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.
This paper introduces the Slovene subcorpus of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), the first representative dataset of English produced by Slovene L1 speakers. It outlines the corpus design, learner metadata, and essay characteristics, highlighting its comparability with other ICLE subcorpora. The paper reviews contrastive Slovene-English studies and relevant ICLE-based research, showing how ICLE-Slovenia enables empirical testing of hypotheses from previous work and supports contrastive interlanguage analysis (CIA) investigations into L1 transfer, learner-specific grammatical and lexical patterns, and cross-variety clustering. Despite limitations in size and genre, ICLE-Slovenia provides a valuable resource for linguistic and pedagogical research, with potential applications in teaching materials, error analysis, and longitudinal studies.
This paper examines whether corporate English became more buzzword-heavy between 2016 and 2024 and how the findings can inform university ESP courses, especially Business English. Using a fully public corpus of annual report shareholder letters and regulatory filings from the time frame of 2016–2024, the study applies corpus-assisted close reading to track recurring buzzword packages, lexical bundles, collocational patterns, and shifts in abstraction and agency. The results show that investor-facing narrative sections increasingly rely on era-framing labels and layered noun phrases that compress meaning and promote strategic alignment, while regulatory disclosures remain more operationally concrete but still admit selective buzzword insertion. Pedagogically, the patterns support teaching corporate phraseology (terminology) through concordance-style noticing, collocation mapping, genre-sensitive rewriting, and unbundling tasks that convert abstract bundles into accountable, reader-oriented plain language.
Well-developed writing performance in students’ first and additional languages is the key to their future professional success, but due to its complexity, it is difficult to achieve. In the period from 2021 to 2025, approximately half of Year 6 students, as the upper-age of young learners consistently showed low results in EFL writing proficiency in the EFL national Sandars assessment tests in Slovenia. To predict the relationship between the social factors selected and the students’ EFL writing performance, a quantitative study has been conducted with a representative sample of 790 students. The students completed a contextual questionnaire and two standardized productive writing tasks. The data were analysed by multiple regression. The main finding confirms that more exposure to EFL leads to better writing performance. Practical recommendations for teachers include raising students’ exposure to EFL, critical judgement of EFL productive writing tasks, offering the learning of more language, and maintaining good practices.
In 1950, the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing proposed that, given the difficulty of objectively comparing human and machine intelligence, since the processes employed by each differ substantially, a subjective test could be used to compare perceptions. An observer behind a partition could listen to two participants in a conversation, one human, one machine, and if the observer could not tell the difference between the two, the machine would be deemed to have passed what was then called the imitation test and is now known as the Turing Test. Seventy-six years later, anyone with a cell phone or a computer has instant, free access to AI services that can mimic human speech, writing, graphic art, and music. With inexpensive, easily accessible equipment, human voices can be made to sound like machines, and machines can speak with human-like voices. A user can even record his or her own voice and upload it, and the computer will sample it to overdub the vocal part of any song. To see if people can distinguish between human- and computer-produced songs, we conducted a survey at the University of Maribor, Slovenia and Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra, Slovakia with a musical version of the Turing Test.
Sara Jeannette Duncan creates a groundbreaking New Woman heroine in the protagonist of her novel A Daughter of Today (1894). The text portrays the struggles of Elfrida Bell in pursuing her life endeavour of creating her individual version of female identity by becoming a woman artist who leaves motherhood aside. By distancing female identity from all traditional conceptualizations in the character of Elfrida, Duncan writes the unwritten since a childless and artistic female subjectivity is portrayed as valid and valuable. A study from the intersectional critical space between New Woman and motherhood studies sheds new light on the protagonist of the novel, as well as on controversial elements of the text, such as its ending.
Going by African ideals of hegemonic masculinity, a man must be financially buoyant, powerful, and able to fulfil the provider role in his home. Ifemelu’s (unnamed) father in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah defies this cultural expectation. With critical investigations of this character lacking in the literature, this study, through a qualitative analysis built on the concept of systemic violence, complimented by the transitivity system in Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics and stylistic devices of negation, repetition, and value-laden language, investigates how the character’s varied experiences, especially his job loss, leads to his emasculation. The findings reveal that the socio-economic workings of the nation prevent Ifemelu’s father from actualizing his aspirations while empowering the privileged to oppress him. In this way, the systemic violence endemic to the workings of the system is responsible for Ifemelu’s father’s financial distress, loss of power and fatherly authority, inability to fulfil provider role at home, and thus his eventual emasculation.
Dissertation thesis reviews within the Czech academic context are, unlike journal article peer reviews, non-blind, non-anonymous, publicly available texts. The key feature of these reviews is evaluation, and they require a substantial amount of facework aimed at both the direct and the potential indirect participants. The present paper focuses on the critical comments, their content, strength, directness, and manner of formulation in a corpus of 32 reviews of technical university dissertations. All instances of criticism were analysed in terms of the use of hedges and boosters as important interactional metadiscoursal devices. These were then further scrutinized with regard to their lexical and syntactic properties. The results indicate that the reviewers are highly aware of the face-threatening nature of the genre and tend to shy away from direct criticism. The main aim of the present research is to enhance the awareness of the genre itself and the linguistic and metalinguistic evaluative features.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman does not broadly critique the American Dream, but rather targets the competitive ethos, the “law of the jungle”, as a defining American tradition. This reading reinterprets perceived contradictions in the play, positioning competition as its central theme. Charley, often viewed as a kind neighbour, subtly embodies this ethos, locked in a lifelong rivalry with Willy over masculinity, business, and fatherhood. Willy, living in a post-colonial society, does not abandon the colonial spirit represented by his father and brother, but adapts it to a modern and metropolitan environment. Personality, or popularity, is but a disguise of pragmatism in his salesmanship, of which his liaison with the Woman is only a minor expression. Well-informed of social Darwinism, Willy raises Biff and Happy to be fearless competitors. While Biff experiences an epiphany and disentangles himself from the law of the jungle, Happy carries it forward. Through Happy, Miller reveals a gloomy future of America beset with corruption and alienation.
