Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero holds a foundational place in feminist literature as a stark indictment of patriarchal violence in Arab societies. This article employs Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as both a methodological framework and feminist epistemological stance to re-examine the novel’s linguistic and ideological operations. CDA is treated not as a neutral linguistic tool, but as a critical social practice revealing how power, ideology, and inequality are produced and contested through language. Through close readings of key moments related to the protagonist, the article traces how her agency is linguistically muted, reconfigured, and constrained. It argues that the novel functions as a counter-discursive intervention exposing the normalization of violence while revealing the limits placed on resistance under authoritarianism. By bringing CDA into dialogue with feminist literary analysis, the study affirms the novel’s significance as a site of ideological struggle.
This study examines Voice Onset Time (VOT) in word-initial stops produced by six Slovenian (L1) students of English (L2) with C1/C2-level proficiency. Using acoustic and linear mixed-model analysis, the research compares the production of these stops in both languages. The results confirm Slovenian as a lead (for /b d g/) vs short-lag language (for /p t k/). In their L2 English, the speakers establish new phonetic categories by lengthening VOT in voiceless stops, reflecting the acquisition of aspiration characteristic of English. In contrast, the voiced series shows strong L1 transfer, as the speakers largely retain prevoicing instead of achieving the target short-lag realizations. The findings of this exploratory study indicate that the L2 English system functions as an upward-shifted version of the L1 Slovenian system: while the acquisition of aspirated /p t k/ is supported, the Slovenian prevoiced /b d g/ remain largely resistant to change, even in highly proficient L2 English speakers.
The increase in migration to Europe over the last decade has spurred a growing demand for interpreting in reception and public service situations. Language mediation in such contexts often relies on untrained interpreters. Interpreter education and awareness-raising, both among interpreters and users of interpreters, are thus important steps towards quality assurance and professionalization. This contribution presents findings from a multi-step user study among interpreting students and novice practitioners. The participants evaluated the usefulness of digital training resources developed in the Erasmus+ project ReTrans (Working with Interpreters in Refugee Transit Zones). Semi-structured interviews provided valuable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of these resources, particularly regarding key aspects such as confidence-building, the balance between theoretical content and practical applicability, and overall usefulness.
Alice Munro’s “Vandals”, a story of the sexual abuse of a little girl, was first published in 1993. While it received considerable scholarly attention in the past, with a specific focus on the female character Bea, who fails to protect the girl, interest in the story was reignited after the sexual abuse in Munro’s own family was revealed in 2024, shortly after the author’s death. The newly revealed biographical testimony calls for a systematic rereading of this story as potentially semi-biographical. This paper focuses on the story’s three protagonists in their respective roles of abuser, victim and bystander, and analyses Munro’s skilful use of evaluative language in the portrayal of these characters, employing the appraisal model by Martin and White (2005) and focusing specifically on attitude, one of the three main categories in the model, in an experimental attempt to apply this approach to a story containing polyfocalization.
Effective responses to negative online customer reviews are seen as highly beneficial for influencing customer perceptions and protecting brand reputation. However, managers’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds may affect their linguistic choices. This study examines the markers of attitudinal stance in managerial responses, pointing to the range of rhetorical purposes associated with these forms, and comparing the ways in which managers of British and Serbian hotels exploit these devices. Tripadvisor responses from hotels located in the two countries were analysed drawing upon Biber’s approach (Biber et al. 1999). The results highlight the importance of attitudinal stance in achieving the overall communicative purpose of this genre. They also reveal that British hotel representatives use them slightly more frequently than Serbian hotel managers, which may be somewhat unexpected, and tend to show greater reliance on adjectives and verbs, while modals and adverbs are slightly more common in the responses from Serbian hotels.
