Linguistic and Extralinguistic in Interaction

Preface

Linguistic research has always, either explicitly or implicitly, dealt with the interaction of linguistic phenomena and extralinguistic reality. Whether we are talking about targeted analyses of the nature of their interaction, or whether this interaction is implied and taken for granted, linguistics has always been interested in its dynamics and manifestations. Thanks to the abundance of communicative channels (primarily those enabled/afforded by the electronic media) which the modern society is employing to satisfy its communication needs, the interaction between the linguistic phenomena and the extralinguistic reality is becoming richer and more diversified. This is the reason why the 2020 Croatian Applied Linguistics Conference was dedicated precisely to this topic.

This book brings a selection of papers presented at the conference, and they may be grouped into two sections. The first section contains papers that focus on various linguistic phenomena, while the second contains those that focus on language acquisition and use of language in education.

The first section opens with Tanja Gradečak and Nevena Ćosić’s paper titled Opacity and transparency of metonymic meaning on the example of Brexit in which they present a network of metonymic expressions containing the lexeme ‘Brexit’ in British political discourse. They analysed a corpus of articles from online editions of several British newspapers and news portals and found variation over time in the frequency of certain nominal heads with regards to the basic part for whole metonymic relation and discovered that the lexeme in question may refer to the contract, the date of the UK leaving the EU, the negotiations, the whole process, etc. They note that the level of intended transparency depends on the pragmatic functions of metonymies, and that the primary goal of this is to manipulate the voters. The next paper, Pragmatics and semantics of thinking in Croatian by Anita Memišević and Mihaela Matešić deals with Croatian verbs of thinking derived from the base verb ‘misliti’ by means of prefixation. The authors build on their previous research of the verbs ‘misliti’ and ‘razmisliti’ and analyse the remaining eleven verbs derived from this base in terms of semantics and pragmatics. Their findings reveal that the prefixed verbs primarily specialise for various aspects of the thinking process, unlike the base verb ‘misliti’, which specialises for state, and that their treatment in contemporary dictionaries of Croatian could be improved upon by taking into account their pragmatics. In a paper titled Croatian-English bilinguals’ use and perception of L1 and L2 swearwords Ivana Petrović and Mirela Plenković analyse students’ self-reported frequency of swearing in their first and second language and their perception of offensiveness and frequency of use of second language swearwords. Their results indicate that there are no significant differences in the frequency of swearing in their subjects’ two languages and that the perception of offensiveness of swearing is related to the age at which they started learning their second language, with subjects who started learning L2 later finding the L2 swearwords more offensive. Another interesting finding of their study is that more proficient users use L2 swearwords more frequently. Rebecca Charry Roje and Vanda Bazdan research rapport-building strategies in English through a descriptive analysis of a corpus of 113 English messages on Airbnb in their paper English as a lingua franca in peer-to-peer digital business: Rapport building strategies in Airbnb messages. They focus on message length, use of greetings and closings, and rapport-building strategies in relation to the writer’s age, gender, linguistic background and level of proficiency in English. Their research reveals that native speakers of English do not seem to be at an advantage when it comes to rapport-building in the context of messages of this type. In Translation universals: translation of personal pronouns from English into Croatian Dubravka Vidaković Erdeljić and Goran Milić analyse two corpora of fiction – one consisting of texts in Croatian and one consisting of texts translated from English into Croatian – in order to investigate the plausibility of translation universals. Their focus is on the translation of personal pronouns from English into Croatian. Their choice of personal pronouns is motivated by the fact that they are used differently in the two languages, i.e., English requires the subject to be overtly stated, while in Croatian subject pronouns are usually omitted since the information about the person and number of the subject is implicitly stated in the verb. Their study has revealed significant differences between the two corpora with respect to the use of personal pronouns in the subject position. However, the surprising fact is that they found that Croatian originals contain a significantly higher number of personal pronouns in the subject position.

