Volume 66, Issue 2

Antonomasia implies two opposing semantic mechanisms: the replacement of a proper name by an appellative, epithet or periphrasis (e. g. the Iron Lady standing for Margaret Thatcher), or the attribution of a proper name to an appellative or a set of certain personality traits (e. g. a Penelope standing for a faithful, devoted wife). The aim of this paper is to show that studying antonomasia as a figure of speech driven by a cognitive metonymic and metaphoric mechanism can contribute to revealing how women are conceptualised and consequently talked about. We do so by analysing figurative antonomasia in a dataset of 307 examples extracted from Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS) webpages, although the findings are generisable to other languages as well. We show that antonomasia is frequently based on entrenched stereotypes about women and that in the collective consciousness of the BCMS speakers women are often conceptualised as (sexual) objects, typically valued by aesthetic criteria, as well as in relation to their possession of certain stereotypical female traits (self-sacrifice or subordination to others, excessive emotion but also cruelty, manipulativeness, showiness, talkativeness, etc.). In addition, the analysis also revealed that a woman is principally identified through her relations with other beings (as a mother, sister, wife or lover). Our study thus confirms that studying antonomasia within gender and language studies is a goal well worth pursuing.

The paper deals with the issues (both inflectional and word-formational) of Proto-Slavic *ū-stems in the Polabian corpus. The aim of the paper is to identify all Polabian words continuing the *ū-declension class and accompany them with comprehensive linguistic and, when necessary, philological comments. As it turns out, some words, regarded as Polabian innovations, are in fact archaisms, as evidenced by comparative data. A new explanation of heteroclitic stems (Nsg -o vs. NApl -våi̯ ) is proposed involving a well-known Polabian sound change (*Kvo > Ko ), which is somewhat elaborated.

This paper is based on newly collected data from the research project on translanguaging and language attitudes carried out in Lviv and Horodok, Ukraine and in Vilnius, Lithuania. The data covered in the article consists of 90 responses from students at Ukrainian and Lithuanian Polish minority schools. The study involves a description and contrast of the Polish communities in Ukraine and Lithuania, and analysis of the sociolinguistic peculiarities of the Polish language, focusing on translanguaging in the daily use of several languages by members of Polish ethnic minority schools. It aims to report the linguistic behaviour tendencies. The study shows that different state and school language policy contexts are characterised by varying linguistic attitudes and language proficiency. The paper reveals the importance of translanguaging for maintaining the Polish language within a mixed culture environment.

The paper analyses the phenomenon of heterotopias as they are described by Michel Foucault and the way they are employed in literature and theatre. The paper argues that each time an author writes or re-writes, a director stages, a member of the audience sees and reader reads a fictional narrative that is set into a non-fictional place (e. g. a city), a heterotopia, “another”, different place is created by means of conceptual integration. This will be exemplified on the contemporary Croatian novel Unterstadt by Ivana Šojat and its stage adaptation.

In many literary texts the haptic symbolism of transgenerational trauma is illustrated by objects. Inherited artefacts are in this understanding symbolic as well as indexical: e. g. when amulets, that are worn around the neck, illustrate a burden inherited from earlier generations. Such a meaning becomes often evident already in the symbolic act of passing down an object to a successor. The paper lays its focus especially on motifs of interaction between characters and objects that illustrate their coping with the emotional charge of the past. This is to shed light on the emotional value of different objects and on the mimesis of the physiologically perceived burdens of trauma.

The article examines Soviet memorial designs of the Great Patriotic War period (1941–1945). These monuments were unorthodox in terms of visual language, and they differed strikingly from the Stalinist neoclassical mainstream of the previous decade. Architects tried to find means of commemoration of the enormous tragedy of war that they faced. Analysis of the poetics of their designs along with the commonplaces of the respective critical discourse reveals the process whereby the memorial genre was transformed. This article discusses the monumental tradition developed by the 1940 s, the models, the sources of motifs and solutions, and some stylistic and architectural peculiarities characteristic of wartime projects. Whereas previously the Soviet architects from the early 1930s had been working on the ‘ultimate’ monument – the Palace of Soviets in Moscow – with the beginning of the war they shifted to improvising in order to ‘stretch’ the limits of genre. I examine the ways in which they broke the limits and shaped the dense, overwhelming memorial narrative to be transmitted by the monuments. New memorials were considered as a form of heroic epic, analogous to the literary epics but expressed by means of architecture and sculpture. The nationalistic sentiments typical of the war years were reflected in both the design ideology and the perception of memorials. Alongside persistent motifs (such as 'prancing' tanks) emerged new themes (the commemoration of victims along with heroes). The technique of provoking the viewer’s emotions, as well as the visual language and architectural style of some structures and particular solutions (such as massive stone cubes), demonstrate the inheritance from the post-Revolutionary Modernist architecture. This unorthodox stylistic flexibility illustrates the ‘liberation’ of architects – and the short cultural ‘liberalization’ on the wartime period.

Based on recent studies on ‘literary meteorology’, the article examines depictions of meteorology in Soviet literature. It contextualizes Daniil Granin’s Into the Storm (1962) and Anatolii Gladilin’s Forecast for tomorrow (1972) within the post-war history of meteorology and reads both texts as examples for a ‘popular meteorology’, in which important shifts in the Soviet culture of science can be detected. In difference to political readings of late Soviet prose on science, it holds, that literary texts can provide valuable insights into shifts of styles on thinking, the praxeology of science, its anthropological implications and into models of scientific evolution.