Hybrids in the Age of Post-Truth

The article discusses the hallmarks and markers of hybrid discourse in social sciences, media and communication, in education and in politics. Linguistic hybridity was studied in detail by Maria Georgieva in her papers and chapters on globetalk where she provides excellent examples of lexico-semantic and lexico-grammatical mixes. In the age of ‘post-truth’ hybrids are often associated with the instrumental use of disinformation or the ‘weaponisation’ of information. This paper highlights some groups of hybrids from a socio-pragmatic perspective.

Gender Form Usage of the Bulgarian Pronouns by Non-Native Learners

The article presents results from a large-scale study of several grammatical categories that learners of Bulgarian as a foreign language find challenging. The gender forms of the Bulgarian pronouns are discussed and a number of problems they present to non-native learners of the language are elicited via an extensive research programme. A taxonomy of the problems encountered is developed and each error type is amply exemplified. Cases of asymmetrical grammatical forms are explored between Bulgarian and several learner mother tongues.

Staging Gogol’s play Marriage in Bulgaria

The article traces a range of performances staging Gogol’s play Marriage in Bulgaria with a special emphasis on the respective translations into Bulgarian. The theory features translation and adaptation mechanisms specifically applied to cultural realia. The staging in the Sofia Theatre is highlighted. The methodology applied belongs to the framework of cross-cultural communication studies and employs cultural-historic and reception approaches.

The concept of Interlanguage from the perspective of Spanish Applied Linguistics

The article outlines the concept INTERLANGUAGE as developed by Larry Selinker and Pit Corder last century. Defined as a complex system, the phenomenon of Interlanguage needs to be taken into consideration both by specialists in foreign language teaching who research the area of linguistics, and by teachers. Then contributions to the topic by Spanish speaking specialists are described with a view of the specifics of learning Spanish.

Hate Speech or Divisive Language

The article analyses a specialized corpus of texts by a Bulgarian radio host to establish what language items qualify as hate speech. Definitions of hate speech are adapted from the political sphere and given a linguistic dimension within a framework of corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. The concordances of key words in the corpus are searched for labelling, namecalling, denotation-shifting etc.

Thematic and Rhematic Realisations of Key Words in the Functional Sentence Perspective of Texts

The article seeks to account for the way key words are picked up for co-reference and whether they are marked as the theme or rheme in the functional perspective of each sentence. A corpus of articles is analysed from major French media. The co-referential chains of the key words are traced to determine the rhythm of the thematic progression.

Managing Fully Digitalised Foreign Language Teaching

The article summarises major points from the author’s book A Holistic Approach to Computerized Foreign Language Teaching. A review of the motives and the raison-d’etre of the approach is followed by practical solutions to teaching tasks using information and communication technologies.

How Insurmountable a Problem is English Orthography?

The article tackles the issue of English orthography and the challenges it presents to people with various learning disabilities. A range of experiments is reported to elicit the responses of people with dyslexia to specific problems in the traditional system of English spellings. Approaches are put forwards to deal with such challenges both in the ordinary classroom and with people with disabilities. The author urges for more open-mindedness towards the challenge of English orthography.

Text-linguistic Analysis of Infinitival Subjects of Opaque Reference in Modern Italian

The article presents an empirical study of zero-anaphora in co-referential chains – an inscrutable and opaque phenomenon in modern Italian that takes place when the verb bears no number or gender marking due to its form and there is no indication of its actual subject. Methods from text linguistics are applied to corpora compiled from three novels by modern Italian authors.

Preserving the Humour in Puns in Audio-visual translation from Spanish. Practical Solutions

The article reveals specific features of the translation from Spanish to Bulgarian of some comic word games/ puns in the American television series Silvana sin lana, especially those based on polysemy and paronymy, neologisms and certain proper names. Based on the requirements presented in the audio-visual translation, several translation proposals are analysed, including different options for translation compensations aimed at generating the same comic impact on the Bulgarian public as the original version exerts on Spanish-speaking viewers. The results show that this objective, however complicated it may seem, in many cases is achievable, although with certain inevitable losses. Nevertheless, on other occasions the word games have practically disappeared from the target text both for purely linguistic reasons, and because of the limitations of audio-visual translation caused by the interpenetration of several codes of different kinds.