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 Paradigm of Cultural Hybridity in the Postcolonial Discourse
- In a broad view, culture has two primary operative functions: one is to endorse the ‘fixed tablet of tradition’ and the second is to provide a location for the progression of culture through generations and time. This paper refers to the process of cultural change and hybridization, one way to distinguish between these two cultural forces is that fixed tradition is not geographically, whereas as hybridisation is often specifically related to place, locale and situation. The rhetoric of hybridity or the hybrid talk is associated with the emergence of postcolonial discourse and its critiques of cultural imperialism. This stage in the history of hybridity is characterised by literature and theory that focuses on the effects of mixture upon identity and culture. Cultural hybridity produces new forms of alterity and is inherent in processes of social and cultural dynamics. A sharp contrast between cultures and hybrids is the notion of choice in cultural referent. This choice is significant because in cultural hybrids, traditions are loosened, and the capacity to make choices allowed. Cultural hybridity therefore, represents a cultural dynamism. This ferment of culture is found on the borders, in the overlaps, and the in-between places between two or more cultures.
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- The Phonetics and Phonology of English Casual Speech
- This paper examines processes of “connected” or “casual” speech in second language pronunciation, focusing on the speech of Korean learners of English. The paper begins with the point of view of Articulatory Phonology, which argues that many assimilations and deletions in casual speech are the result of overlap between articulatory gestures. Examples from English and Russian illustrate gestural overlap. Further examples are provided from a more detailed phonetic study of processes of nasalization and voicing assimilation in Korean and Korean-accented English (Zsiga 2011). The Korean-English data show evidence of gradient gestural overlap in voicing assimilation, and in some instances of partial nasal assimilation, supporting the Articulatory Phonology approach. Many instances of categorical nasal substitution were also found, however. It is argued that a more traditional phonological feature-changing analysis better accounts for the categorical changes. Both Articulatory Phonology and traditional feature-based phonology are required to account for the full set of data.
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- The Pragmalinguistic and Sociopragmatic Aspects of English
- The current paper provides results of a study that investigated the usage of pragmatics by non-native speakers (NNSs) of English when making e-mail requests. Initial data from the study shows that NNSs differ from native speakers (NSs) in politeness and perlocution (i.e., the effect that an utterance has on its recipient) of their English e-mail requests. The data also show that NNSs and NSs differ in the specific pragmatic strategies related to the structure and content used in their e-mail requests. Additional data from this study indicates that explicit instruction can positively affect the perlocution of NNS e-mail requests and the long-term usage of pragmatic features found in the e-mail messages of NNSs, although the greatest effect is observed in the appropriate usage of structural features. The results of this study support the need for instruction of e-mail pragmatics to second language learners and reveal the possible benefits of such instruction.
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- The Role of Orthography and Phoneme Inventory in Dutch Students’ Speech Perception in the EFL Classroom
- The goal of this paper is twofold: to determine whether orthography hampers students’ L2 speech perception and whether, as PAM-L2 predicts, the L1 phoneme inventory influences L2 speech perception of Dutch secondary school students. First, a pilot perception test was administered to see if ‘new’ sounds that do not exist in the Dutch phoneme inventory are harder to perceive than ‘same’ sounds. Next, another perception test was created to look at whether orthography hampers Dutch students’ perception of -for Dutch listeners- difficult English phonemes or phoneme clusters. In that perception test, all phoneme (cluster)s were embedded in common English words as spoken stimuli, and the written target words were sometimes words with an orthography that corresponded with the auditorily perceived word and sometimes with an orthography that differed from the auditorily perceived word. Results indicate that orthography impedes perception. Furthermore, in line with the predictions of PAM-L2, ‘new’ L2 sounds are harder to perceive than ‘same’ sounds.
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- The Spatial Continuation of Englishness in H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods
- This paper examines continuities and ruptures between England and Utopia on the level of spatiality in H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods (1923). In designating the possibility of time travel, similar to The Time Machine, Wells enforces the idea of indiscrete space where Utopia has become England’s spatial continuation. In line with Wells’s bifocal perspective on England, which balances between a sentimental and yet detached depiction, and uncompromising visions of destruction, Utopia is construed of both clearness and dissent. Through the image of and debates about the Crystal Palace, it is sustained that the concept of Utopia is closely linked to Wells’s anti-entropic impulses and evolutionary gradualism. It is concluded that, equipped with the means of locomotion, traditions of freedom, and the discourse of “progress with continuity”, the English identity is appropriately geared to a continuous transition into Utopia.
