The picture bride phenomenon: A reflection on photography from a cultural perspective in Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride

Literature and photography have always encouraged critics to explore interactions between text and image. Within the scope of culture, they also show significant potential in terms of their scholarly application, since the photograph becomes a practical tool for studying literary works within the cultural matrix. The paper aims to use this means of visualisation in order to examine the picture bride phenomenon illustrated in Yoshiko Uchida’s novel Picture Bride (1987), which reveals that behind the veil of apparently prosperous and lifelong marriages, there is a harsh matchmaking system which—solely on the basis of personal networking and Japanese marriage intermediaries—allows for shipping prospective wives from Japan to Japanese immigrants who settled in the United States a few decades earlier. Thus, the photograph constitutes a tool of analysis, which doubles as a tangible means of representation and a factual visualisation of metacognitive imagery.

Why has phonodidactics become “the neglected orphan” of ESL / EFL pedagogy? Explaining methodology- and ELF-related motives behind a reluctance towards pronunciation teaching

The post-method reality of ESL/EFL education, in which LT is no longer perceived as a largescale enterprise based on one universal method, has encouraged theoreticians and practitioners to search for more personalised ways of L2/FL teaching. This specifically applies to pronunciation instruction, whose models, priorities and teaching procedures ought to be considered in light of the tenets of the Post-Method Era. Even though there is no disputing the fact that the influences of methodology- and globalisation-driven transformations have been generally positive in the sense that they have individualised approaches to LT and facilitated international communication respectively, they have also lowered the status of phonodidactics, which, in effect, is disparagingly referred to as “the neglected orphan” of ESL/EFL pedagogy.

Is translating poems for children a child’s play? A linguistic analysis of the English translations of “Lokomotywa” by Julian Tuwim

The aim of the present article is to demonstrate the challenges connected with the translation of children’s poetry, and to offer a qualitative analysis of different translation strategies employed in two English translations of the Polish poem for children “Lokomotywa” by Julian Tuwim. The translation analysis is based on the translation strategies proposed by Lawrence Venuti and Peter Newmark. It focuses on the linguistic and cultural differences between Polish and English, and examines the choices of the translation strategies made by the translators, and the impact they may have had on the reception of the poem in the target language. The comparison shows that although there may be some limitations in terms of the target language and culture, the translators are able to find suitable and effective solutions and simultaneously convey the source text’s form and content. The conclusions placed at the end of the paper summarise the features of both translations and emphasise those strategies employed by the translators which are effective and thanks to which the translations are likely to live up to children’s expectations.

A pragma-rhetorical study of selected Pentecostal sermons in Nigeria

This study examines persuasion and communicative intentions in Pentecostal sermons in Nigeria. Notwithstanding the high scholarly inputs in religious discourse, no single work has examined the devices employed to achieve persuasion and conviction as well as communicative intentions in Pentecostal sermons in Nigeria. This work examines twelve sermons of selected Pentecostal preachers in Nigeria by drawing insights from rhetoric and pragmatic act to account for persuasion and communicative intentions in the data. Findings reveal that preachers strategically deploy rhetorical question; direct address and direct command; metaphor; repetition and structural parallelism; and they develop convincing arguments through logic/reason. It is also revealed that preachers share experiences with their listeners and they assume divine role by speaking authoritatively to convince their listeners into accepting their propositions. Preachers perform pragmatic acts of asserting/stating, encouraging, assuring, directing, commanding, praising, etc. The study has further confirmed that Pentecostal sermons can be used for public mobilisation.

Translating irony. Translation strategies and techniques used by Polish translators of Pride and Prejudice

This article presents the results of a comparative analysis of two Polish translations of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. The authors of the translations are Anna Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska and Magdalena Gawlik-Małkowska. Attention is given to rendering irony, which is the novel’s characteristic feature. The analysed excerpts illustrate the main translation strategies and techniques used in the Polish translations. A comparative analysis shows that techniques applicable to rendering humour and culture-bound elements can be used to translate irony as well. The Polish translations convey irony, but there are differences caused by the translators’ interpretations and by their choice of s trategies and techniques. Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska often uses the strategy of foreignization, but she tries to guide the reader so that they can perceive the implicature. Gawlik-Małkowska’s translation is more literal and more modern, and its irony is more covert.

Code-switching between Arabic and English during Jordanian GP consultations

This study draws conceptually on communication accommodation theory (CAT) to describe and analyze conversations between doctors and patients to identify the psycholinguistic and social motivations for code-switching (CS) between English and Arabic languages during medical consultations in Jordan. The researchers employ a thematic qualitative approach to interpret the phenomena under study. GP doctors (n=9) and patients (n=18) were observed and video-recorded in real medical settings and subsequently interviewed. This generated a comprehensive audio and videotaped corpus of data, which revealed that doctors and patients used code-switching during the medical consultation for two main reasons: 1) filling lexical gaps and 2) accommodating the other party. Jordanian bilingual doctors code-switched from English to Arabic and from Arabic to English to bridge lexical gaps, while both doctors and patients adapted their speech styles for the purpose of convergence. This study is significant as it investigates and examines the phenomenon of code-switching among Jordanian doctors and patients from psycholinguistic and social perspectives to gain a clearly defined sociolinguistic explanation of code-switching phenomena during their clinical interaction.

Meaning in multisemiotic messages – functions of gestures accompanying speech as elements of utterance structure

The topic of the article will be the discussion of the issue of how gestures accompanying speech may complement a gap in a statement. The considerations will cover particular ways of filling such a gap, both semantically and taking into account the place of the gesture in the syntactic structure of the sentence. The subject of interest will be the analysis of spontaneous statements of interlocutors, which will allow for the isolation of word-gesture wholes; it will likewise describe the relationship between the two modes ahead of recounting the functions of gestures in the structure of the entire utterance. The analysis is based on commentaries from one of the journalistic programs hosting politicians in Poland.

I will see it done: Metonymic extensions of the verb see in English

English verbs of perception appear to be significant generators of divergent polysemous senses. The aim of this paper is to propose a dictionary study of the verb see. It appears that many semantic extensions of the term are metonymic in nature, because they are motivated by metonymic shifts within specific State-of-Affairs Scenarios (SASs). Three distinct dictionary sources are consulted in order to identify different metonymic extensions of the verb see. The majority of the database samples appear to belong to the part for whole propositional metonymy category (a stage of SAS for SAS). The conceptual link between seeing and intellectual comprehension is complex and appears to require the discussion of metonymy–metaphor interaction for its fuller explanation. The analysis is followed by conclusions drawn from the database study, as well as suggestions for future research in the field of metonymic extensions of English terms of visual perception.