Picture-text relations in multimodal first-aid instructions and the various nuances of meaning they can jointly produce have been the subject of assessment in numerous studies (e.g., Van der Sluis, Vergeer, & Redeker, 2018; Van der Sluis et al., 2022; Wildfeuer et al., 2023). In our current exploration, we specifically focus on the pictorial aspect of these instructions, particularly on the portrayal of help givers in first-aid guidance materials. Recognizing that these instructional materials can be presented in different formats (for instance, as drawings or photographs, in colour or monochrome, simple or detailed, and sometimes also very similar to characters in comicbooks or strips), our objective was to discover the attributes that individuals associate with help givers depicted in these various formats.

To achieve this aim, we selected 40 images showcasing help givers from the comprehensive corpus collected and organized within the PAT project (see Van der Sluis & Redeker, 2019), ensuring that the faces of the help givers were at least partly visible. These 40 images were then evaluated by a group of 107 participants (all of whom were university students), using two sets of representative adjectival traits presented in contrasting pairs (e.g., disorganized-organized, incompetent-capable, distrustful-trustful, rash-cautious), in line with Peabody’s (1987) catalogue of traits. The findings from this study suggest that a more favourable perception of traits is associated with images that are in colour, depicted from a bird's-eye view, or when the help giver is portrayed as a female, among other factors. It is our hope that the insights from this research will assist creators of future first-aid instruction materials to give more thoughtful consideration to the representation of help givers, thereby enhancing the effectiveness and relatability of their portrayals in first-aid guidance. The understanding of visual representation in instructional material stresses the importance of design choices in effectively conveying vital health information and optimizing learner engagement and comprehension

Older adults may experience certain forms of cognitive decline, but some forms of semantic memory remain intact in older age. To address how metaphor comprehension changes with age and whether metaphor comprehension relies more heavily on analogical reasoning (supported by fluid intelligence) or on conceptual combination (supported by crystalized intelligence), we compared performance of younger and older adults. In two experiments, healthy older adults (54-88 years) scored lower on a measure of fluid intelligence (Ravens Progressive Matrices) but higher on a measure of crystalized intelligence (Mill Hill Vocabulary Test) relative to younger adults (18-34 years). Groups were equally successful in comprehending relatively easy metaphors (Study 1), but older adults showed a striking advantage over younger adults for novel literary metaphors (Study 2). Mixed-effects modeling showed that measures of fluid and crystalized intelligence each made separable contributions to metaphor comprehension for both groups, but older adults relied more on crystalized intelligence than did younger adults. These age-related dissociations clarify cognitive effects of aging and highlight the importance of crystalized intelligence for metaphor comprehension in both younger and older adults. 

Comics, Activism, Feminisms explores from both historical and contemporary perspectives how comic art, activism, and feminisms are intertwined, and how comic art itself can be a form of activism. Feminist comic art emerged with the second-wave feminist movements. Today, there are comics connected to social activist movements working for change in a variety of areas. Comics artists often respond quickly to political events, making comics on topical issues that take a critical or satirical stance and highlighting the need for change. Comic art can point to problems, present alternatives, and give hope. Comics artists from all parts of the world engage issues pertaining to feminisms and LGBTQIA+ issues, war and political conflict, climate crisis, the global migrant and refugee situation, and other societal problems. The chapters of this anthology illuminate the aesthetic and thematic aspects of comics, activism, and feminisms globally. Particular attention is given to the work of comics collectives, where Do-it-Ourselves is a strategy among activism-oriented artists, which use a great variety of media, such as fanzines, albums, webcomics, and exhibitions to communicate and disseminate activist comic art. Comics, Activism, Feminisms is an essential anthology for scholars and students of comics studies, literary studies, art history, media studies, and gender studies. 

VR applications for medical simulations such as emergency situations offer new ways of providing knowledge and practical skills for saving a life and potentially represent a complex communicative environment. The communicative situations constructed by this environment bring with them an increasing level of interactivity and ergodicity and it is particularly challenging to address these analytically. We address this challenge by looking at Lifesaver VR and providing a foundational framework for the multimodal analysis of the communicative situations created in this application. We describe how information and content units of the game can be built and how these units can then be combined into complex discourse structures outlining the complexity and simultaneity of narrative, instructional, and interactive aspects of the game.

Aims and objectives:

The paper describes a study whose objective was to find whether there are any differences in inhibitory control measured with the Stroop test between Swedish early childhood (EC) monolingual and EC (bi-) multilingual university students in the language which is not their EC language and whether one can observe a relationship between the perceived proficiency in the subjects’ mother tongues and their Stroop Effect.

Methodology:

The analyses were conducted on a cohort of 105 students (41 EC monolinguals and 64 EC multilinguals) who took the Stroop test, the results of which (Stroop Effect) were compared for both the groups. A comparison was also made for multilinguals’ perceived proficiency in their mother tongues.

