<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

In the so-called Brexit referendum which took place on 23 June 2016, a slim majority of British citizens voted in favour of the United Kingdom leaving the EU. Following this decision, the United Kingdom officially withdrew from the European Union on 31 January 2020. On both occasions, British newspapers responded with a series of articles and front pages where they elaborated on various arguments for and against Brexit and declared sides in the Brexit campaign. The following study, which focuses on the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, is based on Brexit-related front pages and articles from print and online editions of British newspapers published in both June 2016 and late January/early February 2020. The analysed periodicals represent diverging viewpoints: some argued against Brexit, whereas others backed the Leave campaign. The main points of interest are the intertextual techniques implied in the analysed media texts, ranging from direct quotation to (visual) allusion. They are viewed and discussed as means of (1) revealing the stance of the analysed newspapers; (2) extending the meaning of a given text; (3) attracting attention; and, last but not least, (4) “infotainment”, i.e. involving and entertaining the readership.
The conducted analysis proves visual allusions based on British and European national symbols as well as structural allusions to films, songs and works of literature, proverbs and fixed phrases to be a widely applied journalistic strategy in the British media coverage of Brexit. Carefully targeted by producers of media and appropriately decoded by the readership not only do they fulfil a meaning-making and evaluative function but first and foremost provide entertainment, enhance the attractiveness and thus maintain and/or increase the circulation of the newspaper in question.
</abstract>

Make leave, not war. Intertextual references in the British press coverage of Brexit

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This study presents the results of a cognitive analysis of Winston Churchill’s historical works and memoirs at the textual, lingual and conceptual levels in order to interpret the implicatures of Churchill’s reflection discourse. The scope of the present research covers Winston Churchill’s historical works and memoirs as one of the most fruitful types of literary text with regard to the realization of reflection, which is organically interwoven into his texts. The study is done by means of complex analysis with the application of discourse, textual, semantic, cognitive, and conceptual analyses. In the process of the investigation, it was found that Churchill’s reflection discourse represents a special form of language use that discloses a cognitive personality type, which is characterized by the prevalence of logical, deductive and cause-and-effect reasoning. The conceptual space of Churchill’s reflection discourse is constructed as a network model which represents different types of relations among the reflection concepts (subordination, identity, spatial, associative, subjective-and-causative, opposition, causativeand-resultative, attributive, qualitative, attributive-and-possessive, attributive-and-appositive, partitive, functional, reversive-and-functional, paradoxical, and dependency). The verbalization of the reflection concepts actualizes the implicatures of Churchill’s reflection discourse and helps determine the dominant messages implied in Winston Churchill’s historical works and memoirs.
</abstract>

Churchill’s reflection discourse

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English has firmly established itself as a lingua franca in the international environment and in no environment is this more true than in the academic one. Self-mention, especially in academic settings, has been studied extensively; however, not so in written ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) academic discourse, as the prevailing focus of ELF studies has been on the spoken form. In this corpus-based study, I choose Walková’s (2019) three-dimensional model of self-mention and apply it in the self-mention analysis in the SSH category of the SciELF corpus, a corpus of unpublished research articles written by ELF users. The results are compared with the reference corpus CSSH compiled to be comparable to the SSH corpus in terms of discipline. Features related to self-reference are chosen to represent each dimension. The results are tested for statistical significance using the Log-likelihood test. Some data proved to be of greater statistical significance (the use of personal pronouns) while other data did not carry any (the use of boosters).
</abstract>

Self-mention in the academic discourse of ELF writers

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Entrainment is the tendency of people to behave similarly during an interaction. It occurs on different levels of behaviour, including speech, and has been associated with pro-social behaviour and increased rapport. This review paper outlines the current understanding of linguistic entrainment, particularly at the speech level, in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a disorder that is associated with social difficulties and unusual prosody. Aberrant entrainment patterns in individuals with ASD could thus contribute to both their perceived unusual prosody and their social difficulties. Studying the relationship between speech entrainment and ASD holds great potential for applied benefits in utilizing this knowledge for pre-screening or diagnosis, monitoring progress longitudinally, and intervention practices. Our findings suggest that research on entrainment in ASD is sparse and exploratory, and the ecological validity of experimental paradigms varies. Moreover, there is little consistency in methodology and results vary between studies, which highlights the need for standardized methods in entrainment research. A promising way to standardize methods, facilitate their use, and extend them to everyday clinical practice, is by implementing automatic methods for speech analysis and adhering to open-science principles.
</abstract>

Slovak Technical University in Bratislava

Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra

Prosodic entrainment in individuals with autism spectrum disorder

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This paper aims to propose a typology of replies to insults based on data retrieved from Twitter, which is ripe with offensive comments. The proposed typology is embedded in the theory of impoliteness, and it hinges on the notion of the perlocutionary effect. It assumes that what counts as an insult depends primarily on whether or not an utterance is evaluated as offensive by the insultee. The evaluation can be signalled behaviourally or verbally and includes expressed replies as well as so-called silent replies. The insults, regardless of the presence or absence of an insulting intention of the insulter (potential insult), that are not rendered as offensive by the target are only attempted insults, while those that are experienced as offensive amount to genuine insults. The analysis has illustrated select types of reactions and has shown that potential, attempted and genuine insults may be further divided into: in/direct insults, explicit/implicit, non-/pure, and non-/vocatives, whilst reactions can be subsumed by three overarching strategies: agreeing, attacking and rejection.
</abstract>

“You’re too thick to change the station” – Impoliteness, insults and responses to insults on Twitter

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

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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. 