Volume 54, Issue 2

This paper describes a perception experiment with Polish listeners involving vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) in L2 English. A forced-choice rhyming task employing the Silent Center (SC) paradigm revealed relatively uniform effects of stimulus type (SC, Initial, Middle, Final) on accuracy across two proficiency groups, despite greater overall accuracy on the part of the more proficient users. Analysis of individual vowel pairs used in the rhyming trials revealed some effects of proficiency on the degree to which formant movement in the stimuli affected identification accuracy. This research contributes to the relatively sparse literature on VISC in L2 acquisition. Phonological considerations underlying the degree of VISC in Polish and English are also discussed.

The aim of this article is to examine the meaning potential of images in the enactment or creation of gender stereotypes in a corpus of contemporary British TV commercials. The dimensions outlined in Goffman (1979) and some aspects of Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2006) metafunctions are taken as a starting point to quantitatively and qualitatively analyse a sample of 155 ads which depict women and men in working settings. Findings indicate that women are mainly portrayed in non-remunerated scenarios, in home settings and in the company of their children. This view is reinforced thanks to the multimodal dimensions of framing (mostly through close-ups), involvement with other participants through looks, smiling and profuse touching activity. Men, in contrast, are mostly depicted in remunerated scenarios in which they address the audience directly through demand looks, acting as experts in their professional capacity and framed with medium and long shots. When portrayed together in non-remunerated activities, men are found in family scenes, although they are sometimes portrayed as passive subjects and mere objects of contemplation through lack of interaction with children or spouses. This contrasts with women’s more communal role as they are intimately depicted in the company of their children through close-ups, feminine touch, and constant interaction with them. Stereotyped portrayals are less visually patent when both men and women are simultaneously depicted in remunerated scenarios, although some ads emphasize women’s interpersonal skills as better at talking to customers or patients, whereas men are shown in the role of experts in financial and medical issues.

Prepositions encode various causal forces when expressing emotion causality in emotion constructions. This study investigates two pairs of prepositions, the zerodimensional at and by , and the two- or three-dimensional with and about , which show contrasting collocation patterns in emotion constructions. Through a corpus analysis of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this study claims that there is a strong tendency that zero-dimensional prepositions are used with short-term emotions, whereas two- or three-dimensional prepositions frequently occur with long-term emotions. This study argues that the constraints of distributions of prepositions with emotive adjectives can be accounted for by features of their spatial source meanings in early usages. In the framework of grammaticalization, the constraints of collocation patterns of two pairs of prepositions with emotive adjectives show the phenomenon with respect to the “persistence” of Hopper (1991) in which traces of the source lexemes are retained in the constraints of their distributions. This study is significant in that it suggests a typology of causality based on spatial dimensions of prepositions.

This study focuses on the differences in pitch register and pitch span across five accents of English, and investigates their potential effects on judgements of speech. We recorded two male middle-aged speakers for each of the following accents of English: Brighton, Manchester, Perth, New Jersey and Edmonton. Then, we modified pitch register in selected spontaneous speech recordings by raising the overall pitch in the recordings by 5 Hz and 15 Hz using Praat. The entire material was then randomized and prepared for an online survey. A group of 50 respondents (30 female, 20 male) who were non-native speakers of English were asked in a blind study to evaluate both the unmodified and modified recordings on a 7-point Likert scale in terms of their perceived attractiveness, friendliness, prestige and self-confidence. Overall, it has been found that pitch span can be a telling cue when evaluating perceived friendliness for both gender groups, while pitch register can affect male listeners in evaluating attractiveness and self-confidence. Finally, it seems that there is a an upper limit for what listeners can aesthetically accept in terms of pitch register, as the recordings with highest registers were disfavored by our respondents.

Audiovisual translation has become a common subject of a number of scientific articles, special issues of translation journals or conferences. It may seem that this fascinating area of research has been examined thoroughly and may only be investigated further from the point of view of technological improvements in human communication. However, there are certain modalities of AVT which may appear to have been neglected from the scientific point of view. This article is aimed at discussing such a modality of AVT, namely opera surtitling. It concentrates on surtitling strategies employed by Polish opera houses, which are discussed mainly from the point of view of the semiotics of opera and AVT theory. Results of a questionnaire survey on surtitling conducted among operatic audiences are provided to support the discussion. The surtitling strategies as well as particular techniques observed in provided samples are confronted with the accepted practice, which arises from the theoretical prerequisites and seems common to most famous opera houses. It all helps to arrive at the conclusion that this particular AVT modality is a demanding task, requiring both translational and extra-linguistic expertise.