Data and analysis:

The data obtained via questionnaires and from a computerized version of the Stroop test were compared for EC monolinguals/EC multilinguals and evaluated statistically.

Findings/conclusion:

The results show no statistically significant difference in the inhibitory control measured by the Stroop test between the EC monolinguals and EC multilinguals. The only significant difference the analysis found between the groups is in reaction times, as the EC multilinguals reacted faster in both congruent and incongruent conditions. The analysis conducted among the EC multilinguals does not indicate any relationship between the perceived proficiency in their mother tongues and Stroop effect.

Originality and implication:

The findings contribute to a recent debate questioning cognitive early adulthood advantages of being an EC multilingual. Unlike the majority of other studies investigating inhibitory control, the Stroop test in this study was conducted in young adults and in the language (learnt at school and through extracurricular activities) in which all the students were on approximately the same proficiency level. The findings also bear relevance to future research on the relationship between inhibitory control and academic performance in young adults.

This article presents a study that investigated students’ attitudes toward both online and face-to-face English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classes. The study was conducted with students of mechanical engineering and engineering management after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions that allowed face-to-face teaching to resume. The study aimed to determine students’ preferences for online or face-to-face classes and the reasons behind their opinions. It also aimed to compare the difficulty and interest level of EAP classes with other courses and gather qualitative feedback on how online EAP classes could be improved. The study was primarily quantitative, but it had a qualitative segment, too. The results indicated that students generally prefer face-to-face to online classes, although only marginally. Participants appreciated the ability to work from home and revisit recorded lessons in online classes, while face-to-face classes were valued for better communication with the instructor and collaboration with peers. English was viewed as better suited to online teaching than other courses, but students were hesitant to participate openly during classes. Most respondents suggested more active participation from students and mandatory attendance as ways of improving the online teaching process. 

The aim of this study is to examine the effects of translating literary metaphors from Serbian to English on metaphor quality, aptness, metaphoricity, and familiarity. The research involved 55 Serbian metaphors translated into English using the A is B form, which were then evaluated by 252 participants in two separate studies. Study 1 served as an extension of a previous norming study. In it, a group of participants assessed 55 translated literary metaphorical expressions, and their evaluations were compared to those of the original Serbian versions. In Study 2, a group of participants, divided into two subgroups, rated a collection of both the original metaphorical expressions and their translated counterparts. The results indicate that the translated metaphors generally scored higher in terms of aptness, familiarity, quality, and partially in metaphoricity. These findings suggest that translating the metaphors into English had a positive impact on their perceived effectiveness and familiarity. Several factors are considered to explain these outcomes, including the nature of the English language itself, the participants’ exposure to English, and the translation process. Overall, this study highlights the influence of translation on the perception of literary metaphors and provides insights into metaphor interpretation.

While previous research has identified executive functions as predictors of academic performance in school children, similar studies conducted among adults show mixed results. One of the reasons given for executive functions having a limited effect on academic achievements in adulthood is that they are usually fully developed by that time. Since these executive functions are at their peak at that age, the individual differences in these as well as their influence on academic performance in adults are harder to trace. The paper describes a study conducted among 107 university students the goal of which was to find out whether there is any relationship between the adult students’ inhibitory control values measured with the Stroop Test and their academic achievements. Although the results indicate a weak correlation between the Stroop Effect and the students’ academic performance of low statistical significance, which seems to confirm the outcomes of the previous studies focusing on adults, the study reveals an unexpected statistically significant correlation between the students’ grade averages and the number of their incorrect color identifications. This phenomenon appears to be worth pursuing in future research since it suggests the existence of another, relatively quickly measurable, variable possibly reflecting other predictors of academic performance in adults such as a degree of their manifested conscientiousness, their ability to concentrate on an assigned, relatively short, one-off task and their attitude to fulfilling this task. The Stroop Test, despite not being originally designed for this purpose, might thus be used as a simple tool suitable for providing information about these variables via the subject’s number of color identification errors. Such information can subsequently inform the activities that educators may include in their curricula to foster conscientiousness and concentration in the students lacking these.

Despite the exceptional performance of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks involving natural language processing and reasoning, there has been sharp disagreement as to whether their abilities extend to more creative human abilities. A core example is the interpretation of novel metaphors. Given the enormous and non-curated text corpora used to train LLMs, a serious obstacle to designing tests is the need to obtain novel yet high-quality metaphors that are unlikely to have been included in the training data. Here we assessed the ability of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art large language model, to provide natural-language interpretations of novel literary metaphors drawn from Serbian poetry and translated into English. Human judges—blind to the fact that an AI model was involved—rated metaphor interpretations generated by GPT-4 as superior to those provided by a group of college students. In interpreting reversed metaphors, GPT-4, as well as humans, exhibited signs of sensitivity to the Gricean cooperative principle. These results indicate that LLMs such as GPT-4 have acquired an emergent ability to interpret literary metaphors.