This section closes with two papers which present projects. In the first, titled Proverbs off- and online, Melita Aleksa Varga, Kristina Feldvari and Ana Keglević discuss what makes a good dictionary of proverbs, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of print and online proverb databases. They go on to describe the structure of an online proverb thesaurus that should be created for Croatian. The second, Mono- and bilingual recognition of the laryngeal features [voice] and [spread glottis] measured by EEG, by Szilárd Szentgyörgyi and Zsolt Gergelics presents a detailed proposal for an experiment the aim of which is to test the neural reality about the differences between the underlying representations in the stop systems of two types of languages – those with underlying voice contrast and those with an underlying spread glottis contrast. The languages that they focus on are English and Hungarian and their experiment will use native speakers of English, native speakers of Hungarian and English-Hungarian bilinguals as subjects.

The second section, which focuses on language acquisition and use of language in education, opens with The effects of classroom-based teaching on the acquisition of English prepositions by Jakov Proroković and Katica Balenović. Their study focused on 39 subjects (students) who were first given an initial test (a placement test of sorts) which served as an assessment of students’ competence with regard to the proper use of English prepositions. Their subjects were then exposed to three academic hours of formal instruction on the use of prepositions, after which they took a second test. Their results indicate that formal instruction seems to improve primarily the use of prepositions with adjectives, while it does not seem to have much effect on the use of prepositions that go with certain verbs. Mirjana Semren and Danijela Šegedin Borovina focus on out-of-class learning conducted via homework study in Out-of-class learning: an obstacle or an asset to EFL learning? The authors explore different aspects of English homework, i.e., the amount and type of homework, skills applied, completion, teacher feedback, etc., with the help of a questionnaire that was administered to Croatian primary school EFL learners. Their results indicate that English teachers almost always assign homework which may indicate that they consider homework to be a necessary and beneficial element of EFL learning. In Incidental English and Italian language acquisition: A case study with vocational high school students Sara Brodarić Šegvić, Magdalena Nigoević and Darko Hren study students of the Tourism Management Hospitality and Catering School in Split. Their study employed a questionnaire related to incidental acquisition of English and Italian and their results reveal that English-language media has the greatest input, followed by music and social networks, while out-of-school exposure does not seem to have a significant impact on students’ knowledge of Italian. An interesting finding of their study is that Italian, which used to have a strong influence, and which used to be considered to be the most dominant foreign language in Dalmatia, seems to have been overshadowed by English due to its presence in the media. The paper Improving English in English medium instruction: The crux of the matter by Branka Drljača Margić and Irena Vodopija-Krstanović is based on several studies conducted at the University of Rijeka. Their results show that the English language has been identified as the main obstacle in English medium instruction and here they attempt to give critical insight into various language-related challenges. To exemplify various measures that can be taken to ensure effective implementation of English-medium instruction they give examples of best practice at the University of Rijeka. The last paper, LSP teacher professional development – Needs-based curriculum design by Violeta Jurkovič, Mateja Dostal, Saša Podgoršek and Darja Mertelj, reports on the process of needs-based curriculum design: the analysis of the current provision of languages for specific purposes teacher professional programs in the European Higher Education Area, the definition of the core professional development needs of LSP teachers, the identification of the gaps between the current provision of LSP teacher professional development programs and the professional development needs of LSP teachers, the definition of the learning outcomes, the translation of the learning outcomes into teaching and learning modules, and the design of the pertinent lesson plans. The authors analysed LSP teacher programs provided in EHEA with the help of an online survey, the goal of which was to explore the professional development needs of in-service teachers on EHEA, and with the help of semi-structured interviews.

All the chapters in this book have undergone a rigorous review procedure and we owe a debt of gratitude to all the reviewers, since their expertise has greatly contributed to the quality of this book. We would also like to thank the Peter Lang staff for their continuing support and help. We hope that the chapters that follow will provide readers with plenty of new information, but also inspire them to study the topics they deal with in greater depth.