<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The way the structure of the Japanese honorific system <italic>keigo</italic> is grasped and presented influences the understanding and appropriate use of the honorific forms this system includes. Functional categorization makes it easier to perceive principles that are not immediately evident.This paper argues for the superiority of the new 5-category division into <italic>sonkeigo</italic> (‘deferential speech’), <italic>kenjōgo</italic> (‘humble speech’), <italic>teichōgo</italic> (‘formal polite speech’), <italic>teineigo</italic> (‘polite speech’) and <italic>bikago</italic> (‘refined speech’), recently promulgated by the Ministry of Education, over the traditional and wide-spread 3-category division into <italic>sonkeigo</italic>, <italic>kenjōgo</italic> and <italic>teineigo.</italic> It proposes that the new system offers significant functional advantages in that it better captures the ways social relations are expressed within the Japanese honorific system and that it sets out more clear-cut categories which better reflect the differences between the forms available to the speaker. Through description and comparison of the more notable frameworks proposed by Japanese linguists over the past fifty years, the paper seeks to demonstrate that the 5-category system is not just another more extensive model but also represents a logical outcome of developments in this field of scholarship.</abstract>

On the categorization of the Japanese honorific system <italic>Keigo</italic>

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In this article, the longitudinal development of directives in first-language acquisition is described, and examples of the development of directive speech acts in one Czech child from the ages of 2.8 to 4.1 are included. The results show that the child acquires communicative strategies gradually and that he usually prefers one concrete strategy initially, which is later replaced by a new strategy corresponding with the acquisition of morphological categories. The child’s grammatical development is divided into two stages: the stage of protomorphology, when the child acquires basic morphological categories, and the stage of morphology proper / modular morphology, when the child uses a variety of grammatical means. In the stage of morphology proper, pragmatic factors become more influential as the child is no longer limited by a lack of grammatical competence.</abstract>

Development of directives in child language: A case study of Czech

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Figurative idioms constitute a large proportion of multi-word expressions in everyday language. Contrary to the traditional view of idioms as non-compositional units, numerous studies in cognitive linguistics show that most idioms are not arbitrary but motivated by conceptual metaphors and metonymies that provide a link between literal and figurative meanings. Familiarity with particular source domains and conceptual mappings is regarded as a source of idiom transparency. In this article, we report on a study in which 85 Slovak students participated. Their task was to guess the meanings of English idioms containing three body parts: the eye, the hand and the heart. These body parts are not equally productive metaphorical source domains in English and Slovak. The research results which we present indicate that different prominence of the source domains in students’ mother tongue and the target language is one of the factors that influence idiom comprehension in a foreign language.</abstract>

Slovak students’ comprehension of English figurative idioms containing body parts

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This paper will present a corpus-based study on the translated language of tourism, focusing in particular on the stylistics of tourist landscapes. Through a comparative analysis of a specifically designed corpus of travel articles originally written in English (namely the <italic>TourEC-Tourism English Corpus</italic>) and a corpus of tourist texts translated from a variety of languages into English (namely the <italic>T-TourEC – Translational Tourism English Corpus</italic>), the study will investigate a selection of collocates, concordances and keywords related to the description and representation of tourist settings in both corpora. The aim will be that of identifying differences, aspects or practices to be potentially improved that characterize the translated language of tourism with respect to tourist texts originally written in English. Results will show that the discursive patterns of translated texts differ from the stylistic strategies typically employed in native English for the linguistic representation of landscape and settings due to phenomena of translation universals, and that these differences may affect the relating communicative functions, properties and persuasive effects of tourist promotional discourse.</abstract>

Translating the representation of the tourist landscape: A corpus-based study

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The paper studies the degree of grammaticalization of the structures gotta, gonna, wanna and better. The study presumes that the semantics of these structures – more precisely their modal polyfunctionality (i.e. the ability to express deontic and epistemic meaning at the same time) – has an impact on their morphosyntactic properties. Using corpora (predominantly the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English) and web forums, the paper studies in detail the level of independence of gotta, gonna, wanna and better from their respective auxiliaries (have and be) and the development of the operator properties of these structures typical for central modals (i.e. inversion in questions, compatibility with clausal negation and occurrence in elliptical contexts). It demonstrates that gonna and gotta are partially grammaticalized, especially with respect to the independence of their auxiliaries, but they do not syntactically behave as modals. The verb wanna behaves as a modal morphologically but not syntactically. On the other hand, better is grammaticalized to a high degree, and it does demonstrate both the morphology and syntax of central modal verbs.</abstract>

The degree of grammaticalization of gotta, gonna, wanna and better: A corpus study

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Following the development of a framework for critical stylistics (Jeffries 2010) and the explication of some of the theoretical assumptions behind this framework (Jeffries 2014a, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b), the present article attempts to put this framework into a larger theoretical context as a way to approach textual meaning. Using examples from the popular U.S. television show, The Big Bang Theory, I examine the evidence that there is a kind of textual meaning which can be distinguished from the core propositional meaning on the one hand and from contextual, interpersonal meaning on the other. The specific aim, to demonstrate a layer of meaning belonging to text specifically, is set within an argument which claims that progress in linguistics can better be served by adherence to a rigorous scientific discipline.</abstract>

Textual meaning and its place in a theory of language

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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. 