Philologia
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Philologia is a peer-reviewed academic journal established by scholars at Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, in 2003. The journal welcomes articles, critical and theoretical essays, empirically-based analyses, book reviews, conference reports and translations related to the studies of language, linguistics, applied linguistics, literature, culture, translatology, social science. Various subfields of the said sciences may also be analyzed.
All papers are evaluated in a double-blind fashion by two external reviewers who are experts in the relevant field. The contributions are required to be solidly anchored in theory and methodology (qualitative or quantitative). They may be of interdisciplinary nature.
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- The Construct of Reading and its Operationalization in the Internet-Based Test of English as a Foreign Language
- In this paper an effort is made to define the construct of reading followed by the operationalization of the construct through texts and tasks selected in order to assess reading comprehension in a standardized test exemplified by TOEFL iBT. As defining a construct is by no means an easy task for researchers or test developers, a number of potentially useful methods is suggested to help them struggle through test development process. In the second part of the paper, abilities deemed necessary for efficient text processing, text comprehension, and responding to the tasks designed to measure comprehension in this test are analyzed. TOEFL iBT makes use of academic reading as it is academic environment which is defined as a target language domain. Given that the test is administered by computer and via the Internet, there is an overview of question formats utilized in the test in order to operationalize the construct of reading.
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- The Cult of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting
- This article comments on the way Scottish national stereotypes in literature – ambivalence, “tartan myths” and the tradition of despair – are exposed and employed in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.
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- The Cultural Choice
- During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Arab Cultural Revolution known as al-Nahda brought about an intense work of translation into Arabic, and adaptation of the most representative works of some European authors. My contribution highlights the main stages in the development of modern Arab literature, starting with al-Nahda, the cultural Arab Renaissance of the late 19th century. It investigates the economical and political background that made possible the cultural transfer brought out by the Renaissance. It stresses the importance of the literary translations from different Western literatures, and the extent to which they influenced the literatures in the Arab countries.
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- The Endangered Horizon in Alice Oswald’s “Dunt
- U radu se analizira pesma Alis Osvald „Dunt: pesma za skoro isušenu reku” u kojoj autorka ističe suprotnosti između klasičnog „presipanja” i kulture, ispoljene kroz jezik, kao način postojanja i povezivanja, i kao deo prirode, koja je gotovo isušena. „Zamalo isušena” nije samo jedna reka,već pristup klasičnoj kulturi, koju su Metju Arnold, C.S. Luis i Džon Raskin veličali da bi odbranili ne-naučne vidove ljudske prirode. „Dunt” uspešno povezuje čitaoce sa tim svetom što traga za estetikom, a ne raspravom. Ponavljajući naredbu „pokušaj ponovo”, prikazuje pokušaj da sasluša to što skoro da više ne postoji. Oblikom imperativa odjekuje Hajdegerovo naređenje da saslušamo prirodu stvari, uprkos pokušaju savremenog napretka da ih uništi i prikrije njihovu sposobnost da „razasjavaju” svet – zamalo da ih isuše.
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- The Invisible Hand in The Remains of the Day
- The modern economist Eric D. Beinhocker rightly states that economies stem from people’s choices and decisions. The miniature model of reality within the confines of any fiction book could offer a bird’s eye view of the decision-making process. This is what the English writer of Japanese origins Kazuo Ishiguro indirectly proves in his third novel, The Remains of the Day, which thus gives a literary answer to a question all economists, past and present, have asked themselves at least once: Why is the invisible hand concept, proposed by the father of modern economics Adam Smith, so unfeasible in the real world?
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- The Issue of Age and Language Transfer in Second Language Acquisition
- The purpose of this paper is to contribute to second language acquisition research by exploring the age effects in the initial stages of second language (L2) development with respect to the mother tongue transfer of morphosyntactic features. It assumes the generative framework of grammar and language acquisition, where direct L2 child- adult comparison has been a neglected area of research. The [± strong] Infl parameter of Universal Grammar, V-raising in particular, is taken as the linguistic element of investigation, since it assigns different values in English [- strong] and in Macedonian [+ strong]. The participants in the experiment were a group of children (age 8-11) and a group of adults (age 20-60), all native speakers of Macedonian and beginners of L2 English. They were tested after a four-week exposure to specifically designed instruction on English V-raising. As the entire L1 grammar transfers, the results offer support for the Conservation Hypothesis for L1 transfer for the initial stages of second language acquisition (Van de Craats et al. 1999).
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- The Meaning of the Ye Forms in Basse Mandinka
- The present paper analyzes the semantic load of grams formed by means of the entity ye in the Mandinka variety spoken in Basse and neighboring villages in the easternmost part of Gambia. Such constructions may be divided into two classes: YE1 and YEs types. As for the YE1 variety, our evidence demonstrates that the construction is used as a present perfect (resultative, inclusive, iterative, experiential, indefinite and performative), past tense (perfective, simple and durative), pluperfect and future perfect. In conditional phrases, the formation introduces three sorts of meaning: hypothetical eventual activities, counterfactual but yet possible actions and unreal counterfactual past situations. When derived from certain verbs of receiving, perceiving and feeling, it functions as a simultaneous-resultative, stative and simple present and past. It is also found in proverbs with the value of a universal or habitual present. In respect to the YE2 gram, the meaning is invariably modal. The construction functions as a cohortative, imperative and jussive. The gram may also display real (present-future) and unreal (past) optative meanings. In dependent final subordinate clauses, the YE2 form is used with the force of a subjunctive purposive category, expressing goals and intentions.
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- The Mobility of Sexual Identity and the Androgynous Vision in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- The modern concept of identity implies fluid and dynamic relations between an individual and political, social, cultural and other specific backgrounds. As the boundaries tend to dissolve due to travel, nomadism, diaspora, cultural hybridity etc. the new configurations of identity take place. How do the “new geography of identity“, and gender as one of its constituents fit in the androgynous vision of Virginia Woolf, presented in her novel Orlando? The mobility of sexual identities of the characters in the novel and the vacillation between one sex and the other raise issues not only of the determinability of sexual difference and the relationship between masculine/feminine, but also of the reality of life itself.
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- The Monophthongs of Traditional Cockney and Popular London Speech in Context
- The paper examines the pure vowels of Traditional Cockney as pronounced in connected speech by three elderly male speakers and compares the F1 and F2 values with those obtained for RP by Deterding, and those from a previous experiment with the same speakers for the vowels in citation form (in the context /h_d/).