IDENTITETSKI ASPEKTI KULTUROLOŠKOG SUVERENITETA U MODERNIZACIJI DALEKOG ISTOKA

The mixture of modern and classical, the combination of tradition and the process of industrializa- tion, all left their trace in every segment of the Japanese society. Despite the power of modern technology and its tendency to completely annul certain customs, Japan has remained faithful to its tradition, hence other highly developed countries in the world could learn a lot from Japan in that regard. This paper discusses, among other things, Japan’s response to Western imperialism and points out the fact that his- torical experience proves that Japan would always successfully overcome difficulties and thus become an example to other world countries of how conflicts and challenges of highly advanced, technological societies could be overcome without desecrating the cultural tradition and refuting the collective identity.

BARICCO E JAPRISOT TRA STORIA E MEMORIA-TRAUMA TRANSGENERAZIONALE

Sebastien Japrisot nel romanzo Una lunga domenica di passioni (Une longue dimanche de fiançailles) e Alessandro Baricco in Questa storia trattano lo stesso tema – la Prima guerra mondiale. I due romanzi sono caratterizzati da una specifica carica emotiva e da un realismo nelle descrizioni. Dato che entrambi gli scrittori non sono stati contemporanei degli eventi descritti, rimane poco chiaro quali siano state le fonti su cui è basata la loro narrazione. Infatti, il lettore non comprende se le due storie siano state costruite soltanto sui resti materiali, volontariamente cercati, di un’epoca passata, o se gli autori siano stati in contatto diretto e spontaneo con un “portatore vivente della memoria”. A questo proposito si esaminano le attuali teorie sulla memoria e le situazioni familiari degli autori. Si scopre che ognuno di questi due scrittori è cresciuto accanto a un nonno che aveva partecipato alla Prima guerra mondiale e ne era uscito con traumi specifici. Un’ulteriore analisi mette in luce, da un lato, la somiglianza tra i personaggi dei romanzi, i loro destini, i caratteri e gli atteggiamenti, e dall’altro i destini, i caratteri e gli atteggiamenti dei nonni di Japrisot e Baricco. Seguendo questa traccia, si esplora la possibilità della trasmissione transgenerazionale dei traumi di guerra subita da questi scrittori, concentrandosi soprattutto sul concetto di postmemoria di Marianne Hirsh. Viene esaminato anche il ruolo della narrazione nella liberazione dal trauma.

INVESTIGATING READING COMPREHENSION PROCESSES IN ESP EDUCATION

Reading is regarded as a cognitive process of meaning construction, or an interactive process that comprises low-level processes of word recognition and high-level processing of ideas. Schema theory implies the meaning of а text is not embedded in the text itself; it is actually created in an active manner through interaction between the reader and the text, in which readers use their world knowledge to decode text meaning. Accordingly, readers bring their ideas, experience and previously gained knowledge into reading comprehension processes. The attainment of specific reading goals, including main idea comprehension and extracting specific information from the text, requires the employment of various reading strategies. In that sense, strategic behavior is deployed by proficient readers; it enables them to facilitate and improve text comprehension, which is the ultimate aim of the reading skill. 10 ESP students of the College of Applied Professional Studies in Vranje took part in this research as respondents. After completing their reading comprehension assignments, students reported on those tasks by virtue of think-aloud protocols. This type of research may provide an insight into specific problems students encounter during text processing activities, as well as strategies they employ to resolve them, which would facilitate the evaluation of reading performance and progress monitoring. The results imply that strategic training would enable ESP students to efficiently attain both general and specific reading goals.

HOMONYMY IN ENGLISH MONOLINGUAL GENERAL-PURPOSE DICTIONARIES

The focus of this paper is the treatment of homonymy in selected monolingual general-purpose dictionaries of English. The aim of the analysis presented in this paper is to reveal the perception of homonymy and its lexicographic significance in the analyzed dictionaries, which involves the answer to the question whether these dictionaries mark homonymy at all, and then, if yes, the determination of the criterion used for the identification of homonymy, as well as the definition of the overall lexicographic strategy adopted by the given dictionaries in their treatment of homonymy. The results of the analysis have shown that the analyzed dictionaries do use homonymy as an organizational principle in their macrostructure. Furthermore, all these dictionaries use the semantic criterion based on mutual relatedness of senses in their identification of homonymy. However, the application of this criterion does not always produce the same outcome in the given dictionaries due to the gradient nature of semantic relatedness and various interpretations it is subject to. It has also been observed that the analyzed dictionaries do not consistently mark semantic homonymy at any cost since their gen- eral strategy in the treatment of homonymy can be defined as balancing between adequate language description and user-friendliness.

