Language Arts & Disciplines

Inspired by Mary Shelley’s conviction that reading is a socially significant communal activity, this book presents four essays on modern interactions with literary classics. Ancient tragedy, Shakespeare, and Frankenstein are read anew in the context of challenges and dangers we are facing nowadays. The titular phrase, thinking literature, is meant to indicate reading literature of the previous epochs in a way that allows one to contemplate human condition against the background of the past and in connection with the present.

The essays on Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed, and modern reactions to suicide in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, testify to the lasting relevance of ancient Greek tragedy, Shakespeare’s plays and Mary Shalley’s cautionary tale. Thinking literature by revisiting canonical texts and sharing with others the experience this brings, helps us to define, understand and confront the social and political challenges of today’s increasingly complex world.

How does one speak about kinds in Norwegian? Which noun form should one use to say that dogs bark and cows are mammals? And is it always necessary to use a plural noun form to express genericity?

The study presented in this book shows a cognitive approach to genericity in Norwegian. The study material includes three data sets—two surveys and a specialised corpus of generic texts. Both the surveys and the corpus were analysed in two ways—with the use of chosen cognitive models and with a number of statistical tests. Applying both qualitative and quantitive methods has allowed to conduct a comprehensive study on genericity in Norwegian.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of major issues in the expanding and multifaceted field of translation studies. Intended as an essential and introductory textbook for undergraduate students, the volume contains 14 chapters featuring such wide-ranging and diverse topics as: equivalence, translation procedures, linguistic and cultural barriers in translation, cognitive approaches to translation, corpora and descriptive translation studies, multimodal communication and multidimensional translation in audiovisual contexts, machine translation, CAT and localization, literary translation, legal and medical translation, interpreting, translation competence and borrowing from English.

The Festschrift is a collection of papers written in honour of Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld to mark the occasion of her 70th birthday.

Professor Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld is one of the leading authorities in the field of language contact, and has pursued research on the influence of English on Polish and other European languages, Polish-English contrastive studies, as well as various aspects of English grammar. She has authored more than 160 publications, including four books, as well as course books and academic papers. She has also edited and co-edited dictionaries of English borrowings in Polish.

The Festschrift volume comprises papers from the world of linguistics which have been authored by eminent scholars from Poland and abroad. The chapters included in the volume focus on various issues, including those from the area of contact linguistics. The topics covered in the research papers comprise, for instance, the influence of English on different languages, such as Polish, Danish, Afrikaans, Swedish, Spanish, German and Japanese, as well as on Asian languages and cultures. The authors investigate Celtic borrowings in Polish, anglicisms in Serbian, or Yiddish borrowings in contemporary American English. The contributions also discuss the phenomenon of Ponglish, i.e., the communication code used by Poles living in the UK, the presence of foreign languages in the linguistic landscape of Kraków, as well as the problem of multilingualism in Europe, the relation between language, culture and identity, and the influence of globalisation on both Polish language and culture. Finally, selected chapters address a range of phenomena related to Karaim, Russenorsk, and Turkish.

The work offers a detailed analysis of Anglo-Turkiccultural and linguistic relations as reflected in Englishvocabulary between the 16th and early 20th centuries.Words attested in historical English texts forwhich a Turkic language acted as an etymologicallink have not yet received a monograph treatmentand the information to be found in etymological dictionariesof English is usually hardly adequate. Theaim of the current book is to rectify this situation.The main part of the study is an etymological dictionaryof 106 lexical items related to material culturethat were adopted from Turkic or via Turkic, whetherdirectly or not. For each entry a chronological list oforthographic variants is provided, followed by a summaryof information on the word's etymology to befound in selected etymological dictionaries of English.A critical survey of these is the point of departure forthe author's own commentary. Through careful analysisof contexts in which the new lexical items cameto be used in English as well as a thorough scrutinyof their formal features the author reconstructs thetransmission routes along which the vocabulary inquestion was transmitted into English.

