving a choice in complying with requests. The paper has implications for raising the awareness of the faculty and students about their potential biases in academic correspondence. (shrink)

Supplements to German newspapers in Lodz in the interwar period promoted an extremely modern type of woman, in line with the latest world trends. German magazines „Die Welt im Bilde. Sonntagsbeilage zur Neuen Lodzer Zeitung” and „Illustrierte Wochenblatt. Beilage zur Neuen Lodzer Zeitung” registered changes in lifestyle and propagated them among Lodz readers. The fashion promoted by Lodz accessories and lifestyle did not differ in any way from the latest European and world models. It was an expression (...) of striving for modernity, for changing the way of thinking not only about women, but about the whole society. Introducing modern ideas into magazines resulted in the dissolution of old and obsolete forms. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Beitrag ist als ein Versuch zu verstehen, dem polnischen Leser eine recht seltsame Position aus der Reihe der deutschsprachigen Lodzaica, nämlich die 1913 im Verlag August Grüning in Pabianice herausgegebene Sammlung von Witzen und Anekdoten mit dem Titel 'Ne Mütze voll Witze aus Lodz und Pabianice’, näherzubringen. Der Verfasser des schmalen Bändchens, der sich hinter dem Pseudonym Wilfried Spectator verbirgt, ist Reinhold Piel, ein Deutscher aus Pabianice. Als Satelitenstadt von Łódź, der sich damals sehr rasch entwickelnden Textilmetropole, (...) bildete auch Pabianice in jenen Jahren zweifelsohne ein Teil des in ganz Europa einmaligen und eigenartigen multikulturellen und multiethnischen Tigcls. Reinhold Piel stellte sich mit seinem Büchlein die Aufgabe, ein Sammelporträt der Mentalität des typischen Vertreters jenes Tigels von Kulturen und Sprachen zu zeichnen. In der mehrere disparate Elemente integrierenden Gemeinschaft funktionierte der Humor sicherlich als eine Art Sicherheitsventil, mit dessen Hilfe man bestrebt war, Fremdes zu „zähmen“ und Konflikte zu entschärfen. Scheinbar abstrakte, „auslachende“ Beispiele haben sich wahrscheinlich ebenfalls vortrefflich als Methode bewährt, andere diplomatisch zu sensibilisieren, aber auch eigene Nachteile und Unzulänglichkeiten mit Abstand zu sehen. Der universale Charakter der Anekdote als literarisches Genre beruht u.a. auf ihrer Ahistorizität und Konkretheit zugleich, ihr narratives Werkzeug hingegen - die individualisierte Sprache des multiethnischen Milieus - liefert hervorragenden StolT für sprachwissenschaftliche Forschung. Ein besonders interessanter Aspekt ist dabei vor allem die Frage nach der Übersetzbarkeit bzw. Unübersetzbarkeit von Kulturidiomatik. Um dem Leser entgegenzukommen und ihm den historischen und informativen Wert der besprochenen Sammlung bewusst zu machen, wird im Anhang - zum ersten Mal in der polnischen Sprache - eine Auswahl von besonders charakteristischen Witzen der genannten Sammlung von R. Piel präsentiert. (shrink)

Topoi in Critical Discourse Analysis Topos is one of the most widely-used concepts from classical argumentation theory. It found its way not only in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and linguistics; it found its way in everyday life and everyday conversation as well.In this article, I will examine the role that topoi play in Critical Discourse Analysis. Starting with definitions from Aristotle and Cicero, contrasting them with new conceptualisations by Perelman and Toulmin, and examining the superficial use of topoi in everyday conversation, (...) I will try to show that Critical Discourse Analysis relies mostly on simplified, unreflected use of topoi as found in everyday use, thus neglecting much more productive, theoretical elaborations of the concept. (shrink)

Research in the fields of pragmatics has highlighted important differences in speech act realisation strategies and the perception of contextual variables across lingua-cultures. This particularly applies for requests, which are potentially face-threating acts and important expressions of cultural behaviour, as their performance is influenced by culturally-embedded perspectives on rights and obligations. Although some languages have been widely investigated in terms of request realisation, such as English, little research has been done on Italian. This study examines request realisation strategies in Italian, (...) in terms of Head Acts and request perspective, and the impact of the sociopragmatic factors of social distance and weight of imposition of the request on strategy choice amongst eight Italian speakers, by means of open-ended roleplays. The data was analysed by using a coding scheme based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain and revealed that the Italian speakers where more influenced by social distance, which in turn impacted on the choice of request perspective. They were shown to prefer using hearer-orientation, which reflected in the verb conjugation of the Head Acts, since this perspective allows them to do relational work with the hearer, by either addressing the recipient with the familiar tu or with the formal lei. (shrink)

