Volume 56, Issue 3 -

Especially in Eastern Europe, literature frequently crosses borders; it has a transnational orientation. Scholarship, however, must often devise new systematic methods to analyze transnational literature. The example of the Jewish-Czech Poet J. M. Langer demonstrates this problem, in which questions such as what kind of readers do multilingual authors have and to which literary history do they belong must be addressed. It is also necessary to examine how national/European historicism has shaped scholarship, i. e. the purpose of national literary historiographies. We shall see that conjunctions of influences create a network of transna­tional intertextuality, not differences in works of literature.

These reflections on the images of the Slavs in Penčo Slavejkovs work provide a component of a more general study on modern and avant-garde concepts of ‘the nation’. Various ideas on the ‘modern soul’ and its topographical character are essential for these concepts. One of the paradoxes of the period of modernism is that the ‘soul’, – which is usually first and foremost defined as being immaterial and a-historical – can be geographically and ethnically determined. The reflections on the ‘Slavic Soul’, which play a crucial role in Slavejkovs aesthetics, are accompanied by a derogatory attitude towards other ethnicities, such as the Germanic or Latin. Nonetheless, Slavejkov is nowadays portrayed as an ironical opponent of any nationalism. The essay at hand seeks an explanation for such a characterization of Slavejkov in the key concepts of Bulgarian literary criticism, namely in the notions of “Europe” and “the Belated Nation”.

The paper analyses several means and strategies to interactively construe an in-group identity and, thereby, co-construct and exclude an out-group, which are used in the context of Russian and Ukrainian women’s high involvement conflict style. The strategies are verbal, pragmatic and regarding contents. They apply on the level of phrasing, the content level and the level of interaction. The in-group and in effect also the out-group they conceptualise vary. Some devices establish a locally defined in-group which is mostly associated with the opponent in the discussion. Others create an in-group which is wider and culturally or socially defined. Accordingly, their potential to exclude an out-group also varies. It is shown how these strategies interact in the context of the analysed conflict communication.

This paper investigates the semantic composition of Russian possessive constructions. It is argued that in sentences of the kind u X est' Y , the Y-expression is used to refer to a type. Accordingly, the nominal sobaka in a sentence like U Igorja est' sobaka denotes the type ‘dog’. The fact that the sentence (utterance) is nevertheless about a particular dog, i.e. about some token of the type, is explained by the semantic impact of the existence predicate est' . It is demonstrated how the proposed analysis can account for the linguistic data known about Russian possessive constructions, and how it can be implemented in terms of DRT.

Linguistically, the past two decades in Bosnia and Hercegovina were characterized by the implementation of three legal languages, “Bosnian”, “Croatian” and “Serbian”, which replaced the formerly used “Serbocroatian”. What initially looked like a merely terminological change for ideological reasons has developed into a gradually growing language change along ethnic lines, which could be measured by quantitative analysis, the methods and results of which will be presented partly in this article. Through additional qualitative analysis it became evident that these linguistic changes are not spreading equally within each linguistic group, but are only affecting the language use and speech of the majorities of certain areas. This means, that there is a great difference between the level of standardization, acceptance and actual use of the three languages in question leading to the establishment of linguistic areas rather than the planed equal trilingualism in the state.

The present paper is concerned with the construction ‘direct speech + verb of emotion’ in Russian, focusing on the question where the ‘utterance’-interpretation for verbs of emotion in this specific context derives from. Moreover, a tentative typology of direct speech constructions will be provided, illustrating that the type of relation between direct speech and matrix verb, and hence the motivation for the ‘utterance’-interpretation, depends on the semantic characterisation and the event structure of the ‘matrix’ verb.

The paper discusses the phenomenon of phraseological false cognates on the example of Upper-Sorbian and Polish idioms. The author talks about the views on lexemic and phraseological false friends. The analysis examines the motivations of the differences in meaning between formal identical and similar phraseological units in Upper-Sorbian and Polish. It includes relevant examples to illustrate the categories of phraseological false friends within which dissimilarities are considered.

Zusammenfassung Juliane Besters-Dilger und Achim Rabus (Hrsg.), Text – Sprache – Grammatik. Slavisches Schrifttum der Vormoderne. Festschrift für Eckhard Weiher, München – Berlin: Otto Sagner, 2009. (Die Welt der Slaven: Sammelbände; 39) ISBN 978-3-86688-081-8

Zusammenfassung Rothstein, Björn, Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten für Linguisten. Tübingen: narr Verlag, 2011. 218 S. ISBN 3823366300

Zusammenfassung Keil, Rolf-Dietrich, Puškin- und Gogol′- Studien, Köln; Weimar; Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2011. 429 S. (Bausteine zur slavischen Philologie und Kulturgeschichte Reihe A: Slavistische Forschungen; 69) ISBN 978-3-412-20565-2

Zusammenfassung Marina Scharlaj: Das Weißrussische zwischen Sprachkontakt und Sprachverdrängung. München: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2008. 154 S. Ill., graph. Darst. (Specimina philologiae slavicae 147) ISBN: 978-3-86688-038-2