Volume 58, Issue 2 -

Starting from the believe that the main function of the language is communication, the article problematizes the obviousness of this assumption. The linguistic situation in the Slavia after the revolutions of 1989 suggests quite another idea: speaking the same language significates the membership of a community, i.e. the diversification of (not only Slavonic) languages attests a social need of individuals rather than the wish to communicate ideas, emotions etc. Speaking a language means to belong to a certain social group and to be distinguished from another social group. Thus, Bühler’s organon model has to be inverted, the assigning function of the language precedes all other functions (representing, appealing etc.). As the author assumes, most of such common linguistic developments like language change, multilingualism or the difficulty to speak a foreign language without accent can be attributed to this basic function of exclusion and inclusion.

The aim of the paper is to present modes of grammatical representation of affirmation in Serbian and English. I will explore the hypothesis that affirmation is a type of modality and its expression involves syntactic and morphological markers. The formal expression of strong types of affirmation modality is characte­rized by the preference for long, full and stressed variants of modal auxiliaries Alternatively, affirmative verb forms may be intensified by additional suprasegmental elements, such as intonation, or even para­linguistic tools, gestures and non-verbal ways of reinforcing a statement. This seems to confirm the general function-form isomorphism requiring the more complex mental events to be represented by more complex structures. I will argue that this requirement may initiate the process of auxiliation, perceived as a search to find a more adequate means for expressing affirmation modality.

Though a wealth of literature on Russian-Belorusian bilingualism and more specifically on Trasjanka has been published within recent years, the status of Trasjanka is still some matter of debate. None of the labels which have been proposed so far, seem to hit the mark. In this article it will be argued that the search for a label which will make sense, has been hampered by the fact that the language situation in Belorussia is still being interpreted in terms of bilingualism. By comparing the Belorusian situation to what is simultaneously going on in most Western European countries, among them Germany, it is hoped to demonstrate that what is going on in Belarus is more akin to processes of destandardisation and concurrent dialect-leveling and -death in monolingual dialect-standard-continua. It will also be argued that this parallel ought to be taken at face value, which implies that Russian-Belorusian bilingualism is in fact dialectal in nature and that Trasjanka is ultimately just another of the many regiolects of increasingly decentralising modern Europe.

Extensive research has been done on language learners’ perceptions and representations of the target lan­guage country, culture and speaking community. However, first of all, there is a lack of such studies in the context of Russian language teaching and learning. Secondly, no attempts have been made in the previous stu­dies to quantitatively assess the favourabillity of the country images held by the language learners. The pre­sent study addresses these gaps in research literature. It employs an interdisciplinary approach to explore the content of Russian language learners’ stereotypical representations of Russia and to assess favourability of these stereotypes. The findings indicate that the students’ representations of Russia were predominantly positive though their knowledge about the country was limited. The study offers a discussion on pedagogical implications of its findings.

The political transformation of the late 1980’s allowed for a significant change of the cultural and artistic exchange between Poland and Germany. Fascination with the new dramatic/spectacle forms, observed in Poland since the end of the 1990’s, was to a large extent the result of new communication forms, the lifting of the political and mental barriers, and in general a stronger presence of artists from Western Europe, predominantly from Germany, in the polish theatre life, who displayed an innovative approach to the dramatic text, new staging methods and performance techniques. These more and more common contacts were a major inspiration for Polish artists, who were looking for a new stage language and creatively customized the German theatrical experience to their own spectacles. The scale of the process was so large that it can be described as a rather unique phenomenon in contemporary art and in the Polish-German relations.

Zusammenfassung Heinrich Kunstmann – Tymoteusz Karpowicz. Listy 1959–1993. Opracował i do druku podał Marek Zybura. Wrocław 2011. 512 S. ISBN 978-83-7432-577-6

Zusammenfassung Menzel, Birgit / Hagemeister, Michael / Glatzer Rosenthal, Bernice (Eds.), The New Age of Russia. Occult and Esoteric Dimensions, München / Berlin: Verlag Otto Sagner 2012. 448 S. (= Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe, vol. 17) ISBN 978-3-86688-198-3

Zusammenfassung Wilma Rethage, Strukturelle Besonderheiten des Russischen in Deutschland. Kontaktlinguistische und soziolinguistische Aspekte. München/Berlin: Kubon und Sagner 2012. 383 S. ISBN 978-3866881914

Zusammenfassung Puškin, A. S. Polnoe sobranie sočinenij v dvadcati tomach. T. 7. Dramatičeskie proizvedenija. Sankt-Peterburg 2009, 1068 S.

Zusammenfassung Mijnssen, Ivo, The Quest for an Ideal Youth in Putin’s Russia. I.: Back to Our Future! History, Modernity and Patriotism according to Nashi, 2005-2012. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2012, 202 S. (= Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Vol. 114) ISBN 987-3-8382-0368-3