Indirect directives in recipes: a cross-linguistic perspective The present paper is intended as a cross-linguistic study of the range of possible realizations of instructional speech acts as a special type of directives, as realized in the domain of cooking recipes. Even a cursory comparison of orders as directive speech acts across languages brings to light an extreme degree of variation concerning their formal realization. While imperatives are virtually the only possibility in English, a contrastive linguistic perspective reveals that other construction (...) types are attested in other languages, instead, or in addition to the imperative. The central goal of the present paper is to shed light on the motives for these intralingual and interlingual similarities. The data from Germanic, Romance, Slavic languages, and Hungarian are analyzed against the background of the speech-act scenario model, and then discussed with the help of two cultural models of HELP, which are claimed to provide the basis for the motivation of the cross-linguistic distribution of various constructions. (shrink)

Pragmatic Tactics in Mediation Mediation is the process by which a neutral third-party works with disputing parties to assist them in reaching an acceptable, voluntary settlement of their dispute. Mediators are often faced with competing demands over and above those of the dispute itself. For example, establishing and maintaining control of the mediation process without appearing to bully the disputants, persuading a party to reexamine it's position without appearing to lose their neutrality, and convincing a party that the present offer (...) of settlement is the best possible, given the circumstances, without appearing to be determined to reach closure at all costs.The present paper examines data from labor, divorce, and community mediations to show how mediators reduce tensions like those mentioned above through various devices such as establishing common ground, reframing the issue, use of metaphorical examples, and reliance on innuendo, ambiguity, and equivocation. (shrink)

This paper is about “othering” in cyberspace. The roots of othering of non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia are seen in the perception of umma as special and superior, therefore automatically categorising “non-believers” as “other”. The in-group and out-group demarcation strategies and consequent marginalisation are considered from both perspectives as bilateral and mutually exclusive. The focus is placed on othering e-space, where marginalised voices can be heard via virtual communication. The effects of virtual reality on real life interaction and resulting involvement in (...) controversial and taboo topics are also discussed. Additionally, some cases of demarginalisation or “de-othering” are described in terms of cyber-verbal expression and exchange of opinions. (shrink)

This study investigates the effect of power and gender of the addressees on the type and number of refusal strategies employed by Sarawani Baloch female university students following Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz’s taxonomy. Employing refusal strategies mostly the same as those in the given classification by SBFUS confirms the universality of applying refusal strategies. However, SBFUS also employed some new strategies not predicted in this scheme, suggesting the effect of their religion and culture. The results also disclose that although power (...) of the addressees significantly affects the type and number of refusal strategies employed by SBFUS, the effect of their gender on these variables is trifling. Negative willingness, ability and a combination of 2 strategies are the most frequent strategies regarding the type and number of refusal strategies. (shrink)

Japan has been facing with paradigm shift necessity in terms of the demographic structure, globalizing business and technology revolution, and as its consequence, also with deficiency of human resources with global literacy. The Japanese government has established a new strategy aiming to develop and foster “Global Human Resources” with high language and communication skills capable for international operations. Analyses of the literature on Japanese sociocultural behavioral characteristics and empirical case studies carried out in Poland with pragmatics approach in this paper (...) reveal that honorifics regarded as a technical layer of interaction management and Japanese habitus consisting of uchi/soto behavioral scheme, unique uchi-codex are causes of interaction failure. These features make Japanese uchi-group ethnocentric and almost impossible for a non-Japanese to assimilate themselves to the uchi-codex. Neither a foreign speaker’s high level of proficiency of the Japanese language nor their good knowledge on Japanese culture itself guarantee successful communication and interaction in the Japanese business sector without their practical ability and endeavors to apply this Japanese behavioral scheme even partially. The whole sociocultural and behavioral discrepancy or this incompatibility of Japanese behavioral scheme to other cultures seems to keep the Japanese away from achieving Human Resources with global literacy. (shrink)

