Volume 66, Issue 4

This essay focuses on the sociocultural and semiotic aspects of the discourse of protests sparked by the rigged presidential election in Belarus, in August 2020. The mass demonstrations, using symbolic items (such as posters, slogans, exclamation marks, performances, posts in the social networks on the Internet, etc.) have been analyzed as a type of social discourse. The focus is on the peculiarity and the most distinctive features of the protest movement in Belarus. In particular, the following socio-political and cultural characteristics of Belarusian protest discourses are considered: 1) rejecting stereotypes (especially the tolerance stereotype, blr. pamjarkoŭnas’c’); 2) Belarusian protest tradition; 3) historical and geopolitical factors of the Belarusian protest movement; 4) the discursive systems; 5) the carnival. The emphasis is on linguistic forms of creativity, especially the protest slogans. In addition, the extensive scientific literature addressing such discourses is discussed.

Hate speech can be viewed as a form of socio-political conflict that might be considered an inevitable result of the shift of the historical paradigm in the former Soviet republics. In the meantime, the study of hate speech in Belarus demonstrates its relevance not only in the context of the current socio-political situation, but also because of the lack of the related research in the country. This study provides a general outline of hate speech in the Belarusian online discourse at the present time. At the beginning of the article, a brief literature review and the definition of the key terms are given. Afterwards, extralinguistic factors that influence hate speech functioning within the discourse community are described. Most attention is paid to the linguistic analysis of the legal documents of the Republic of Belarus as compared to those of other countries. Then, based on the analysis of the Internet users’ comments to online news, the most topical issues are determined and some observations on labeling as a move aimed at creating an image of a social group are provided.

In this paper we critically analyse how the identity of the Western Balkans (WB) has been metaphorically conceptualised in the latest stages of the EU integration processes in a corpus of internet news articles recently posted in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Hercegovina. Unlike the accession processes of the former membership candidates from Europe, the WB’s integration has proven to be a very long one, hindered by many, perhaps insurmountable obstacles and subject to a great deal of uncertainty regarding its final outcome. Although this process is predominantly conceptualised through the already established metaphors employed to depict such processes of the former member candidates (journey, house, circles/rings, family, etc.), their evaluative content is different, given that the roles and the positions of the EU and the WB are starkly asymmetrical, i. e. that the WB is deeply marginalised. We identified some new metaphors that this specific political situation has engendered, also reflecting the said asymmetry – the WB is perceived as a colony, self-imprisoned state, Trojan horse, victim of blackmail, immature person, experimenting ground and waste-collector for immigrants. These metaphors construct an image of the WB as that of the very inferior Other.

In comparison to different genres of written discourse, the structure of university lectures remains insufficiently explored. This paper examines which structural elements the mediostructure of Montenegrin lectures consists of, what functions they serve and what features are typical in their internal organisation. The study further aims to determine which linguistic resources are frequently used in the units identified, as well as to define their functions and examine the relation between the mediostructural units and their linguistic characteristics. Applying a part of Cook's model (1975) and conducting frequency and qualitative analyses, we explore a specially compiled corpus of Montenegrin linguistic lectures. The analysis reveals that the lecture mediostructure includes four structural components performing specific communicative functions. They are characterised by the common use of specific linguistic features influenced by the unit in question. The results could be useful to lecturers to successfully plan and structure their lectures, as well as for future research regarding this institutional genre.

This comparative syntactic study claims that the possessor of Russian and Hungarian BE-possessives neither originates nor lands in [Spec,VoiceP], the designated structural position of external arguments since Kratzer (1996). Possessive sentences universally describe a state with two eventuality participants, the possessor and the possessee (Stassen 2009). BE-possessives are built on dyadic-unaccusative existential BE. Neither of its two eventuality participants passes the agent/cause tests provided by Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer (2015). It is claimed here that possessive BE-sentences in Russian and Hungarian pattern with the piacere -subclass of psych -predicates, inasmuch as the possessor bears the oblique case and the theme appears in the nominative in them. In the cartographic model, the oblique experiencer of the piacere -type of psych -predicates targets a position higher than canonical, agent/cause subjects do (see Cardinaletti 1997, 2004; Rizzi 1997, 2004 for Italian). This paves the way for oblique possessors and non-canonical subjects to appear in positions left-adjacent to the designated position for canonical, nominative subjects (see Cardinaletti 1997, 2004 for Italian; Benedicto 1995; Livitz 2006, 2012 for Russian; Dalmi 2000, 2005 for Hungarian). Possessive BE-predicates in Russian and Hungarian share a number of syntactic and semantic properties with existential BE (see Partee & Borschev 2008 for Russian and Szabolcsi 1992, 1994 for Hungarian). Nonetheless, BE-possessives and BE-existentials differ in the two languages in their clausal architecture, due to the fact that EPP is fulfilled in different ways in them.

The article discusses Adam Naruszewicz‘s famous Ode to Justice (1773) and the engagement of occasional poetry in contemporary discussions about the handling of justice in political trials. Looking at the trial of 1773 the Ode addresses the question of finding a just sentence for the abortive attempt two years earlier to abduct king Stanisław August. The article presents the pertinent aspects for such an analysis in three parts: 1) an introduction to the conceptualization of royal justice in European thought of the Enlightenment, 2) the known facts about the abduction and its historical contexts, 3) an overview of the occasional poetry written by Naruszewicz about the incident from 1771 to 1773 leading to an analysis of the Ode to Justice in regard to the political reasoning of its author.

Usually Feofan Prokopovyč’s tragedokomedija Vladimir is considered an early example of the author’s ecclesiastical reform concerns, which he realized in the Russian Empire from 1716 onwards. However, a detailed analysis of the religious dispute, which is at the center of the play, and its literary sources gives rise to a more biographical reading, according to which the young author recommended himself to the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy for his work as a professor in rhetoric. He, the former supporter of the Union, emphasizes the Greek roots of Eastern Christianity and presents himself as a loyal representative of Moscow-orientated Orthodoxy. There is no evidence that he disagreed with Hetman Mazepa on the political position of Ukraine at the time.