Meaning in Language – From Individual to Collective

Preface

Meaning lies at the very heart of the development of language. Therefore, it is not surprising that the study of meaning has preoccupied linguists from the very beginnings of this discipline until the present time. The approach to meaning has changed over time, even in contemporary linguistics – from structuralist studies into the relationship between one linguistic sign and other linguistic signs, over a short and only seeming abandonment of the primacy of meaning in favour of the expressive power of the combinatory potential of grammatical structures, to the nowadays dominant cognitive-semantics approach that studies meaning in relation to concepts and the abilities of the human brain. One of the most intriguing questions throughout the history of semantics has been the one that deals with the relationship between an individual and the linguistic community within the framework of the wider sign-meaning relation. This essential, but insufficiently explored relationship was the central topic of the 33^rd International Conference of the Croatian Applied Linguistics Society.

The book consists of three thematic parts. The first part which deals with the meaning of morphemes and words opens with Manuel Padilla Cruz’s Diminutive Morphemes: Towards a Relevance-Theoretic Approach in which he argues that the semantics of diminutive morphemes should not be consistently associated with notions of smallness/littleness since they do not always modify the referent of the word they are attached to by providing information about their size or degree and argues that the semantics of these morphemes could be procedural. Saša Bjelobaba’s approach in Complex Concepts as Determinators of Prepositional Meaning: The Case of Italian Spatial Prepositions is based on postulating the underlying complex concepts that are comprised of functional and spatial components. The author proposes a method of symbolic representation of both complex concepts and their contextual elaborations – a figure of an octopus with the goal of avoiding the attribution of a cognitive value to its dimensional layout which frequently happens with network models. The third paper in this part – Is a Human’s Bark Worse than his Bite? Animal Sounds in Croatian Verbs of Speaking by Anita Memišević and Mihaela Matešić focuses on a group of Croatian verbs that employ the metaphor of animal sounds with the goal of referring to human speech. The authors have found that these verbs contain a strong component of evaluating the quality of speech and that they are used for extremely negative evaluation and for making ironic remarks about the content of speech.

The second part deals with Croatian demonstratives. It contains two papers, the first of which is Saša Kresojević’s From Here to Eternity: Mapping the Radial Categories of Static Spatial Demonstratives in Croatian in which he deals with ovdje and tu and analyses the spatial scenes they construct and maps their semantic radial categories. He shows that the spatial scenes prompted by these two demonstratives overlap in a single sense that he has dubbed Inclusive Deictic, and claims that this overlap enables the shift from the traditional three-element system to the two element-system of static spatial demonstratives. Marija Brala-Vukanović and Anita Memišević deal with demonstrative pronouns in a paper titled ‘Ovaj’ is not ‘onaj’ but Might Be ‘taj’: A Usage Based Analysis of Croatian Demonstrative Pronouns. They analyse the meaning expressed by the Croatian demonstrative pronouns and conduct a usage-based analysis in terms of frequency by gender and position (anaphoric vs. cataphoric). Their results indicate that there are clear differences between the usage patterns of demonstratives both in terms of gender marking as well as in terms of relative distance.

The last part of the book contains two chapters. The first, Željka Macan and Danijela Huljenić’s Tolkien’s Toponyms in the Original and the Croatian Translation, employs a descriptive-analytical approach to determine translational strategies used to translate toponyms in Tolkien’s trilogy. The authors found that the translator obeyed Tolkien’s wishes and consistently applied reproduction to toponyms belonging to Imaginary languages, while the toponyms in Common Speech have received varied treatment – some have been left unchanged, but the majority has been translated. In the second chapter What it Takes to Successfully Implement English-Medium Instruction: A Case Study Branka Drljača Margić and Elisa Velčić Janjetić deal with data on teachers’ perceptions of the presence of meeting certain conditions, teaching staff commitment and staff members’ (linguistic) competencies collected by means of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. They found that the majority of teachers welcome the educational innovation represented by English-medium instruction, but they also expressed certain concerns.

All the chapters included in this book have undergone a rigorous review procedure and we wish to express our gratitude to all the reviewers for their insightful comments and help. Their expertise has greatly contributed to the quality of the book as a whole. We would also like to thank the Peter Lang staff for their support and long-standing cooperation which continues with this book.