<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> A narrative is a sequence of connected events arranged by a narrator. Folktales are a genre of narrative stories that every cultural community possesses. They have spread through verbal storytelling rather than written formal texts and reflect cultural beliefs, cultural identity, traditions and social customs. In this paper, I comparatively analyse the narrative structure of two versions of Korean folktale stories: the original Korean version and their English versions rewritten by American writers. The results of the analysis reveal that a modification in narrative structure occurs during the process of trans-creating folktales into a different language to appeal to a target audience that has a different cultural background. The results of my analysis show that the story schemata of folktale stories and story patterns vary between cultures, reflecting the different cultural orientation of each audience.</abstract>

Narrative structures in Korean folktales: A comparative analysis of Korean and English versions

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> Recent work shows that downward entailment (DE) cannot be the right semantic domain that licenses negative polarity items (NPIs). Zwarts (1995), Giannakidou (1998), among others, argue that NPIs are licensed in non-veridical domains, those that do not entail or presuppose the truth of the propositions they embed. In this paper, based on empirical facts, I argue that DE theory is the right analysis for Jordanian Arabic. I propose an analysis of NPI licensing in which three components of grammar interface: syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Semantics defines the class of NPI licensors, pragmatics forces quantificational closure of NPIs, and syntax executes the licensing via AGREE between a phasal head and the NPI. The analysis contributes to the debate on what components of grammar are responsible for NPI licensing and provides a new perspective on the interface between different components of grammar.</abstract>

NPI licensing in Jordanian Arabic: An argument for downward entailment and syntax-semantics interface

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> The paper deals with the field of Czech corpus linguistics and represents one of various current studies analysing text coherence through language interactions. It presents a corpusbased analysis of grammatical coreference and sentence information structure (in terms of contextual boundness) in Czech. It focuses on examining the interaction of these two language phenomena and observes where they meet to participate in text structuring. Specifically, the paper analyses contextually bound and non-bound sentence items and examines whether (and how often) they are involved in relations of grammatical coreference in Czech newspaper articles. The analysis is carried out on the language data of the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) containing 3,165 Czech texts. The results of the analysis are helpful in automatic text annotation - the paper presents how (or to what extent) the annotation of grammatical coreference may be used in automatic (pre-)annotation of sentence information structure in Czech. It demonstrates how accurately we may (automatically) assume the value of contextual boundness for the antecedent and anaphor (as the two participants of a grammatical coreference relation). The results of the paper demonstrate that the anaphor of grammatical coreference is automatically predictable - it is a non-contrastive contextually bound sentence item in 99.18% of cases. On the other hand, the value of contextual boundness of the antecedent is not so easy to estimate (according to the PDT, the antecedent is contextually non-bound in 37% of cases, non-contrastive contextually bound in 50% and contrastive contextually bound in 13% of cases).</abstract>

Studying text coherence in Czech – a corpus-based analysis

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> The current research is directed towards the transition of distress studies in the English speaking culture from the prototype towards the conceptual metaphor approach. It enables the enlightenment of mental images, which underlie distress language usage in modern mass communication. The analysis involves identification of conceptual distress metaphors and metonymies within the image-schematic structure. The study includes a cognitive semantic analysis of linguistic units of the distress lexicon retrieved from the GloWbE, BNC, COCA, English newspapers and media platforms. Figurative language reveals conventional beliefs about distress represented in English media discourse, such as strong associations of emotion with darkness and coldness. Metaphorical mappings contain views about the reasons for distress experience which lie in the loss of balance or inner equilibrium, loss of control, and convictions about the reaction characterizing a person as being weak and brittle. The findings of data analysis are summed up in a metaphorical profile of distress (MPD) which discloses the behavioural patterns (communicative behaviour, adequacy/inadequacy of behaviour, ability to socialize) and physical effects including health issues.</abstract>

Metaphorical profile of distress in English media discourse

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> This paper discusses the interaction between voices in the so-called Appraisal satellite, a section in the generic structure of hard news concerned with evaluation (White, 1998). The discussion focuses primarily on the interplay between external voices brought into the discourse by various forms of presentation, i.e. forms of reporting the language of others (Semino and Short, 2004); in addition, the paper touches upon the interplay between external voices and the internal authorial voice of the journalist. External voices are considered in terms of the function they fulfil in hard news Appraisal. Prototypically, external voices serve as the main source of evaluation but also fulfil various subsidiary roles; for instance, voices serve as the target of evaluation, express attitude, and provide a summary, background information and justification. Correspondences are found between voice functions and forms of presentation. Voice functions are interpreted from a dialogic perspective, more specifically in terms of their potential to expand and contract the established dialogic space (Martin and White, 2005).</abstract>

The functions of external voices in hard news Appraisal: A dialogic perspective

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> The paper focuses on the institutional website as a complex genre with a relatively discontinuous inner structure, which is, however, coherent and cohesive, and unified by a common communication goal(s). The website is viewed as a discourse colony consisting of independent but related components realized in an array of subgenres, some of which are typical of the academic/institutional environment while others come from different discourse domains and are employed as embedded genres. The paper focuses on the blog as an embedded genre, its forms and functions within university websites, and particularly on its potentially multimodal character, i.e. the interplay of the verbal content of the blog and the non-verbal elements, esp. photographs, which co-create the producer’s message to the addressee. Drawing upon the recently developed field of multimodal discourse analysis within Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly Martinec and Salway’s model, the paper explores the level to which the modes are integrated and the ways they contribute to meaningmaking in the genre.</abstract>

“And this is the view from outside my window”: On text and image interplay in university website blogs

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 24 (2023): Issue 2 (December 2023)

Volume 24 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 23 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 23 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 22 (2021): Issue 2 (December 2021)

Volume 22 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 21 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Volume 21 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 20 (2019): Issue 2 (December 2019)

Volume 20 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 19 (2018): Issue 2 (December 2018)

Volume 19 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

Volume 18 (2017): Issue 2 (December 2017)

Volume 18 (2017): Issue 1 (June 2017)

Volume 17 (2016): Issue 2 (December 2016)

Volume 17 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016)

Volume 16 (2015): Issue 1 (December 2015)

Volume 15 (2015): Issue 1 (June 2015)

Volume 14 (2014): Issue 1 (December 2014)

Volume 13 (2014): Issue 1 (June 2014)

Topics in Linguistics

 Topics in Linguistics is a double-blind, peer-reviewed international scientific journal issued twice a year by the Department of English and American Studies, the Faculty of Arts, at the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra.  The journal aims to foster interdisciplinary, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural approaches to language research. Topics in Linguistics seeks to publish high-quality, original papers which adopt diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives in exploring a wide range of current issues in linguistic studies. Although papers on world languages are considered, we especially encourage submissions dealing with the majority and minority languages spoken in Europe.  Subject areas of study include, but are not limited to:   general linguistics (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics)  interfaces with general linguistics (neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics)  cognitive linguistics  comparative linguistics  corpus linguistics  applied linguistics  stylistics  (critical) discourse analysis  intercultural communication   Topics in Linguistics is published in English. Authors are requested to submit their papers (doc. format) anonymously. The authors will receive an automatic confirmation email and are notified within one month of submission of the results of the initial screening of their manuscript.From Volume 13, 2014 onwards, Topics in Linguistics has been published by De Gruyter Open (now Sciendo). Since 2016 Topics in Linguistics has been an electronic-only journal.  Acceptance Rate (2020-2021)   11.85%   Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 