Despite the exceptional performance of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks involving natural language processing and reasoning, there has been sharp disagreement as to whether their abilities extend to more creative human abilities. A core example is the interpretation of novel metaphors. Here we assessed the ability of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art large language model, to provide natural-language interpretations of a recent AI benchmark (Fig-QA dataset), novel literary metaphors drawn from Serbian poetry and translated into English, and entire novel English poems. GPT-4 outperformed previous AI models on the Fig-QA dataset. For metaphors drawn from Serbian poetry, human judges – blind to the fact that an AI model was involved – rated metaphor interpretations generated by GPT-4 as superior to those provided by a group of college students. In interpreting reversed metaphors, GPT-4, as well as humans, exhibited signs of sensitivity to the Gricean cooperative principle. In addition, for several novel English poems GPT-4 produced interpretations that were rated as excellent or good by a human literary critic. These results indicate that LLMs such as GPT-4 have acquired an emergent ability to interpret literary metaphors, including those embedded in novel poems.

Taking The Great Gatsby as its central case study, this article discusses my method of teaching regional American literature in Nordic classrooms through a liberal use of maps. It argues that closely attending to the cities, states, and regions to which literary texts refer helps students better understand and scrutinize their larger claims.

Given that the use and comprehension of figurative language is one of the most intriguing abilities of the mind, this study extends the line of research related to the process of understanding figurative language to individual differences. The starting assumption is that individual differences affect our ability to understand figurative language, focusing on fluid and crystallized intelligence. These types of intelligence were measured in relation to the ability t1o understand metaphors, and their influence was investigated indirectly, through tests that reliably examine both types of intelligence. The research investigates non-literary metaphors in the Serbian language, normed according to the following dimensions: metaphoricity, aptness, and familiarity. This study seeks to show whether and to what extent fluid and/or crystallized intelligence influence the process of understanding non-literary metaphors normed according to different features. Through selected verbal and non-verbal tests, Raven’s progressive matrices (Raven, 1938), semantic similarities test (Stamenković, Ichien, & Holyoak, 2019a), as well as a non-literary metaphor comprehension test, it is determined in which way fluid and crystallized intelligence play roles in the process of metaphor comprehension, as well as which possible cognitive mechanism allows us to process metaphors. The results show that the comprehension of non-literary metaphors mostly relies on crystallized intelligence, while fluid intelligence seems to be employed in individual cases, only with some groups of metaphors.

The sitcom Superstore aired on NBC from 2015 to 2021. In its sixth and final season (ending March 2021), the series explicitly addressed how the coronavirus pandemic affected the working conditions of the staff and management of “Cloud 9”—a fictional big-box store based in Saint Louis, Missouri. This chapter examines the ways in which the character interaction serves two distinct functions: first, to provide the viewing audience with general information about the coronavirus and the pandemic; and second, to depict the difficulties of dealing with the pandemic as an essential worker. The series uses humor to problematize the essential worker status of the Cloud 9 employees as superordinate to their status of individuals with a right to protect their health and minimize exposure to the virus.

Feminism and the City (FATC, 2021) is a Ukrainian comic book based on a series of online feminist blog posts authored by Emma Antoniuk, a columnist for the website Gender in Detail. FATC promotes an awareness of gender discrimination, thematizes critical feminist concerns, and suggests ready-made strategies for activism in the pursuit of gender justice. The comic book comprises ten free-standing stories, each of which depicts Emma's experiences or observations of life from a feminist perspective. Common to each of the stories is Emma's enthusiastic advocacy for gender justice in Ukraine that has characterised her life and career path. The present chapter represents a brief and targeted analysis of FATC as an example of feminist activism in the Ukrainian context. We approach FATC as a feminist activist field guide, focusing on two stories that explicitly engage with language usage and thus showcase the interplay of image and text, taking advantage of the comics medium both to depict potential scenarios and to model linguistic strategies of feminist activism. This chapter specifically highlights two critical aspects of promoting feminist activism: gender-fair language and discourse strategies of advocacy.

Multimodal characteristics of first-aid instructional materials have been extensively investigated in several previous studies (e.g., Van der Sluis, Vergeer, & Redeker, 2018; Van der Sluis et al., 2022; Wildfeuer et al., 2023). Starting from these studies, in our investigation, we narrow the focus to the portrayal of help givers in pictorial instructions, aiming to uncover the attributes associated with these representations across various formats and ways of depicting (for instance, as drawings or photographs, in colour or monochrome, simple or detailed, having different sets of characters, etc.). Drawing from a corpus of 40 selected images collected within the PAT project (see Van der Sluis & Redeker, 2019), participants evaluated these depictions using contrasting adjectival traits, presented in pairs, as outlined by Peabody (1987). Our empirical findings yield several relevant insights, indicating that favourable perceptions are often correlated with specific visual features, including colouration, perspective, and the portrayed gender of the depicted help giver. We believe that these results could have significant implications for the design of future first-aid instructional materials, advocating for more deliberate and effective representations, which could enrich learning experiences and user engagement in health education. This could, in turn, improve design-related decisions and allow them to communicate crucial health information more efficiently and optimize situation comprehension within health-educational frameworks.