As a part of religious discourse, Christian sermons are a “…persuasive discourse par excellence”. This is more pronounced in the Christian Prosperity Gospel, a system of thought and belief in which preachers The word preacher and speaker are used interchangeably in this paper. attempt to convince audiences to donate to their churches with the expectation that God will reward them with health and wealth. Previous research shows that the use of metaphors and metonymies pervade CPG sermons but an explanation on (...) the mechanisms through which they persuade is rarer. With this in mind and viewing CPG sermons from their persuasive angle; this paper sets out to investigate how metaphors and metonymies are used for persuasion purposes in televised sermons presented in the Gĩkũyũ language Gĩkũyũ is the language of the Agĩkũyũ who are largely found in central Kenya as well as in some other parts of the country. It is a Bantu language classified as a Zone E language by Guthrie. According to the 2019, Population and Housing Census, the gĩkũyũ is the largest tribe in Kenya at 8,148,668 individuals. The community has dominated in televangelism but the position is changing due to the proliferation of many vernacular television stations.. The data is drawn from authentic televised sermons. The findings indicate that metaphors and metonymies engender persuasion in sermons by affecting the perceived altruism and trustworthiness of a speaker in a sermon. This is done by means of manipulating various forms of distance suggested in the Media Proximization Approach. Metaphor is found to affect the axiological, epistemic, temporal and emotional distances while metonymy affects the axiological and spatial distances to activate certain pragmatic presuppositions which make them persuasive in a covert way. (shrink)

Identity has been addressed from diverse perspectives that range from a conceptualisation of it as a pre-existing and static notion to a view that regards it as dynamically constructed in interaction. In this work, we take the latter as the guiding principle for our investigation into the ways in which identity is co-constructed by Argentinian university students in casual conversations. The analysis is carried out on the premise that there is an unquestionable relationship between discourse, identity and social processes. Given (...) the nature of the topic, an eclectic theoretical framework has been employed. An exhaustive examination of the data reveals the different types of identities deployed by the participants, the linguistic resources and the discursive functions used in the negotiation of identities. The analysis also shows that the emerging identities can be heavily conditioned by the topics addressed by the interactants. (shrink)

Conceptual Focus in Social Encounters: the Case of Directives The present analysis focuses on highlighting the conceptual focus on groups as a specific property of discourse in young peer groups of Polish speakers. Its alternative is the conceptual focus on individual interlocutors; the latter is implicitly assumed to be an interactive norm in a vast body of pragmatic studies dealing with the performance of speech acts in both monolingual and comparative setups. The analysis is based on empirical material comprising interaction (...) in young peer groups in Poland, Great Britain and Germany under constant experimental conditions, made possible by the international commercial project "Big Brother" belonging to the genre of reality T.V. (shrink)

Examining the coverage of the 2016 US Presidential election of the highest circulating New Zealand newspaper—the New Zealand Herald (NZH)—this study argues that this newspaper sets agenda against Donald Trump—the Republican Party candidate in the 2016 US election. Examining all news, editorials and photographs published in NZH, it discursively argues that this newspaper overshadowed and dehumanized Trump and especially his leadership ability. The other major candidate—the Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton—was applauded in the coverage. The NZH repeatedly focused upon the (...) activities of Trump through news, views and images to dehumanize him. The repetition, therefore, does not necessarily mean that a particular media outlet favors a particular candidate. It also argues that the media outlet of a distant nation that cannot influence its reader to vote for a particular candidate may still set the agenda in favor of a candidate. (shrink)

Legitimisation and Proximisation Values in the Discourse of Historic Change This methodological-critical paper belongs to the field of pragmaticcognitive discourse analysis. It develops Cap's STA model of legitimisation and investigates various mechanisms legitimising the speaker's actions in political discourse of historic change. Proximisation as the salient feature of the model adds significantly to effectiveness of the speaker's continual attempt to convince the addressee of the rightness of political steps taken. It is a powerful and coercive tool "alerting the addressee [to] (...) the proximity or imminence of phenomena which can be a ‘threat’ to the addressee" located in the deictic centre of a given event or a chain of events. The STA model accounts for the application of a three-dimensional pattern of the phenomenon in question, i.e. spatial, temporal, and axiological proximisation. However, the division does not exhaust the notion's potential, since properties of the dimensions mentioned enable us to classify them according to an extended taxonomic system in which they possess positive, negative, and neutral values. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyse the interplay between a number of legitimisation strategies, present the positive/negative/neutral classification of proximisation, and comment on the nature of the interaction between and potency of the three dimensions and values. These can coexist within the body of one text, as well as within the body of one paragraph and their complementary character strengthens the overall goal of legitimisation providing various stimuli for the addressee to accept the speaker's stance, his decisions and actions, to comply with them, and to undertake actions intended by the speaker. (shrink)

