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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- English Weak Forms – a Challenge for Bulgarian Learners of English?
- The aim of this study is to determine whether it is problematic for Bulgarian language learners of English to acquire and produce the reduced forms of English function words correctly. What I also note is how Bulgarian learners incorporate weak forms in relation to the distribution of stresses in the flow of their Bulgarian English speech compared to the distribution of stresses and weak forms in the speech of a native English speaker. The study relies on empirical evidence collected in a class environment from a homogenous group of 20 Bulgarian learners of English, who are first-year university students in English and American Studies at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. I investigate their production of weak forms in a very well-known connected speech diagnostic passage which contains a sufficient number of common weak form words. All of the participants have been studying English as a foreign language for 4 or more years. The acquisition and the production of English weak forms is a problematic area for native speakers of Bulgarian and their perception and production need further investigation.
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- Evil friends
- Childhood fiction has received great critical attention due to its exploration of identity development, a tendency which can also be observed in contemporary diasporic narratives dealing with the experience of ethnic minority children. Two of such narratives are Anita and Me (1996) by Indian-British Meera Syal and The Icarus Girl (2005) by Nigerian-British Helen Oyeyemi, both focused on the childhood experiences of two girls from ethnic minorities who grow up in racist societies. This essay surveys the connections that can be observed between both novels as they deploy the friendship motif in their depiction of the protagonists’ identity conflicts after turning to damaging friendships for identification and approval. The assessment of the links between both narratives leads to insightful reflections regarding diasporic writing and identity formation in migrant children.
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- Examining intonation
- In this article Professor John Wells provides a first-hand, examiner’s experience on how well native speakers of English score in an intonation test which is a part of the practical oral examination in phonetics at the University College London, as in many universities in Britain. The examinees’ performance in the test is discussed in relation to their implementation of the tonality, tonicity and tone in the test sentence. Animated renditions of the test sentence are best avoided and examinees are advised to choose an unmarked intonation pattern in any particular case. The analysis of the examinees’ scores has shown that the safest way to score well in an intonation test is to keep things simple and natural, as intonation in a real language functions this way.
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- Facing the other
- Having described himself as primarily “a passionately religious man,” Lawrence understands his work to be a deep religious response to the living cosmos and an intense ontological yearning to be. Being man, he is profoundly convinced, means being a thought-adventurer. While, rather than being a mere combination of the acquired information within the impassive Cartesian cogito, real knowledge sprouts from the immediate sensual recognition of an unknown world. In one’s genuine attendance to the Other, one ventures into the unknown, risking all the inherited conceptions and becomes transported to another ontological level, where the misery of time is transcended and freedom to create is acquired. In an attempt to give my interpretation of Lawrence’s text an eschatological frame, I draw on the rich field of research carried out in eschatological metaphysics, while primarily relying on the work of Nikolaj Berdjaev.
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- False cognates
- The aim of this paper is to set out a major obstacle, false cognates, faced by many Algerian students wishing to translate from and into French and English.
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- Formal Semantics, Lexical Semantics, and Compositionality
- The focus of the paper is the interaction of meaning and context with different kinds of adjectives. Adjective meanings are shown to be more constrained than was appreciated in earlier work. Facts about “NP-splitting” in Polish and Russian cast serious doubt on the standard hierarchy of adjectives, and the data become much more orderly if privative adjectives are reanalyzed as subsective adjectives. This revised account requires the possibility of coerced expansion of the denotation of the noun to which an adjective is applied. Compositionality can be seen as one of the driving forces in such context-sensitive meaning shifts.
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- Formant Measurements of Serbian Speakers’ English Vowels
- We present the results of an acoustic investigation of English vowels as produced by Serbian speakers, students in the English Department, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade. The number of participants was 26 (13 first-year students, and 13 fourth-year/ MA students), and measured were F1 and F2 of stressed vowels — 11 monophthongs (KIT, DRESS, TRAP, FOOT, STRUT, LOT, FLEECE, PALM, GOOSE, THOUGHT and NURSE) and 4 diphthongs (GOAT, PRICE, MOUTH and FACE). Measurements were also made of the participants’ L1 vowels, with which their L2 vowels were compared. Participants were recorded reading BBC news copy in English, and two very short stories in Serbian. The number of tokens analyzed was 7534 for English (around 305 per speaker), and 4266 for Serbian. The results show that Serbian-speaking learners, at the proficiency level of our informants, do not on the whole substitute their L2 vowels with L1 vowels; on the other hand, they also do not quite reach the qualities characteristic of native speakers, but rather reach compromise values. Exceptions, regarding substitution, are DRESS, and for some informants at least, TRAP (both are substituted by the Serbian short /e/). The vowels that exhibited the largest intergroup differences were GOAT, GOOSE, MOUTH, PRICE, and to a lesser degree THOUGHT, with older students showing more native-like qualities.