Band 54, Heft 3

This paper presents an eye-tracking study in which number processing in simultaneous interpreting was investigated. Interpreting accuracy and eye behaviour were studied together to unveil the processing and rendering of numbers by interpreting trainees (N = 22) and professional interpreters (N = 26). While professional interpreters rendered numerals and the context in which they appeared with better accuracy, there was also a positive correlation between number interpreting accuracy and context interpreting accuracy. Our results indicate that interpreting arithmetic values of numerals is more cognitively demanding than interpreting their context, which is reflected in longer mean fixation duration on numbers than on the elements they referred to. Further research is needed to investigate numerical data processing in other tasks, involving other language pairs and interpreting directionality. The study outcomes may be a useful contribution to research on the cognitive aspects of simultaneous interpreting, numerical data processing, as well as interpreter training.

Recent work suggests that Ukrainian represents a typologically rare bidirectional stress system with internal lapses, i.e. sequences of unstressed syllables in the vicinity of primary stress (Łukaszewicz and Mołczanow 2018a, b). The system is more intricate than the hitherto known bidirectional systems (e.g. Polish), and thus interesting from the theoretical perspective, as it involves interaction between free lexical stress and secondary stresses. Lexical and subsidiary prominence in Ukrainian have been shown to be expressed acoustically in terms of increased duration of the whole syllable. This leaves open the question of the role of classic vowel parameters in shaping prominence effects in this language. The present study fills this gap by investigating vowel duration, intensity, and F0 as potential acoustic correlates of primary and secondary stress in Ukrainian. It focuses on words with primary stress on the fifth syllable. Such words are predicted to have secondary stress on the first and third syllables. The results point to statistically significant lengthening of vowels carrying lexical stress as well as of those in the initial syllable, but not in the third syllable. A possible explanation is that other parameters, e.g. consonant duration, may be crucial in the case of word-internal subsidiary stress in Ukrainian.

This paper is concerned with the forms of expression of occupational terms in contemporary Croatian institutional practice, typical of the changes in language policy and public language usage. Predominant in Croatian language was the androcentric practice of using masculine occupational terms as unmarked, gender-neutral. However, due to various reasons, it has changed in past years. The 2008 Amendments to the Croatian National Classification of Occupations marked the turning point in gender equality in terms of providing for gender-specific occupational nouns. For the first time, an official document codified both masculine and feminine occupational titles and stipulated their usage as a national classification standard, thus acknowledging a significant language change. However, the 2008 and 2010 Classifications both displayed certain asymmetries as well. The paper pinpoints these asymmetries, documents elements of linguistic sexism still remaining, as well as successful “escapes” from it, and tries to determine whether imbalances and barriers within the binary masculine-feminine concept are brought about by intralinguistic (lexical) or extralinguistic factors.

This paper analyzes China’s president Xi Jinping’s discourse of political measures including the construction of the Party’s “work style”, anticorruption drive, and China’s economic development. The analysis is based on an integrated framework combining discursive representations (Fairclough 1995, 2003) and Martin and White’s (2005) framework for the language of evaluation. Through the analysis, this study is hoped to offer a discourse perspective regarding the CCP’s “discursive governance”, that is, how the lifeworld discursive resources including metaphors, representations of daily scenarios, and colloquialisms in the CCP’s discourse work to strengthen the argumentations for its governance.