This paper explores the pragmatic routines that occur in clause 2 chaining. It demonstrates that the tense-aspect dependency markers in Toposa texts not only combine chained clauses with an initial clause, but also guide the audience to understand information in texts as foregrounded. The understanding of which information is foregrounded is achieved through pragmatic routines that cut the comprehension process short because of frequently encountered inferential processes occurring in repeatedly accessed contextual environments. The pragmatic routines are explained as part of (...) the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic. It will also be shown how these routines apply to narratives, and procedural texts. (shrink)

While empirical pragmatic research in the Spanish-speaking world has covered most of the Hispanosphere, Central America remains a very underrepresented region. This study serves to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing data collected from eighteen role-plays in Masaya, Nicaragua and Panama City, Panama. In the role-play situation, the interlocutor requests advice from the participant regarding a serious issue in her marriage. The advice-giving strategies are classified according to a categorization adapted from Blum-Kulka’s request strategy taxonomy, allowing for a (...) pragmatic analysis using Spencer-Oatey’s Rapport Management approach. Results indicate strong similarities between participants from Nicaragua and Panama, both electing to respect all components of the association principle and to violate the equity principle, especially its autonomy control component. In this advice-giving context between best friends, both groups prefer to impose their opinions and suggestions rather than respect the person’s right to be treated fairly, as well as to maintain a rapport-enhancing orientation rather than preserve their right to associate with others. The results show similarities with other research on directives in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Venezuela and Spain, cultures typically associated with less mitigation, positive politeness, conventional indirectness and high involvement. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Sinophobia which is usually not expressed openly in the public service media. The Sinophobia discourse intensified in 2020 in connection with the coverage of the pandemic. How are anti-Chinese attitudes expressed in the news discourse of the Czech Radio and Czech Television? Examples from a broader analysis of the representation of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic in news and journalism programmes are given. Inductive qualitative research methods (discourse and semiotic analysis) were used to detect subtle nuances of meaning (...) and reveal implicit presuppositions. This study focuses on the manifestations of bias, e.g., the ideologically grounded attitudes of the speakers. The anti-Chinese statements (about poor hygiene habits and eating wild animals) were most often mentioned in connection with the origin of the coronavirus, vaccination, and China expansive policy. Sinophobic messages were built on the opposition of Us and Them, which is, according to van Dijk (2000), the core of new racism. In spite of the fact that the open hate speech and systematic bias (intentional implications, obvious evaluation or signposting) were not found in the researched sample, the analysis identified the presence of Sinophobic statements in both public service media. (shrink)

This qualitative classroom study investigated the development of pragmatic competence in academic discussions through content analysis of student reflective writing. The aims of the study were: to understand the greatest challenges that students faced during the learning process, the causes of those challenges, and the most successful strategies that students employed to overcome the challenges. In addition, the analysis investigated other significant themes in the reflective writing that related to the students’ experiences in developing their pragmatic competence in discussions. Five (...) advanced English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students at a Sino-US institution in China participated over the course of a semester. Results showed that common challenges included: hesitation resulting in missed opportunities to speak, lack of clarity when speaking, inability to repair communication breakdowns, and difficulty with listening comprehension. Self-reflection allowed the learners to understand the various reasons for the challenges they faced and to develop appropriate pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic strategies for coping with them. It also enabled the instructor to make suggestions suited to learners’ specific needs. In addition to revealing specific challenges, causes, and strategies that students employed, themes that emerged through content analysis included the impact of students’ emotional lives on their learning and performance, as well as the value of authentic communication in the development of pragmatic competence for academic discussions. This exploratory classroom investigation provides suggestions for teaching pragmatic competence in academic discussions and for additional classroom explorations that empower learners to develop autonomy. (shrink)