This chapter analyses the conceptual relevance of the notion of heterogeneity to the formulation of a radical politics in Robert Tressell’s classic working-class novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. It begins with a brief reconstruction of the social imaginaries of the mid-19th-century bourgeois novel in Britain, suggesting that the observations of urban opacity and unruly multiplicity found in authors such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell constitute a significant rehearsal of a socio-political grammar at the root of subsequent socialist developments. The chapter’s central claim is that it is with the uncovering of heterogeneity at the heart of the social, which 19th-century writing performs and a pioneering working-class text such as Tressell’s adopts, that the possibility of a discursive project of articulation emerges, reclaiming the category of class from any pre-determined or essentialist definition and opening it up to a logic of political contingency. It argues that this line of thinking, even if it never reaches the level of theoretical maturity found in continental Marxism at the turn of the century, and while its frame of reference remains that of late Victorian and Edwardian socialist debates in Britain, is comparable in some of its strategic conclusions to those of Marxist political thought in the early 20th century.

Using poetic metaphors in the Serbian language, we identified systematic variations in the impact of fluid and crystalized intelligence on comprehension of metaphors that varied in rated aptness and familiarity. Overall, comprehension scores were higher for metaphors that were high rather than low in aptness, and high rather than low in familiarity. A measure of crystalized intelligence was a robust predictor of comprehension across the full range of metaphors, but especially for those that were either relatively unfamiliar or more apt. In contrast, individual differences associated with fluid intelligence were clearly found only for metaphors that were low in aptness. Superior verbal knowledge appears to be particularly important when trying to find meaning in novel metaphorical expressions, and also when exploring the rich interpretive potential of apt metaphors. The broad role of crystalized intelligence in metaphor comprehension is consistent with the view that metaphors are largely understood using semantic integration processes continuous with those that operate in understanding literal language.

This chapter explores the status of English-language popular culture throughout the Nordic countries with regard to its relation to attitudes toward English and its effect on everyday discourse. The traditions and contemporary developments of English as an academic subject in the Nordic countries reveal an important shift in the symbolic capital of English. While English as a linguistic system and Anglophone literature and culture once symbolized erudition and high intellectual pursuits, the abstract idea and concrete manifestations of English in the Nordic countries are now more likely to invoke Anglophone popular culture and media artifacts. However, the close association between popular culture and the English language has fostered a Nordic-wide relationship to English that deviates from native Anglophone norms, whereby the filtering of English through popular culture encourages the use of English as a language of play and imbues a distance to its affective properties. The chapter presents a pan-Nordic overview of the rise of Anglophone popular culture and the effects of the stronghold that the English language enjoys in the Nordic countries as a result of the wholesale adoption of English-language popular culture. 

Most translation tasks in the entertainment industry involve multiple modes of communication, i.e. they are multimodal, not solely language-based. A translator is expected to analyse, evaluate and transfer each of those modes to render an accurate translation of the source text. This is especially important in films, documentaries, TV and animated shows – multimodal scripts which are being localised for various contexts. An important step in the translation process in the entertainment industry should be the identification of translation errors in the final product which should be based on a proper translation error classification. Given that available translation error classifications rely solely on linguistic modes of communication, the aim of this paper is to propose a multimodal translation error classification which would be based on the multimodality of scripts to be translated and thus provide a reliable tool for the quality check of the final translation product in the entertainment industry. In that way, translators in this industry will be alerted to recognise elements (e.g. tone of voice, facial expressions, proximity, etc.) existing in multimodal scripts where both the source and the target texts as essential parts of the scripts are multimodal products