ON SOME SOCIO-PRAGMATIC DIMENSIONS OF BORROWING FROM ENGLISH INTO SERBIAN

The recent pragmatic turn in the research on language contact and linguistic borrowing emphasizes the role of discourse, the speakers’ motivations and the social context, along with the structural, semantic and pragmatic aspects. Following the theoretical framework postulated in Andersen (2014), Andersen et al. (2017), Peterson (2017), Peterson, Beers Fagersten (2018), and focusing on the borrowing of pragmatic markers from English into Serbian, this article discusses several, often interrelated phenomena, which have been identified as associated with pragmatic borrowing. They are the functional shift (in particular, the weakening of the illocutionary force and the narrowing of the scope of use of the borrowed pragmatic items), semantic bleaching, indexing of particular social identities, and licensing of certain linguistic and social behaviours, possibly unsuitable with the use of native Serbian pragmatic markers. The article provides numerous illustrative contextualized examples of English pragmatic markers borrowed into Serbian, extracted from various electronic sources of written Serbian. They include the politeness markers pliz and sori, the expletives shit, fuck and the related forms such as who/what the fuck, wtf, and the abbreviations omg and rip, which are examined in their pragmatic, semantic, and social aspects.

CAN AUDIO-VISUAL TRAINING EQUALLY AFFECT PHONEMIC AND PHONETIC CONTRASTS? AN EXAMPLE OF L2 FRICATIVE PRODUCTION

The paper explores the effect of audio-visual perceptual training on Serbian EFL learners’ production of novel phonemic and phonetic contrasts in L2, specifically focused on fricatives. Hence, the paper aims at discovering whether audio-visual training has equal effects at phonemic and phonetic levels, and also, whether the effect is the same at two different age/proficiency levels, 6th grade primary and 4th grade secondary school. In order to explore the phonemic level we concentrated on interdental fricatives, and for the phonetic level differences sibilant contrasts were included, following the predictions of the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best 1994) and Speech Learning Model (Flege 1995). The testing for relevant acoustic information was per- formed prior to and immediately following the experimental period, when all the participants were recorded pronouncing a prepared sentence list containing target sounds. It consisted of measuring spectral moments, frication duration and comparison of spectrograms. The results of the audio-visual phonetic training proved especially beneficial for phonemic contrasts, i.e. interdental fricatives for both levels of age/proficiency, while sibilant contrasts showed insignificant progress. The age/proficiency level did not appear to be a significant predictor of the effect of audio-visual training. Along with the empirical results, the paper likewise presents pedagogical implications important for pronunciation teaching and highlights the significance of phonetic training in the Serbian EFL context in particular.

AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA AND THE ACQUISITION OF EFL VOCABULARY

English language vocabulary is not static and unchangeable, especially because it is constantly enriched as the world changes. All this is reflected in audiovisual media, which people around the world can access easily via the cinema, TV or the internet. Since authors like Hopkins (2013), Israel (2013), Kabooha (2016), Kuśnierek (2016), Li and Brand (2009), Peters et al. (2016), Rodgers (2013) and Shing and Yin (2014) have found that audiovisual media can contribute to second language acquisition, the aim of this research is to establish if and to what extent they influence the acquisition of vocabulary of English as a foreign language among high school students in Serbia. In order to obtain the data, we examined the frequency and manner of use of audiovisual media in a questionnaire and collected the data on vocabulary knowledge in a test. The research was conducted in a grammar school and the informants were 99 second and fourth-grade students. The data were coded and statistically processed in SPSS 20.0. It was established that those students who spent more time using audiovisual media had a positive attitude towards them and achieved better results on the vocabulary test.

CONTRASTING ENGLISH AND SERBIAN THROUGH THE LENSES OF MULTILEVEL-GROUNDED SEMANTICS

The paper illustrates how the author’s emerging theory of “multi-level grounding” may be applied to some contrastive phenomena in English and Serbian. The theory argues that classic semantic approaches based on cross-space interaction may profit enormously from a more thorough consideration of contextual constraints on meaning generation. For example, to understand even a fairly simple comparison such as “Achilles is a lion”, one needs to know a lot more than just how to, depending on the paradigm of choice, “cross-domain map”, “blend”, or “analogize” appropriate formal elements of the two concepts understood as mere mental representations. Rather, to be meaningful in more than just an academic sense, the interpretation needs to call layers of context, from the very general knowledge of who Achilles is and what lions are to specific cultural and even personal connotations appropriate to the two agents and their interaction. In relation to the earlier work of Searle and Langacker, cognitive linguists Coulson and Oakley propose to allocate such knowledge to the construct of the “grounding box” (containing implicit information on the agents, forum, and circumstances surrounding the utterance). The author’s theory makes this concept more refined, suggesting a series of at least six hierarchical and partly recursive grounding boxes constraining meaning generation – from the perceptual attributes of objects cognized to such percepts’ cross-modal interaction with the interlocutors’ embodied experience, to their affective, conceptual, and discourse-driven (re) interpretations. The analysis in this paper aims to show how this approach may be instrumental in disentangling the (seemingly) shared and different semantic strategies in the way English and Serbian treat a simple stock expression (“You are right” / “U pravu si”), grammatical construction (“tolerant of” / “tolerantan prema”), and widely used idiom (“a finger in every pie” / “u svakoj čorbi mirođija”).