This paper highlights areas of concern in the assessment of pragmatics, with the intent of stimulating fresh thinking about the assessment of pragmatics both for research purposes and as a part of classroom instruction. It starts by considering what aspects of ability in pragmatics to assess, and then contrasts the trade-off between the feasibility of obtaining data and the ultimate importance of the data. Next, the conspicuous lack of assessment of ability in L2 pragmatics in language classes is noted. Then (...) follow sections on topics all relating primarily to the assessment of pragmatics for research purposes – the use of mixed methods, data elicitation procedures, and norms used in determining the appropriateness of any given performance in pragmatics. The last two topics deal, respectively, with the perceived relevance of the given assessment by the learners and with the value of collecting verbal report data from the respondents as a means for validating the assessment measures. Finally, considerations regarding the most prominent of these issues are provided. (shrink)

The study of pragmatic competence has gained increasing importance within second language assessment over the last three decades. However, its study in L2 language testing is still scarce. The aim of this paper is to research the extent to which pragmatic competence as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has been accommodated in the task descriptions and rating scales of two of the most popular Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) at a C1 level: Cambridge’s Certificate in (...) Advanced English (CAE) and Trinity’s Integrated Skills in English (ISE) III. To carry out this research, OPI tests are first defined, highlighting their differences from L2 pragmatic tests. After pragmatic competence in the CEFR is examined, focusing on the updates in the new descriptors, CAE and ISE III formats, structure and task characteristics are compared, showing that, while the formats and some characteristics are found to differ, the structures and task types are comparable. Finally, we systematically analyse CEFR pragmatic competence in the task skills and rating scale descriptors of both OPIs. The findings show that the task descriptions incorporate mostly aspects of discourse and design competence. Additionally, we find that each OPI is seen to prioritise different aspects of pragmatic competence within their rating scale, with CAE focusing mostly on discourse competence and fluency, and ISE III on functional competence. Our study shows that the tests fail to fully accommodate all aspects of pragmatic competence in the task skills and rating scales, although the aspects they do incorporate follow the CEFR descriptors on pragmatic competence. It also reveals a mismatch between the task competences being tested and the rating scale. To conclude, some research lines are proposed. (shrink)

All human activity including motion is construed mentally with reference to different objects and spatial relations that are relevant (Waliński 2014). Following the work of Talmy (1985, 2000) on categorization of languages on the basis of motion events into verb framed languages and satellite framed languages, this paper addresses the typology of the Tugen language regarding motion events. It takes into consideration the reclassification of the V-languages into equipollent frame and the doubling frame, (Slobin 2003; Croft et al. 2010). Further (...) it explores the hybrid system as expounded by Schröder (2016) on the categorization of V-languages so as to cater for languages that do not fit into the equipollent and the doubling frame. This paper analyses motion events in Tugen, a Kalenjin language belonging to the southern Nilotic cluster. In this analysis, Tugen is seen as both verb framed language and satellite framed as a result of prevalence of deictic directionals and the applicative. The language also bears an associated motion affix which relates simultaneous motion to non-motion events. The associated motion affix renders the motion events to be satellite framed. The occurrence of deictic directionals on motion events that are verb framed can also be taken to be instances of doubling frame. (shrink)

The present paper aims to report on the preliminary findings from the initial stages of ongoing research on hate speech in Lithuanian online comments. Comments are marked strongly by such phenomena as flaming and trolling; therefore, in this genre we can expect a high degree of hostility, obscenity, high incidence of insults and aggressive lexis, which can inflict harm to individuals or organizations. The goal of the current research is thus to make an attempt to identify some features of verbal (...) aggression in Lithuanian by applying the principles and instruments of corpus linguistics, which proved to be a useful approach when dealing with such issues as trolling. It is expected that further analysis of those features will help to identify and define formal linguistic criteria that could facilitate identification of hate speech in public discourse. The data has been obtained from the Lithuanian corpus of user-generated comments collected from one major Lithuanian portal, www.delfi.lt. The corpus consists of all the comments posted in the year 2014 and in total includes 17,909 comments, which make up 1,160,109 words. For the initial data analysis, linguistic aspects, such as wordlists, collocations, and formulaic language, were analysed by using the AntConc software. The interpretations of the results are still very tentative, but what the initial findings show is that overt aggression does not feature among the most frequent and most salient features of comments. Aggression is, in our data, indirectly expressed through creative language use, which can mainly be studied through qualitative analysis. (shrink)