The Medical Humanities underscore the pivotal role of autopathographies in understanding the impact of illness on the self, and the correlative senses of agency, autonomy, and identity for critical and practical insights. This study employs a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, aligned with the requirements of the Medical Humanities, incorporating cognitive approaches to life-narratives alongside Frank Kermode’s humanistic interpretation of storytelling to address two contestations with regard to the existing theories of narrative selves, particularly concerning narrative unity and totality. Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air is analysed as the quintessential autopathography that effectively responds to these challenges while adhering to the postmodern exigencies of its era.
Colour-coding and collaborative peer feedback are learner-centred techniques that support the development of writing skills in English as a foreign language (EFL), particularly in primary education. These techniques encourage creativity, foster collaboration, and increase learner engagement; however, their practical use among young learners remains underexplored. This article presents a systematic review of eight scholarly studies and theses published between 2010 and 2024, focusing on students aged 10 to 15, corresponding to the second and third cycles of the Slovenian primary school system. While the pedagogical value of these techniques is widely acknowledged, clear, age-appropriate guidelines for their classroom implementation are still lacking. To address this gap, the article synthesizes existing research and proposes a step-by-step instructional model adapted to EFL learners in this age group.
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) captured worldwide interest, generating a wealth of literature across multiple genres. In Ireland, this conflict sparked fervent debate, reflecting the nation’s own history of civil strife, with Irish volunteers joining both sides of the Spanish conflict. While conventional narratives often oversimplify the war as a clash of opposing ideologies, certain authors endeavour to offer nuanced portrayals that transcend binary interpretations. Drawing upon Kate McLoughlin’s insights into war representation, as delineated in Authoring War (2011), and Laura Saxton’s exploration of “accuracy” and “authenticity” in historical fiction, this article analyses three recent Irish historical novels –Dermot Bolger’s The Family on Paradise Pier (2005), Maurice Leitch’s Gone to Earth (2019), and Anamaría Crowe Serrano’s In the Dark (2021) – to explore how they re-create the complexities of the Spanish Civil War, examining their thematic depth, historical accuracy and narrative authenticity.
Eve Ensler’s memoir The Apology (2019) traces Ensler’s growing up with an abusive father who raped her during her childhood and never apologized for the damage he caused. Ensler, now a successful woman in her sixties, thus imagines her father’s apology and details everything she was going through. Unlike Caruth’s theory of traumatic aporia where painful experiences are inherently contradictory and can never be grasped completely, Ensler’s act of writing the unspoken words of her father points to the fact that trauma can be healed through writing. As Richard McNelly and Joshua Pederson claim, it is precisely through writing that the victim can gain control over the act of recalling, helping the survivor to remake the self. Thus, in Ensler’s memoir, Caruth’s traumatic amnesia is replaced by the power of remembered and written detail to enact healing. This essay addresses issues of incest and rape through the lens of more recent trauma theory by paying attention to an imagined act of the perpetrator’s apology. By evoking pseudo memories, Ensler tries to understand her childhood trauma and how it affected her as a person. She establishes herself as a truth-teller and the survivor of intergenerational trauma with the ability to break the cycle of abuse, which is exactly what she does by writing The Apology.
This paper aims to provide an overview of the rhetorical strategies found in university students’ emails when they write to faculty members. The analysis is based on a self-compiled corpus of 100 emails written in English and sent to the author by the English major students at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana over a one-year period. More specifically, the paper examines the sample for the use of forms of address and request strategies, such as the level of directness, internal modification and request perspective. The findings reveal a preference for conventionally indirect strategies and a significant use of consultative devices and subjectivizers. The results highlight the students’ awareness of formality and politeness in academic email communication, reflecting in most cases their sensitivity to the hierarchical nature of the student-teacher relationship.
Drawing on literary theory, translation studies, and social identity theory, the research investigates whether reading Louise Glück’s poem “Adult Grief” in English versus Slovenian elicits different affective reactions. Using a repeated-measures design and a specially developed empathy scale, the study differentiates between compassionate and distressed responses of narrative empathy and examines how they relate to the four dimensions of trait empathy as assessed by the interpersonal reactivity index. The findings indicate that empathic concern and fantasy are key predictors of empathic engagement, with fantasy enhancing perspective taking and personal distress. Notably, language significantly influences empathic responses, especially when interacting with personal distress, suggesting that reading in one's native language reduces the self-other differentiation and intensifies emotional experience. However, language exposure also moderates responses, indicating that habitual engagement in a language can enhance emotional resonance regardless of native status. These results underline the complex interplay between language, empathy, and literary affect.
This paper seeks to (re)introduce the largely overlooked Irish writer Florence Daphne Sheridan and critically examine her portrayal of 1950s and 1960s Spain in her short stories written in the 1980s. While other Irish authors such as Kate O’Brien and Pearse Hutchinson have received moderate attention in relation to their depictions of Spain, Sheridan’s literary representation of the country under Franco’s dictatorship remains largely ignored. This study explores Sheridan’s images of Spain using the framework of Imagology Studies, which focuses on the cultural construction of national identity through literary representations. Sheridan’s works offer a distinctive perspective on the intersections of Irish and Spanish cultural relations, moving beyond the romanticized or stereotypical images of Spain often found in British literature. Her fiction captures the complex realities of Spain during its developmental stage under Francoism and focuses on the effects of economic hardship, political oppression, and the influx of tourism.