VR applications for medical simulations such as emergency situations offer new ways of distributing knowledge and providing practical skills for saving a life. Compared to the genre of serious games in which players are trained as exports or layperson first-aiders within an interactive gameplay, VR applications potentially represent an even more complex communicative environment. Additional semiotic resources such as touch, body movements and proprioception (cf. Martin et al. 2022) are used to construct the virtual world and instruct players to perform certain procedures. From a multimodal perspective (cf. Bateman et al. 2017), the communicative situations constructed by the virtual environment bring with them an increasing level of interactivity and ergodicity and it is particularly challenging to address these analytically. Especially the cyberphysical infrastructure provided in these applications add to the complexity by embedding holograms, 360-degree videos, etc. which need to be taken into consideration in the analysis of the instructional techniques. While there is now research on e-learning strategies such as serious games (e.g. Boada et al. 2020) and mobile apps (e.g. Metelmann et al. 2018), not much work has been done with regard to the (multimodal) design of VR applications and how these can be used to teach resuscitation and other procedures. It will therefore be interesting to address this question from a qualitative perspective with future potential for empirical research on the effectiveness of these applications. In this talk, we will address the analytical challenges by looking at two different examples of VR applications for first aid (Lifesaver VR, Resuscitation Council UK; Basic Life Support, Dual Good Health) and providing a foundational framework for the multimodal analysis of the communicative situations created in these two applications based on our previous work on video games (Wildfeuer & Stamenković 2022). The data to work with are recordings of the initial usage of the applications as provided by the production companies. We aim to not only show how recent developments in multimodality research are well-equipped for the effective analysis of these artifacts, but also how the analytical results can be practically implemented in the further development of these applications.

This article introduces broad strands of research on swearing as a foundation for an interpersonal pragmatics (IP) approach to the nature and effects of swearing in interaction and relationships. The main tenets of interpersonal pragmatics are presented, and swearing as a distinct research focus within IP is outlined. The article invokes pragmatic perspectives in addressing both negative and positive functions of swearing. The central focus on IP is developed by considering the mutual interplay between language and relationships in swearing activity. With respect to communicative context, it is noted that swearing both emerges within interpersonal relationships, and simultaneously provides a context for different types of interpersonal relationships to unfold (endogenous vs. exogenous IP perspectives). By way of introducing the special issue on swearing and interpersonal pragmatics and the constituent articles, it asserts the need to account for swearing as an interpersonal pragmatic strategy and to analyse the causes and effects of swearing in different contexts. The article concludes with a discussion of future research directions, including, in particular, swearing in mediated settings. 

This chapter provides an overview of the volume’s background, contents, and structure, explaining the foundational theoretical underpinnings, premises, and organizing principles. In addition to defining and delineating the nation-states encompassed by the term “Nordic countries,” the chapter also explicitly discusses and contextualizes the similarities and the differences between the languages and societies of the Nordic countries. The main focus, however, is on identifying what makes these countries a cohesive and coherent unit of study - in general, but especially with regard to shared social, cultural, and linguistic aspects as unifying themes among the Nordic countries. Importantly, this introductory chapter critically addresses the common narrative of the “rise” or “triumph” of English and the frequent framing of the spread of English in the Nordics as a success story. 

The final chapter of the volume draws together the main strings of the preceding chapters into three themes: English in relation to the languages of the Nordic countries; 2) changes in research approaches of language and language use; 3) Nordic exceptionalism; the Nordic countries as a model. In addition to commentary from the volume’s editors, ten eminent scholars of the language situation in the Nordic countries have been consulted to supply their viewpoints. Their response to two questions, one having to do with the history of English studies in the Nordic countries, and the other having to do with the future of English studies, round out the volume by offering a complement to themes raised in the previous eleven chapters.

People in the Nordic states – Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland – rank as among the most proficient speakers of English in the world. In this unique volume, international experts explore how this came to be, what English usage and integration looks like in different spheres of society and the economy in these countries, and the implications of this linguistic phenomenon for language attitudes and identity, for the region at large, and for English in Europe and around the world. Led by Elizabeth Peterson and Kristy Beers Fägersten, contributors provide a historical overview to the subject, synthesize the latest research, illustrate the roles of English with original case studies from diverse communities and everyday settings, and offer transnational insights critically and in conversation with the situation in other Nordic states. This comprehensive text is the first book of its kind and will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of World/Global Englishes and English as a lingua franca, language contact and dialect studies/language varieties, language policy, multilingualism, sociolinguistics, and Nordic/Scandinavian and European studies.

Swearing fulfils a range of interpersonal pragmatic functions and also acts as a distinguishing feature of speakers and contexts. In broadcast media, swearing has traditionally been censored or at least limited in its deployment; although when used, it serves characterization, interactional, and narrative functions. In this article, we consider the Disney+ television series Only Murders in the Building (OMITB, 2021–), in which swearing is not subject to standard media constraints, due to its provision on a streaming service. Freed from such constraints, OMITB is distinctive in its unusually high frequency and dispersion of swearing across characters and contexts. Compared with both real-life and media-based analyses of language use, the swearing in OMITB reflects neither real-life nor standard broadcast patterns. In this paper, we investigate how swearing is used by the characters, and what it is ‘doing’ in the series. In particular, we highlight the role of swearing in affiliation and relationship-building, both between characters in the story world, and between the series and its viewers. Our analysis contributes to understanding the pragmatic functions of media swearing.