The present volume is a token of gratitude for our colleague, Janina Aniela Ozga, a senior lecturer at the Institute of English Philology of the Jagiellonian University. The book is a collection of papers on a wide spectrum of topics, ranging from Hamlet to Zoolander, which reflect diverse academic interests of the authors: literary theory, linguistics, translation studies, philosophy of language, history and language teaching. The common thread running through all the papers is the desire of the authors - all of them humanists involved in academic pursuits - to place in a theoretical perspective of their discipline and shed new light on an interesting research problem in literature, art, language use, or language teaching that they have identified.

This book is a voice in the ongoing discussion on the communicative nature and consequences of content and language integrated learning (CLIL). The innovative character of the present study rests upon its context on the one hand, and its perspective on the other. The numerous accounts available in international research literature on this topic typically concern naturally bilingual educational contexts, and focus on the effects of CLIL on the levels of subject knowledge attainment or improvement of second language skills (e.g. Várkuti, 2010; Pessoa, 2007; Jäppinen, 2005). The present study was designed as a comprehensive research into the effects of CLIL in the context of English as a foreign language teaching at lower primary level. Outside the naturally bilingual educational context, cross-curricular instruction is practiced at the level of secondary education but it is hardly ever present in primary school, and even more rarely in the lower primary classroom. Therefore, the author aims to fill the existing gap in literature on the subject in this particular context.The book attempts to provide a thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis offering a wider perspective on the nature and consequences of CLIL methodology on lower primary students' linguistic behavior and executive control. The former aspect is described and discussed on the examples of real language use in the classroom that is rich in multiple code switches characteristic for naturally bilingual contexts. The latter, being a psycholinguistic feature, was measured by means of a Stroop test and subjected to a statistical analysis. Executive control was measured through reaction times in conflict conditions against a control group. The discussion following the description of a longitudinal study led to a conclusion that, over time, young learners have developed a cognitive flexibility and inhibition control as a result of constant voluntary code-switching, displaying conscious control over selective inhibition of competing lexemes. The results suggest a considerable advantage of CLIL at lower primary level in EFL educational contexts.

Dialogue in foreign language education is a collection of studies that explore topics important in contemporary foreign language education, such as: academic discourse, intercultural communication, the use of information technology, critical reading, the development of communicative skills, and anxiety in foreign language learning. Researchers from Poland and abroad discuss the interplay between various factors influencing foreign language learning and teaching. The publication consists of 11 chapters, each followed by comments in which their authors dialogue with the opinions expressed in the chapters. It is our hope that the book will inspire readers to ask questions and pursue new paths along "old, well known" topics concerning foreign language education.

This volume contains selected papers on linguistics from the conference organized by the Jagiellonian University Student's English Society from April 7 to 8 in 2008 in Kraków. The authors were all students of the Jagiellonian University and the university of Lódz at the time of the conference. The papers address questions related to the theory of natural language syntax, language diachrony, theory of phonology, psycholinguistics, linguistic stylistics, translation theory and language methodology. This impressive spectrum of topics reflects the students' wide ranging research interests in the study of natural language.

Transcending Traditions is an attempt to systemise Thurayya AI-Baqsami's literary creativity as well as examining the significance of her artistic work.

This book presents an ongoing debate in cognitive linguistics about the modelling of prepositional polysemy, known as "the story of over." Additionally, it discusses a Polish counterpart - "the story of za(-)" (a preposition and a verbal prefix). Its further aim is to reveal a deep divergence of perspectives between the cognitive and hermeneutical approaches to the meaning of words. The argument could be summarised as follows: the issue of the representation of lexical senses (available out of context) presupposes the issue of distinct meanings of words in communal use, which in turn presupposes the question of the transformative power of words (in linguistics, articulated by Humboldt as energeia). In short, the book proposes to complement a post hoc static cognitive approach with a dynamic "expressive" one.

