Volume 62, Issue 3

The increased interest in the analysis of human verbal behavior leads to the need to define a basic unit of communication sphere, which could serve as the basis of its analysis. The first part of the article provides an overview of different speech units proposed by various authors, such as a speech act (J. Austin and J. Searle), speech genre (M. M. Bachtin), speech action pattern (K. Ehlich and J. Rehbein). As a conclusion to the overview, the authors propose their own interpretation of the basic unit of communication, which they call “speech behavior pattern” (SBP). The illocutionary content and general organization of SBP can be considered universal, while its realization in a language is culturally conditioned and therefore may vary significantly in different language communities. Utterances constituting a certain SBP are organized as a field, which includes a prototypical center and a gradually formed periphery. The second part of the article considers the major factors and components of the contrastive analysis of SBP including: definition of illocutionary goal, identifying communicative-pragmatic factors and the implementation of major structural forms of SBP, contrastive description of the structure and hierarchy of communicative-pragmatic fields in the languages under analysis. Finally, the article reveals differences between the notions of equivalence and adequacy and describes possible relations between them in contrastive linguistics.

The article provides a comparative analysis of three different forms of perfect in the western Macedonian dialects which are further compared with analogous forms in the Albanian and the Aromanian languages. It is found out that each of the perfect forms has its own range of use: the perfect of sum došol type performs the majority of modal functions (admirative, renarrative, optative); the perfects of imam dojdeno and sum dojden types are used primarily in the resultative and experiential contexts.

This article analyses two literary texts: Barbara Radziwiłłówna z Jaworzna-Szczakowej by the Polish author Michał Witkowski (2007) and Sakharnyi Kreml’ by the Russian author Vladimir Sorokin (2008) in the context of postcolonial studies. I treat the terms coined by post-colonial critique, such as orientalism , orientalization , subversion or mimicry as not only ideological categories, but also as aesthetic and narrative ones. These tools turn out to be useful in the interpretation of both these texts which, despite the differences between them, may be read as examples of post-dependence narration, which articulate issues in connection with identity-related problems of modern Polish and Russian cultures. Both Witkowski and Sorokin subversively employ auto- and heterostereotypes and avail themselves of the strategy of self-orientalization, which enables the play on foreign notions regarding, respectively, Polish and Russian culture and collective identity. The novel by Michał Witkowski ironically, perversely addresses national complexes associated with the systemic transformation of 1989 and takes the floor in the discussion on post-communism. In turn, Sakharnyi Kreml’ by Vladimir Sorokin is an example of a futuristic dystopia, in which criticism of Putin’s Russia commingles with reflections on the non-autonomous and non-independent status of own culture which, in the year 2028, continues to reproduce foreign discourses and finds it difficult to articulate its own position.

By analysing the diary entitled Pamet, širom otvorene oči i – ljubav. Dnevnik izgradnje Jugoslovenskog dramskog pozorišta (‘Intellect – eyes wide open and – love. Diary of the construction of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre’) by Marija Crnobori, we reach interesting discoveries linked to the socio-political, cultural and historical context of its inception. However, above all, we gain insight into the internal life of the author at a certain period in her life. The diary which Crnobori started writing after a fire totally destroyed her theatre, became a framework within which she began to build her own world; she thinks about the past, present and future, about important people who have professionally and emotionally marked her life and about people passing by, about “a little life” which was slowly reaching its end. In this autobiographical text by Marija Crnobori we notice three different narrative layers which are mutually intertwined providing the reader with an insight into the complex world of a diary subject. The diary has become a space to construct her multi-fold identity from a lonely pensioner to an established actress, from a family woman and friend to a writer and social chronicler.

The subject of this paper is to deal with the specifics of Ladislav Novák’s sound poetry succinctly, thus to create some important starting points for further possible literary or interdisciplinary research. Firstly, completely unknown, privately recorded compositions of Novák are investigated, secondly his professionally created audiotape-works that are relatively well known, however with little attention from the literary science, will be discussed.