This article intends to provide insight into how speakers of English, Mandarin, and Serbian perceive spatio-temporal relations expressed by specific pairs of adverbials. In two studies participants were presented with simple sentences describing the metaphorical movement of events on the timeline (e.g., "The meeting was moved from the morning to the afternoon.") and were asked to decide whether the event had been moved along the sagittal, vertical or transverse axis (forward/backward, up/down, left/right). The main aim of the first study, which was conducted with 104 native speakers of Serbian, was to explore the effects of axis-orientation and individual time units on participants' preferences and response times. The target time units used were dates, hours, months, days of the week, and years. The results showed significant differences in response times between the transverse and sagittal axis conditions on the one hand (with shorter reaction times), and the vertical axis condition on the other. Moreover, the distribution of answers showed a high degree of inconsistency when it came to moving events to a previous point in time. The main aim of the second study was to identify potential differences in responses and response times to different orientations and time units between four experimental groups: native speakers of English with no second language, native speakers of English with knowledge of a second language, native speakers of Mandarin (with English as a second language), and native speakers of Serbian (also with English as a second language). The study was conducted with 126 participants. The design of the second study was largely parallel to that of the first, but it involved three trials and different time units (parts of the day, days of the week and months). The Mandarin speakers gave the quickest responses in the first two trials when deciding on the vertical axis. Moreover, reaction times were significantly shorter in the parts-of-the-day condition (e.g., "morning", "afternoon"), across the three trials. In addition, Mandarin speakers showed an inverted trend in responses on the sagittal axis compared to the remaining three groups. While some of our results corroborate previous research on the topic, the study also provides novel empirical evidence on how Serbian speakers conceptualize time using spatial terms.

The Swedish journalist and author Margit Silberstein’s autobiographical memoir, Förintelsens Barn (2021), represents her post-war upbringing in a survivor family. Both parents were Hungarian-speaking Jews from Transylvania, who were the only members of their respective families to survive horrendous persecution and conditions during the war. After the war they immigrated to a small town in Sweden, where Margit and her brother were born. This chapter examines the tensions in Silberstein’s account of her childhood and her relations with her parents, particularly her mother, viewing these tensions as stemming from characteristics of and contradictions between later postmemorial writing and the im/migrant literature of Sweden today, both of which are conditioned by their social contexts, including those of antisemitism. Silberstein’s work brings Holocaust postmemoir into dialogue with im/migrant autobiography in contemporary Sweden, and it suggests that this dialogue will continue to the third generation, Silberstein’s children.

This chapter explores Dina Nayeri’s use of life writing in The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) to represent refugees as political, as opposed to humanitarian, subjects. The camp is a leading trope in her narrative of flight and refuge, used to explore literature as a means for problematizing the damaging, hegemonically determined connection between citizenship and gratitude. In recounting her trajectory from child refugee to successful author, she places special emphasis on her time spent in the refugee camp Barba. The camp was a space of despair and interminable waiting, but also one of intimacy and gossip; when reflecting on her former campmates, she understands them as subjects who tried to shape their own stories, however painfully. This view clashes with the humanitarian paradigm that casts refugees as passive victims and demands gratitude, a prerequisite for empathy and aid. In rejecting this paradigm, she tells her life’s story as one of a collective, weaving it in with her fellow refugees’; the community of the camp enabled her to become a storyteller. She undermines the Bildung plot of individual success, and thereby points to modes of narrating refugee subjectivity that do not rely on eliciting the kind of empathy that functions instrumentally to uphold global inequalities.

The paper claims a cyclic evolvement of the multidimensional concept LOVE incurred by gradual changes in the degree of salience of critical parameters that the construal of love involves. A comprehensive account of modifications in the concept organization invites an alternative set of tools for emotion knowledge processing. Therefore, the aptness of configuration space as a tool for the analysis of concept elaborateness is tested with the purpose to establish a valid system of parameters profiling the cognized experience of various kinds of love.

Employing the theoretical framework that represents a unique amalgam of the domains of multimodality, intermediality, transmedia storytelling and adaptation, the paper analyses the process of medial transposition of the folk fairy tale Baš-Čelik, primarily into Đorđe Lobačev’s comic book of the same name (1939/1989), and then into Petar Meseldžija’s 2008 illustrated book The Legend of Baš-Čelik (orig. Legenda o Baš-Čeliku). The paper presents verbal and graphic tools used by these authors in adapting the original text from a monomodal into multimodal media, with a special focus on three research directions. The first is the manner in which the compositional structure of the fairy tale is transferred into the comic and the illustrated book, with the aim of assessing the level of fidelity in these adaptations. The second direction is related to the most important narrative and stylistic differences (e.g., language and tone of narration). The third direction deals with the use of certain comics-specific techniques and resources, such as page layout, use of colour for emphasis, representation of speed and motion, and the presence or absence of particular graphic devices (upfixes and pictorial runes). Finally, the adaptations themselves are compared to each other, highlighting the major similarities and differences between them.