This study focuses on texts exploring human proclivity to violent behaviour. Building on the anthropological insights of René Girard, and on the premise that literature is a reflection of a cultural moment, Curyllo-Klag shows how early modernism registers symptoms of crisis which even the outbreak of World War I failed to resolve. Arranged in chronological order, the works of Conrad, Lewis and Lawrence reveal an unfolding pattern and form a triptych, indicative of the growing intensity of the epoch in which they were produced.

This volume is based on the papers presented at the conference entitled "Languages and Cultures in Research and Education," held in Krakow from May 19 to 20 in 2009, organized by the Chair of Hungarian Philology of Jagiellonian University on the 20th anniversary of its foundation, as a commemoration of the Year of the Hungarian Language. The conference was dedicated to the celebration of the scientific career of Professor Ralf-Peter Ritter on his 70th birthday. In view of the wide range of his scientific interests and the special occasion on which the conference was held, the conference topics covered subjects connected with researches on historical linguistics lato sensu, as well as research on the Hungarian language and literature. The selection presented therefore contains, above all, articles on Indo-European and Ugro-Finnic linguistics, the history of science, and Hungarian literature. On the occasion of the publication of this volume, the editors would like to thank all the contributors and conference participants, as well as the Jagiellonian University's Faculty of Philology, whose generous help and financial assistance made this publication possible.

This book is about reading. Throughout the book, the author explains the complexity of the dual-language involvement of FL/L2 reading by showing how L1 and FL/L2 factors interplay in FL/L2 reading. The main aim of the book is to explore reading in English in the foreign/second language context as a cross-linguistic phenomenon and to present the results of a think-aloud study which investigated reading in Polish as the L1 and English as the FL of Polish learners of English. The project consisted of six stages, each focussing on a different aspect of reading. Thus, the following was explored: reading strategies, problems and solutions, the way the subjects constructed their representations of the texts, the students' individual patterns of developing comprehension and effectiveness in identifying the main ideas. The findings revealed both differences and similarities between the subjects' reading in Polish and their reading in English. The book offers implications for further research and elucidates the usefulness of think-aloud protocols in foreign language instruction.

Kamil Stachowski examines partial interfixed reduplications in standard Turkic languages. Generally no longer productive, this type of reduplication serves primarily to intensify adjectives and adverbs. Unlike previous texts, his book considers the phenomenon comparatively across twenty modern languages and is based on complete collections of examples. It approaches the subject from a diachronic perspective, combining etymological, historical-comparative, and quantitative methodology.

This book is a collection of articles written in honor of Professor Stanislaw Stachowski, a distinguished linguist from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Stachowski is known both in Polish academic circles and to a wider world of scholars as an expert in Turkish, Balkan, and Slavonic linguistics. The papers included in the volume reflect the varied scholarly pursuits of the authors, but are all related to Professor Stachowski's research interests.

This book takes on critical problems in current Macedonistics, with a special emphasis on text linguistics and linguistics of discourse. It focuses on the language of modern Macedonian discourses, including scientific, political, parliamentary, and media, and on the Macedonian literary text and the language in public communication. Particular attention is dedicated to the conditions in which the Macedonian standard language was born.

?This book looks at the development of language skills in Swedish as a second language in young adults, beginning from the first months of their second language instruction and ending after three years of intensive language courses. The focus is on three proficiency dimensions: complexity, accuracy, and fluency, and their interplay at group level and in individual students.

At the beginning of the second language learning process, accuracy, complexity, and fluency are not integrated in the learner's mind and they tend to act in an arbitrary fashion. During second language development, integration of all dimensions proceeds steadily and after three years of learning the discrepancy between different aspects of proficiency is very low. The study traces the mutual impact of each dimension on particular aspects in order to identify four distinct learner profiles. The goal of this book is to provide a platform for further discussion of the dynamics of second language development and the interconnectedness of the systems involved in this development. Iwona Kowal calls for an individual approach to be taken with every learner and for development to be treated as a constant interplay between many factors.