The paper tests conversational Large Language Models, instructed to produce stance expression types (affective, relational, epistemic, and moral) and their contexts in Opinion (Speech) Events (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara, Chaya Liebeskind, Anna Baczkowska, Jurate Ruzaite, Ardita Dylgjeri, Ledia Kazazi & Erika Lombart 2023. Opinion events: Types and opinion markers in English social media discourse. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 19(2). 447–481). In the first part an opinion taxonomy proposed in (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara, Chaya Liebeskind, Anna Baczkowska, Jurate Ruzaite, Ardita Dylgjeri, Ledia Kazazi & (...) Erika Lombart 2023. Opinion events: Types and opinion markers in English social media discourse. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 19(2). 447–481) is discussed in terms of Explicit (direct or indirect) and Implicit opinionated texts, categorized as positive, negative, ambiguous, or balanced. The further part discusses our previous attempts at Explicit (direct/indirect) and Implicit opinion type generation, performed by means of a series of prompts with LLMs (ChatGPT and Gemini) (Liebeskind, Chaya & Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk. 2024a. Opinion identification using a conversational large language model. In FLAIRS conference Proceedings. Florida, Liebeskind, Chaya & Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk. F 2024b. Navigating opinion space: A Study of explicit and implicit opinion generation in language models. Santiago de Compostella: EAIS conference publication), while this paper presents further LLM experiments with chatGPT and Gemini as well as their results, based on the analysis of stance expression types, which lead to increased success in opinion context generation. (shrink)

This article shows how Arab students at an Arab college in Israel, majoring in teaching of mathematics, English, and science, rely on metaphor as an important rhetorical tool for the advancement of their ideological positions and for criticism of the policies of the Israeli government, which discriminates against and disenfranchises Arab Israelis. The underlying hypothesis of the article is that the way Arab students in Israel use metaphor in their writing has unique rhetorical aspects that help to sharpen their message (...) in pursuit of the broader goal of emphasizing Arab Israelis’ suffering and changing for the better the Israeli government’s discriminatory patterns of action against them. (shrink)

Economic migration, international mobility and refugee crises have brought about both risks and opportunities. Alongside the socio-economic and cultural potential to capitalize on they have generated challenges that need to be addressed. In such an increasingly globalized and diverse world, intercultural competences have become strategic resources underpinning the concept of democratic citizenship and social integration. The objectives of the present article are thus two-fold: firstly we want to explore the concept of cultural cognition and highlight the importance of intercultural and (...) diversity awareness, and, secondly, we intend to present and discuss the results of intercultural training sessions for uniformed services conducted within the “Open Lodz” project (Otwarta Łódź POWR.03.01.00-IP.08-00-3MU/18) (2019-2022) coordinated by the University of Lodz in collaboration with the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in Łódź, the Municipal Police, the City of Lodz Office and the City Guard in Łódź. The project was aimed at enhancing foreigners’ quality of life and functioning in Poland. With this goal in view project activities, addressed at two groups of beneficiaries, namely foreign nationals and frontline workers (police, city guard officers, and municipal clerks) focused on improving communication skills (linguistic and cultural competences). (shrink)

Hate speech is a phenomenon which has been in the focus of scholarly interest of linguists, philosophers, sociologists, human-rights advocates, legal and media experts. Much of this interest has been devoted to establishing criteria for identifying what constitutes hate speech across disciplines. In this paper, we argue that hate speech has profiled as a distinct subgenre of the language of politics with typical patterns and ways of addressing which can be recognized in political campaigns across the world. Therefore, we present (...) the findings of the case study of translation exercises of English and Serbian texts containing samples of hateful language during presidential campaigns in the USA and Serbia in 2016 and 2017. Our aim is to identify the linguistico-pragmatic commonalities of hate speech in Serbian and English and examine students’ attitudes towards ethically and morally challenging language contents in their mother tongue and English as their foreign language. The results indicate that in both English and Serbian the same groups are targeted with the hateful language which in both languages uses vulgarisms, taboo words, sexist and chauvinistic declarative expressions to achieve political goals. In addition, L1>L2 and L2>L1 translation data indicate that personal moral and ethical norms in translators are stronger in L1 thus restrictively affecting translational L2>L1 output. (shrink)

The hypothesis of this paper is that writers with similar academic backgrounds express personal attitudes in English and in Spanish differently in research papers. Thus, the main objectives are, first, to study the differences in the use of attitude devices in Spanish and English academic discourse; second, to compare the results in the different sections of articles; and finally to study the positive or negative semantic implications of the lexical items by carrying out a sentiment analysis. To this end, fifteen (...) Spanish industrial engineering papers were compared with fifteen English industrial engineering papers. The results showed that there are in fact differences in the way academic writers communicate attitude, but the sentiment analysis revealed that neutral lexical items were the most commonly used in engineering research papers. Even though engineering researchers share the knowledge of the specialist content and the academic style of expressing their thoughts, personal attitudes were expressed in different ways in Spanish and in English. (shrink)

