Volumen 10 (2022): Heft 1 (October 2022)

This paper examines the thematic structure of a corpus of insults using the inference-boundary model of Theme and Rheme. It focuses on the concept of negative inference—which must be generated for an insult to be successfully delivered—and shows how it allows us to better understand and characterize the form that insults generally take. The analysis suggests that insults are typically structured to generate backward-looking negative inferences from the decoder, much in line with how new information (in this case, the thrust of the insult) is generally located in final position. The paper also proposes a summary statement capturing the general configuration of insults and suggestions for further research.

The article discusses figurative use of expressions from the domains of INVASION and HOUSE in media discourse on the European migrant crisis. The conceptual metaphors MIGRATION AS AN INVASION and the COMMON EUROPEAN HOUSE, which are inextricably related in the segments of the real discourse on migration, have strong rhetorical power and serve as a means of promoting antimigrant ideologies. The aim of this paper is to identify the instances of deliberate use of the aforementioned metaphors in British and Bosnian-Herzegovinian papers and describe their use in the media with the aim of changing addressees’ perspectives on an important issue such as migration.

The effect of incidental learning on acquiring the pronunciation of the phoneme /p/ by Arabic-speaking English as foreign language learners was the focus of this study. This phoneme was chosen because it does not exist in the phonemic inventory of Arabic. Eighth graders studying at Al-Ethra’a Secondary School in Alkarak were tested on the pronunciation of words containing /p/ in context (pre-test). For three weeks, they were taught the primary stress of English words containing the target phoneme in their first or second syllable (treatment/incidental learning). The learning exercises consisted of explaining the stress rules and listening to native speakers uttering the words, followed by the participants’ repetition. The students were then re-tested (post-test) to determine whether incidental learning had affected the participants’ pronunciation of /p/. The results reveal that the treatment (incidental learning of /p/) had a positive impact on the participants’ answers on the post-test.