This volume brings together research on the forms, genres, media and histories of refugee migration. Chapters come from a range of disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches, including literature, film studies, performance studies and postcolonial studies. The goal is to bring together chapters that use the perspectives of the arts and humanities to study representations of refugee migration. The chapters of the anthology are organized around specific forms and genres: life-writing and memoir, the graphic novel, theater and music, film and documentary, coming-of-age stories, street literature, and the literary novel. 

This article offers a substantial reinterpretation of Mary Barton in terms of Robert Owen's ideas, especially as outlined in his early tract A New View of Society. The article contends that Gaskell's novel stages a significant reassessment of the transformative possibilities of nineteenth-century paternalism. It also suggests, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, that the reformist aspirations of a utopian thinker such as Owen can only be articulated "spectrally" in the context of Victorian class conflict: that is, by positing the kind of presence that only an irremediable absence can enable and register.

The paper describes a study involving 53 Swedish native multilingual students the objective of which was to investigate the relationship between their mother tongue oral and written proficiency as they themselves perceive it and their academic performance at two educational levels, i.e. secondary and tertiary. The study compares the students’ grade averages with the data obtained through questionnaires targeting their language proficiency and mother tongue use. The results show that while there is a positive correlation between the students’ degree of perceived proficiency (both written and oral) in the language originally spoken with their mother and their academic performance at their secondary school, this correlation seems to disappear once they enroll in their university studies. The paper discusses two of the possible reasons for this phenomenon on the background of threshold hypothesis and transitional perspective. According to these, native multilinguals benefit from their multilingual condition academically only when they reach a certain level of proficiency in the language(s) they use and only until their parents complete their linguistic assimilation in the country they have immigrated into.

This study analyses visual and verbal material found in Đorđe Lobačev’s comic book Tsar Dušan’s Wedding (1938/1976) (orig. Ženidba Cara Dušana) using a set of tools coming from the domains of intersemiotic translation, intermediality, and adaptation. The comic book is based on the Serbian oral epic ballad Dušan’s Wedding (orig. Ženidba Dušanova), which focuses on the hero wedding theme. The study will try to present verbal and graphic devices used to transfer the epic narrative to the medium of comics and compare them to the ones used in the original story. It will also address the aspect of the epic ballad structure and its transposition into the realm of comics. The analysis will take into account the historical context of the comic book in question and compare the findings with some of the results of contemporary comics studies dealing with certain graphic devices employed in comics. These findings reveal that Lobačev’s comic book contains certain graphic flourishes related to describing motion, speed and spatiality, but lacks the ones used to depict affect, which is in line with basic traits of oral epic poetry

How do particular genres and forms, with their distinct conventions and histories, shape representations of refugee experience? How do representations of refugeedom transform the conventions of genres such as memoir, theatre, comics, song, the essay, poetry or the novel? In this chapter, we outline a humanities approach to refugee studies with reference to significant contributions in the field. Then, we introduce the genres and forms covered in this collection and the relevance of these forms for claiming human rights: the memoir, the graphic novel, poetry, theatre, song, documentary film, media art, the Bildungsroman and the literary novel. 

In the last decade, critical interest in the effects of institutional and technical protocols on recorded Holocaust testimony has grown. The role of professional or volunteer adult interviewers has been re-examined, particularly in relation to taped, archival testimony, and studies demonstrate that survivor testimony is shaped by the interview situation and listening practices. However, the role of the child listener in a domestic setting in relation to postmemory autobiography and memoir has received less attention. In the analysis that follows, I focus on Irene Oore's 2019 memoir, The Listener: In the Shadow of the Holocaust, because, as the title suggests, Oore thematizes the question of listening, asking what it means to listen to a survivor parent. My analysis considers domestic listening in relation to Holocaust testimony as well as to listening as emotion work. Oore's text posits life writing as the most desirable outcome of domestic listening, for it can be an act of care which elicits the retelling of witness accounts. In publishing her mother's stories, as well as her own experiences of listening to them, Oore's postmemory writing functions as deferred and mediated testimony which her mother never publicly gave.

The English-Serbian Contrastive Lexicology is primarily aimed at philology students, English and Serbian linguists and other scholars, translators, proofreaders and all those interested in contrastive linguistics. The authors’ aim was to take a fresh perspective on the English and Serbian lexicon and the related aspects of the two languages. The book provides the basics of contrastive linguistics from a lexicological viewpoint, information on dictionaries and lexicological companions of English and Serbian, overviews of synonymy, antonymy, homonymy and hyponymy, as well as contrastive approaches to polysemy, dictionary meanings, modal verbs and numerous tenets related to their translation from English into Serbian. Furthermore, the book also encompasses chapters contrasting colour terms, motion verbs, verbs of visual perceptions. The remaining chapters describe Anglicisms and Anglo-Serbian words, false friends, slang and jargon words, as well as phraseological units in English and Serbian. Each chapter includes a set of study questions, which can stir interest for the future approaches to the topics tackled within this book.