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- The Token Hero’s Journey
- Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, or the Hero’s Journey, is a series of gross constituent units which ultimately lead to the Hero status. The Journey introduced the idea of deferral in terms of attaining the Hero status. The status is bestowed on the Hero by the collective consciousness immediately upon his departure, but is deferred indefinitely by the Hero himself. The Hero is removed from the concept and turned into a token as soon as he is labeled with it. The Journey is the effort of the Hero to construct a pattern which would eventually lead to the fundamental concept of a “Hero”. The collective consciousness perceives the Hero in terms of a metonymical sequence, while the Hero advances along the metaphorical axis. The token Hero is a token of the collective consciousness which has falsely labeled him a type. This sort of conceptual structuring creates a finite continuum of “heroism”. In order to analyze the continuum of heroism, the authors constructed a tool of analysis based on Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope. The basic form of the chronotope was adapted so that it can represent multiple layers of the story and parallel narratives. In order to test out the tool, the authors conducted an analysis of Michael Ende’s epic fantasy The Neverending Story. The paper draws a number of implications from Bakhtin’s chronotope relevant not just to the literary world, but society at large.
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- The Use of Articles in Spoken and Written Discourse
- This paper deals with a survey describing the students’ use of articles in a spoken register that was compared to the use of articles in a written register. The results showed that articles are generally more common in written than in spoken corpus. The definite article is almost twice as common as the indefinite article in the written register because it has a greater range of uses. Since in the current language teaching practice and theory the emphasis is put on the communicative language competence, it is important to decide how to best help students become proficient in the use of articles. Due to the small size of the corpus, the conclusions of the present study should be subjected to further re-examination and verification.
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- The Use of Mitigating Devices in Requests by Serbian EFL Learners
- The paper presents the examination of the ways Serbian EFL students use mitigating devices in realizing the speech act of requesting. Beginning with definitions and classifications of the main concepts, the paper presents the two main objectives of the study: the use of mitigating devices in requests by Serbian learners of EFL, and, the emphasis on the importance of teaching pragmatic aspects in schools. The method used in the research is presented, and the process of data collection explained. The data obtained from the discourse completion task are analyzed, and the possible results discussed. Finally, the research results are stated, and the attention is drawn to the importance of teaching the use of mitigating devices and to the promotion of students’ pragmatic development in EFL classroom settings.
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- The Use of the Passive in the British Daily Press
- This paper is inspired by the theory of “audience design” (Bell 1977) according to which language variation is not based on the socio-economic status of language users, but on the socio-economic status of those at whom language is directed, i.e. receivers, or intended audience. In this regard, the author of this article assumes that language use, or more to the point, the use of certain syntactic structures such as the passive, will differ in newspapers whose readers belong to different socio-economic classes. Since the passive is usually seen as being “more frequent in formal than in informal styles” (Trudgill 2002: 162), it is presumed that it will be used more frequently in those newspapers whose readers belong to higher socio-economic classes. The analysed articles are therefore taken from a representative cross section of newspapers, divided on the basis of the socio-economic status of their readers into upmarket (The Guardian), midmarket (the Daily Mail), and downmarket newspapers (The Sun). The method used is quantitative-qualitative.
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- The appeal of beauty in distress as seen in Fanny Burney’s Evelina and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
- The article aims to demonstrate that two 18th-century novels, Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Burney’s Evelina (1778), were produced according to the same principle, which may be succinctly summed in Edmund Burke’s phrase: ”Beauty in distress [is] much the most affecting beauty” (Philosophical Enquiry, 1757). The narrative patterns and protagonists have a lot in common. Needless to say, both novels enjoyed tremendous popularity and success in their day, mostly with female audiences.
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- The character of Electra in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides .
- Greek myths have always been a rich source of inspiration for many playwrights and one of the most famous myths is Agamemnon’s murder and vengeance on the mother who committed it. Among many characters that appear in the myth, Electra deserves meticulous attention and inspired even the Ancient Greek dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who approached the story in three different ways. Aeschylus regarded the matricide as a necessity and Electra in his play is both emotional and indecisive. Sophocles saw Electra as a tortured heroine who does not have limits. Euripides, the last of these playwrights to deal with the myth, provides a lot of criticism for the traditional myth and in his play Electra is not only anti-heroine but also pathological character. After Euripides, the importance of tragedy fades away in the Ancient Greece and the plays were not written anymore in the manner of the greatest playwrights.