Volume 56, Issue 2 -

By resorting to tourist information such as brochures, advertisements and web sites, this articles aims to find out in what way the elements of text on urban history written for marketing purposes achieve to make a case and lay the foundation for further argumentative development. But before turning to theoretical questions of argumentation the structural principles of (re)construction of the past shall be pinpointed by taking the west-Ukrainian city of L’viv as an example. As shown later, the overriding structures of marketing often narrow and sometimes even define the supposed course of history. Methodically, this analysis resorts to concepts of cultural semiotics, discourse analysis, history and the telling of history as a practice applied to create fiction.

The “century of the encyclopaedias and dictionaries” (Siècle de l’Encyclopédie) in France will have induced Antioch Kantemir (in 1738–1744 in Paris as Russian diplomat) to compile the first known “Russian-French dictionary”. As his main sources – Polikarpov (1704) and Weismann (1731) – provided Russian and Latin equivalents (as well as Greek or German vocabulary), but not the French words, a remarkable specific feature of the Kantemir-dictionary becomes apparent: for the French semantization process of Russian headwords often the Latin equivalent was used by means of consultation of Latin-French encyclopaedias or French dictionaries listing also the Latin words (even Lémery’s Latin-French specialised dictionary). Those dictionaries prove a Russian-Latin-French transfer, even though the step from Latin to French is not listed in Kantemir’s dictionary.

This paper outlines distributional and combinational potentials of consonants in Present Standard Czech. We adopt a notion distributional unit introduced by Jan W. F. Mulder. It is defined as a bundle of positions such that in every such position a phoneme can stand and commute with other phonemes or with ∅ (be empty). Nine positions are established for Czech: five pre-nuclear, one nuclear and three post-nuclear. The sum of these positions is an underlying grid upon which the structure of all the phonotagms (roughly: syllables) in Czech can be effectively mapped and thus exhaustively described. This paper focuses in particular on the distribution of Czech consonants and includes tables containing 413 pre-nuclear (= syllable-initial) and 82 post-nuclear (= syllable-final) consonantal combinations in Czech. Such a comprehensive list has not, to the best of our knowledge, been published elsewhere.

Language discourse frequently uses metaphors. Since the “iconic turn”, it has become increasingly common to analyze culture also by using distinctive imagery and signs. Sign-formation as a semiotic process is intensified in small, peripheral and often mixed spaces, which, from a linguistic viewpoint, are often functionally limited. On the one hand, cultural monologisation (including language) occurs where culture becomes a text monument. On the other hand, culture often attempts to go beyond the scope of the small. This paper investigates and compares the metaphorical and figurative concepts used in metalinguistic discourse in a selected corpus of contemporary Belorussian texts. By using the example of fighting as a metaphor, this article shows how language and bilingual situations are conceptualized, and questions the universals and representativeness of this concept within the boundaries of the cultural linguistics discipline.

The novel “Anděl / Angel Station” delivers an another example of the unusual writing style of the Czech author Jáchym Topol after “Sestra / City Sister Silver”. In his early narratives the author deals with the harrowing times after 1991 not only thematically, but also on a structural and linguistic level. This troubling thriller, driven by the search for happiness in threatening static times, unfolds into an allegory – and proclaims a story of salvation both psychedelic and from an “unreliable” perspective. The paper shows how this allegory is produced through a specific poetic of transpositions, by examples of displacement figures on the spatio-temporal level, on the level of motifs and the specific development of the story. In doing so, a glance is cast on the changes that are made through translation (drawing on the example of the German translation) and by transferring the novel to other media (here, above all, the resulting film).

This essay discusses the phenomenon of “aggressive localism” in literary works by Andrzej Stasiuk and Jurij Andruchovyč. The former is characterized by anti-urbanism, underground aesthetic, and regional determinism. The Wende – as the revolutionary events of 1989/91 in East and Central Europe are commonly, if controversially, referred to in German – is used as metaphorical pivot. Across this rupture the city serves as the dominant frame of reference for (self-) interpretations of underground art, defined as a specifically all-embracing form of expression that seeks to subvert “official” claims about the city, i. e. spatial hierarchies. The city thus connects the marginally (sub-) urban with political dissent in the form of social nonconformity. Stasiuk and Andruchovyč intensely employ literary means derived from aesthetic patterns of underground art. Their characters envisage urban solitude and death, post-multicultural fissures in the (great) city. Yet, both narrators depict “their” respective city as a metropolitan village, as a place of a more local, even rural, of indeed pagan profile. At the same time, they use these patterns to praise the East Central European countryside as a “slow space”. In such manner, they appropriate a pre- Wende aesthetic strategy in order to produce structural aggressive fantasies of a re-ruralized “East”.

Largely unobserved by philological research, the Czech culture has shown far above average receptiveness to a number of Russian dramatists, among them M. Ju. Lermontov. While the English speaking world keeps waiting for a translation of the canonic version of “Maskarad” (1835), there have been three independent Czech translations of this play – by František Táborský (1929), František Píšek (1941) and Emanuel Frynta (1951). Comparative analysis of these translations out of which two have been staged proves to forward the interpretation of this complex piece of dramatic literature (“a problem of interpretation forever”, Frynta). A discussion of several Czech theatre productions of “Maskarad” between 1941 and 2008 reveals historical and cultural context, but also impressive cases of actualization in all of these productions.

Čornejová, Michaela, Tvoření nejstarších českých místních jmen . Bohemika z 11.-13. století. Brno: Masarykova univerzita – MUNI Press, 2009. 204 S. ISBN 978-80-210-5027-3

Zusammenfassung Reinhard Ibler (Hg.), Der russische Gedichtzyklus : Ein Handbuch. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006, 356 S., Personenverzeichnis, ISBN 3-8253-5253-6

Zusammenfassung Rumjancev, Oleh Je., Pytannja nacional′noji identyčnosti rusyniv i ukrajinciv Juhoslaviji (1918–1991) . München, Berlin: Sagner, 2010 (Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe; 11), 523 S. ISBN 978-3-86688-114-3

Zusammenfassung Europa und seine Werte . Hrsg. von Jerzy Bartmiński und Rosemarie Lühr. Frankfurt am Main u.a.: Peter Lang, 2009. 290 S. ISBN: 978-3-631-59057-7

Zusammenfassung Krause, Marion, Epistemische Modalität . Zur Interaktion lexikalischer und prosodischer Marker. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007. 250 S. ISBN 978-3-447-05635-9