The article reports on some preliminary findings of an ongoing research initiative investigating the pragmatics of daily interaction, cross-culturally and trans-nationally. Phase one of the initiative looks into the specifics of how cultural differences impact on cultural values, social categories and, ultimately, communicative styles, focusing initially on address forms. More specifically, the article looks into the current status of the ideology-based address form comrade, its pragma-semantic profile and rules governing its usage in post-Communist Eastern-European societies, looking primarily into selected instances (...) of public communication and media language in modern-day Serbia. Having identified and contextualised key usage patterns of the ideology-based forms of address clustering around the title comrade and the set of options associated with it, the article concludes by suggesting future parameters of research. (shrink)

The study aimed to investigate the functional-pragmatic and communicative-pragmatic use of morphological and syntactic diminutive resources of Kazakh and English in the example of artistic contexts. The following methods were used: comparative-comparative, morphological-syntactic, communicative-pragmatic, analytical-synthetic, and contextual. This paper analysed the main morphological and syntactic resources used for word formation of diminutive adjectives in Kazakh and English languages. In particular, the results of the study showed that synthetic means (use of suffixal morphemes with diminutive semantics) and analytical means (use of (...) special lexemes with diminutive semantics) are frequent in Kazakh. It was determined that suffixal morphemes to express the diminutiveness of adjectives were most often used to warn addressees about the properties of objects and phenomena, to soften categorical evaluation in Kazakh, to diminish the attributes of the object, to demonstrate the incompleteness of the attribute in English. This work can be used in the spheres of communicative linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, word formation, and morphology. (shrink)

Starting from the basic premises of Schank's notion of indexing in story telling and the representational approach of language, this paper investigates whether fairy tales create initial indexes for children, that may be re-indexed later in adult life, by reshaping their pre-existing experiences. More specifically, it focuses on the way fairy tales present several concepts already familiar to children, and whether this representation matches children’s pre-existing experiences. The data collected comes from several of Grimm Brothers' fairy tales and consists of (...) a corpus of 62839 word tokens. The fairy tales included were thematically related to general areas of everyday experience: femininity, blackness, whiteness, day, night, being young, ageing. The following semantically contradictory lexical pairs were examined in the expanded concordance, in relation to their collocations and semantic associations: old - young, woman - maiden, day - night, white - black. These were then compared with an adults’ and a children’s dictionary to check whether the collocations, semantic associations of the selected words as portrayed in the data, matched the societally accepted meanings found in dictionaries. The comparison indicated that, although the connotative meanings were included in the majority of denotative meanings that make up words' definitions in the adult dictionary examined, only five of them matched the connotative meanings of the words examined in the data. On the other hand, the way the above concepts/words were presented in the children’s dictionary, was very simple, probably reflecting children’s experiences. It seems, thus, that the concepts - at least some of them - presented in the fairy tales examined, do not “officially” relate to children's but to adults' experiences, functioning as an index that re-shapes children’s pre-existing concepts. (shrink)

Although political discourse is essentially expected to be fact-based and objective, both practice and research show that literal language in political discourse is very often compounded with figurative language. The paper at hand tackles figurative language use in political interviews. For the purposes of this research, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of political interviews given by a former Macedonian female politician – Radmila Shekerinska. The corpus consists of six interviews (with a total duration of about 3 (...) h) in which she answers questions about the political climate and the challenges of North Macedonia in the last couple of decades. The selected interviews are all conducted in English as they are aimed at international audiences and they all fit into the time frame from 2017 to 2021, which practically overlaps with the final years of Shekerinska’s long-standing political career. This study uses a descriptive qualitative research design and focuses, first, on ascertaining the presence of different types of figures of speech in her answers (e.g. metaphors, simile, metonymy, synecdoche, personification, rhetorical questions, idiomatic expressions, proverbs, etc.); then, on identifying the pragmatic functions they perform in the context in which they are used, and finally, on establishing an interface between the figurative language use and the political ideology propagated by this politician. The results point to an extraordinarily resourceful use of a wide spectrum of figurative devices, skillfully intertwined with fact-based political discourse, primarily for addressing highly sensitive political issues, but also for driving important political points home; also, for gaining support from both the domestic and international community regarding the political ideology of this political figure as well as for enhancing the criticism addressed to political adversaries with an additional layer of creative flourish. (shrink)

