Colloquium: New Philologies (E-Journal)
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The Blog is Served: Crossing the ‘Expert/Non-Expert’ Border in a Corpus of Food Blogs
Full text linkoai:ojs.pkp.sfu.ca:article/10In the last few years, food blogs have increasingly grown in importance, taking the role of “virtual communities” (Blanchard 2004) in which people with common interests in food share information and recipes.
Food blogs can thus be seen as places of interaction between the ‘expert’ who created the blog and ‘the non-expert’ who visits the blog and occasionally posts comments. However, this interaction is more complex than just a dual relationship between the author spreading professional knowledge and the public receiving it since visitors are often experts themselves as they include not only beginners but also experienced amateur specialists in the field of cuisine.
The present study analyses the most popular food blogs in the United Kingdom in order to investigate the features that contribute to shape the discourse of these specific virtual communities, in which language seems to constantly cross the border between professional and popular communication. Through corpus-based research methods, the study will look at the lexico-grammatical aspects that characterise the language of food blogs with the aim of investigating when and to what extent the food bloggers make use of professional language in cuisine (and related terminology, in particular) and when and to what extent they employ a more popular(ised) kind of discourse. In this respect, the analysis will also include the interactions occurring between the bloggers and the other users in order to look at the ways in which the latter respond to the former’s usage of professional or popular terminology.  
Osebni, kolektivni spomin in identiteta v sodobnem slovenskem romanopisju na avstrijskem Koroškem
Full text linkLiterature has always been the medium to help readers find their own identity and sometimes to even expand it further. In the last few years, self-reflection has thus become one of the leading ways for communicating a first-person narrator’s experience. It is particularly distinctive for the literatures of minorities, which deal with the past in their own specific way. Language, as a medium for exchanging experiences, of dreams, and thoughts is the main intermediary between past and present. In the literatures of minorities, the personal memory of an individual becomes connected with the collective memory that refers to a particular time and a particular place
“Trust, but Verify” – The Framing of the Nuclear Conflict between Iran and the West in UK and US media
Full text linkHistoricity is an important concept in people’s self-conceptualization as well as in their conceptualization of the world around them. By knowing what was, we can interpret some of what is as a consequence of past actions and events and thus understand how it came to be and how to react appropriately. For our interpretation of current events in the world, we therefore frequently rely on history “as a source of meaning” (Leudar and Nekvapil 2011, 68). Since we relate to events in the world through mediation, i.e. the media, we accordingly understand world history through the historical context that is provided for us by journalists. In many cases, however, such contextualizations of events appear to foreground proximal – or synchronous (Blommaert 2005, 130) – factors over distal ones, thus restricting interpretation to immediate factors rather than describing them as a consequence of other actions or events in history. Due to global reach of today’s corporate media, such synchronous framing of the news can lead to a certain bias of attitudes (Philo 2004, 201–202), e.g., regarding the nature of conflicts between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to the effect that ‘we’ always appear as acting on logical, justifiable and altruistic grounds, while ‘their’ actions are irrational, unwarranted and self-serving. In this paper, I analyze the framing of the political conflict between Western countries and Iran regarding its nuclear program. I investigate opinion columns from various British and U.S. newspapers in order to explore the nature of the news framing of the issue and whether any distal factors such as Western interventions in Iran and Middle Eastern affairs are taken into account. The analysis will be conducted following the Thematic Analysis approach developed by the Glasgow University Media Group (Philo and Berry 2004/2011), but including also other conceptual categories such as Blommaert’s (2005) notion of synchronicity
Lexical borrowing in Slovene green energy terminology
Full text linkThe paper presents the most common types of lexical borrowing in Slovene green energy terminology and the languages this particular field generally borrows from, with a special emphasis on calques and doublets, which often occur as a result of borrowing from these languages, e.g., odlagališče (also: deponija) ‘landfill’, odlagališčni plin (also: deponijski plin) ‘landfill gas’, biotska raznovrstnost (also: biodiverziteta, biotska pestrost, biološka raznovrstnost) ‘biodiversity’, and albedo (also: odbojnost) ‘albedo’.The examples of lexical borrowing are taken from the English-Slovene Dictionary of Green Energy Terms (Mrhar 2015) and analyzed with the help of a small corpus compiled for the purposes of this study, containing a limited number of Slovene articles on green energy and their English translations. The paper furthermore concentrates on the variety of vocabulary deployed in texts pertaining to the field and assesses both unproblematic and problematic cases of lexical borrowing
Third language vocabulary acquisition: The influence of Serbian and Hungarian as native languages on the English language
Full text linkThis paper examines the influence of bilingualism on the use of vocabulary learning strategies during the acquisition of a third language. More precisely, it debates whether having a knowledge of two languages is beneficial for the awareness and frequency of strategy use. In this analysis, the use of learning strategies of pupils bilingual in Hungarian and Serbian language is compared to their monolingual peers of Serbian language while acquiring English as a third language. Since third language acquisition (TLA) is a relatively new and unexplored area, little research has been done on this specific topic. This particular study is situated in Serbia and used a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire as a way of collecting data consisting of two parts. The first part was based on three questionnaires on vocabulary strategies proposed by Gu and Johnson (1996), and Schmitt (1997), and on Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning. The second part consisted of pupils’ suggestions and thoughts on learning strategies, together with their background information. Further discussion focuses on the use of bilinguals’ vocabulary strategies and their frequency compared to monolinguals’
Exclusion Labels in Slavic Monolingual Dictionaries: Lexicographic construal of non-standardness
Full text linkThe present paper analyzed the practices of excluding vocabulary items from the standard language in four major Slavic monolingual dictionaries (Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Slovenian). The analysis has revealed that there exist a range of primary (overt) and secondary (implicit) exclusion labels and that their effect is negotiated in the sociocognitive context of the dictionary, in a communication between the dictionary and its users
Zur Beurteilung von Schreibleistungen aus Deutsch als Erstsprache in High-Stakes Tests: Die Stabilität von Skalendeskriptoren im Bewertungsraster für die österreichische Matura
Full text linkThe present study describes a first step towards validating the rating scale for assessing L1 German writing in the context of the Austrian Matura exam. After describing the process of scale development in the context of the exam reform, it reports on an empirical study into the stability of scale descriptors. The 70 scale descriptors were assessed in terms of their difficulty by a panel of 100 experienced teachers who had not undergone training in the use of the scale. This data served as the basis for studying overall rater agreement, the correspondence of the sequence of empirically scaled descriptors to the intended sequence, and for studying rater agreement on individual descriptors. It was found that using the scale without previous rater training is not recommendable and rater training is indispensable. The highest level on the scale was found to be the most consensual among the assessors. There is relatively high agreement with regard to what constitutes excellence in L1 German writing. The descriptors on the critical pass level were found to function relatively well although at least two descriptors turned out to be unstable and should be focused on in rater training. Overall, a high number of stable descriptors was found, which is remarkable given that the assessors had not yet received training in using the scale. Suggestions for areas of focus in assessor training or minor improvements of the scale are made