Mit Feuilleton bezeichnet man entweder ein Ressort in der Zeitung, das sich unter dem sog. Strich befindet, oder eine journalistische Darstellungsform, die in einer kommentierendbeurteilenden Weise verschiedene Ereignisse, vor allem kulturelle, darstellt. Charakteristisch für das Feuilleton als journalistische Darstellungsform ist ein persönlicher Schreibstil, der das Literarische mit einbezieht. Von daher profiliert sich das Feuilleton zwischen Journalismus und Literatur. In der ersten deutsch-polnischen Zeitung in Lodz Łodźer Anzeiger-Łódzkie Ogłoszenia, die im Jahre 1863 erschien, wurden Feuilletons unregelmäßig gedruckt. Anfänglich fanden unter (...) dem Strich, wo das Ressort platziert wurde, in erster Linie Werbung und kleinere Anzeigen ihren Niederschlag. Mit der Zeit veröffentlichte die Zeitung unter dem Strich Fortsetzungsromane, Feuilletons und kurze Erzählungen. Die Zeitungsredaktion machte eine Ausgrenzung zwischen dem polnischen und deutschen Ressort, so dass man verschiedene Texte einem deutschen und polnischen Leser bot. Da der Verleger Johann Petersilge über eine einfache Drucktechnik und keine erfahrenen Journalisten verfügte, waren viele Feuilletons nachgedruckt. Sie hatten einen rudimentären Charakter und ihre Funktion begrenzte sich generell auf Unterhaltung und Aufklärung des Lesepublikums. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the news representation of Liz Truss by the British press, starting from the identification of news values. In addition, our analysis investigates the portrayal of Truss as a gendered social actor. The data were retrieved online through the resource LexisNexis – using the keyword “Truss” in headlines and lead paragraphs in both British broadsheets and tabloids – during three crucial days: 10 July 2022, the day Truss announced her candidacy for the leadership of the Conservative Party (...) and as Prime Minister, 5 September 2022, when she became leader of the Conservative Party and consequently the new Prime Minister, and 20 October 2022, the day she announced her resignation as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister. These data were analysed combining Bednarek’s and Caple’s Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA). Our findings identify the most frequent news values employed by British national newspapers in Truss’ portrayal during the selected timespans and highlight the connection between those values and her gendered representation. (shrink)

Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution The aim of this paper is to put forward a new way of conceiving of the conventionality of illocutionary acts, grounded in a new look at Austin's original ideas. While the indispensability of uptake has correctly been deemed to be a hallmark of illocution, it has also been taken as evidence of the intention-based nature of illocutionary acts as opposed to their alleged conventionality. After discussing the readings of the "securing of uptake" offered by Strawson (...) and Searle and commenting on the consequently established divide between "communicative" and conventional speech acts, I claim that illocutionary acts are conventional, first of all, because they have conventional effects. I show that Austin took such effects to be essential to illocution and argue that the bringing about of conventional effects is bound up with the indispensability of uptake. (shrink)

Vague References to Quantities as a Face-Saving Strategy in Teacher-Student Interaction The main focus of the present paper is to show how vague language categories can function as a face-saving strategy. The observations made in this article are based on the analysis of one category of vague language, that is, quantifiers in British and American spoken academic discourse. The data used for the present investigation have been obtained from two corpora: the sub-corpus of educational events of the British National Corpus (...) and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken Discourse. The results suggest that quantifiers as a face-saving strategy are used when self-criticism or criticism towards others is expressed. They are often employed in apologies, promises, self-justifications, when giving advice and in cases of uncertainty. Both students and teachers use quantifiers in these situations, but in teachers' speech they are of special importance, since teachers, if they want to maintain their authority, are especially conscious of their positive face. Paucal quantifiers especially frequently function as a face-saving device since they have a mitigating effect. The use of quantifiers as mitigators is especially evident in those instances where they occur in negative contexts. Such instances demonstrate that the main difference between the two varieties under investigation is that in BE quantifiers significantly more frequently function as mitigators. Finally, it has been observed that quantifiers frequently occur alongside other means of self-distancing and face-saving in both varieties. (shrink)