The present chapter combines the tools developed in multimodal studies of metaphor in comics and film, as well as those we find in comparative narratology and intersemiotic translation, in an analysis of a corpus of comic books and their film adaptations. All instances of visual and multimodal metaphor have been extracted from the collected comics corpus, along with certain examples of metonymy and specific alterations of standardised pieces of comics vocabulary that reinforce the metaphorical content. The fact that the comic books examined in this chapter have been adapted using two different media (animation and live action) provide us with an almost unique opportunity to investigate the ways in which metaphor gets converted from drawings into the animated and live-action forms, how this conversion alters the way in which metaphor can affect the audience, and whether the power of metaphorical messages can be retained in this conversion. The chapter presents different direct and indirect strategies for expressing a number of nonliteral messages (some of which appear to be very comics-specific) in different media – each of these media has to calibrate the instruments it has in its inventory in order to express different meanings within the animated or live-action discourse. The static nature of comic books seems to require a more abundant use of nonliteral representations so as to convey the intended meaning, thus making such instances more frequent in the analysed examples. Conversely, using the dynamic media of animation and live action, abstract messages can be contextualised in such a way that does not depend entirely on images with overt nonliteral content.

This paper analyses several examples of pictorial and multimodal metonymy found in political cartoons and photographs related to the topic of Brexit and collected from the two British daily newspapers, The Guardian and The Telegraph. The first part of analysis deals with instances of pictorial metonymy, emphasising the importance of certain distinctive features such as colour, graphic representation, or photographic composition. The second part of analysis focuses on multimodal metonymy of the verbo-pictorial variety, particularly scrutinising the relationships between the two modes. Based on the different ways in which the pictorial and the verbal mode interact, the examples are classified into three separate categories: (1) image-dominant metonymy, (2) text-dominant metonymy, and (3) complementary metonymy. Furthermore, the analysis sheds some light on how these metonymies can form the basis of pictorial and multimodal metaphors, how several source and target concepts can be chained together within a single metonymy, and how metonymy in visual communication can also possess an indexical, rather than merely iconic character

Catchphrases have long been a hallmark of US-American sit-coms and dramas, as well as reality, game and variety show programming. Because the phenomenon of the television catchphrase developed throughout the era of network, commercial broadcasting under Federal Communications Commission guidelines regulating profanity in network television, catchphrases traditionally have not included swear words. Nevertheless, certain past television catchphrases can be regarded as euphemistic alternatives of swearing expressions (e.g. ‘Kiss my grits!’), while contemporary catchphrases from cable or streaming series do include explicit swearing (e.g. ‘Don’t fuck it up!’). We examine a database of 168 popular catchphrases from a 70-year period of US-American television programming according to categories for bad language and impoliteness formulae. We identify three categories of catchphrases based on structural-functional similarities to swearing expressions, and we trace the distribution of these categories over time and across networks. The data reveal a trend towards explicit swearing in catchphrases over time, not only in series on cable and streaming services, but across networks. We conclude that the expressive nature of catchphrases and their structural-functional properties render the inclusion of swear words both more palatable to a television audience and more compatible with television norms, thus propagating catchphrase swearing on cable and streaming television services, and mitigating the use of swear words on network television. Due to appropriation phenomena, swearing catchphrases may serve to blur the lines between actually swearing and simply invoking a swearing catchphrase, thereby potentially increasing tolerance for swearing both on television and off.

This essay considers the pitfalls and rewards of using “western women writers” as a critical category of analysis, in part by surveying my own scholarly history with the concept. As a critical paradigm it continually breaks down, and yet, I contend, it persists. Its application yields insights into the texts, authorship, publication, and reception of numerous women writing from and about the West. Equally important, it yields insights into the relationships among these women and the patterns we can identify across their work. It is in large part because these women have been conceived as western in the past--whether by themselves or by publishers, readers, or scholars—that it is useful to continue to conceive of them as western in the present. Thus in addition to, or sometimes even instead of, thinking about what they do as western writers (analyzing their texts for regionally specific arguments), it is productive to think about how they are received as western writers. That is often where the patterns emerge across them, and where we can justifiably generalize. While the diversity of the actual West precludes essentialist claims, views about the West remain remarkably consistent.

Swearing produces effects that are not observed with other forms of language use. Thus, swearing is powerful. It generates a range of distinctive outcomes: physiological, cognitive, emotional, pain-relieving, interactional and rhetorical. However, we know that the power of swearing is not intrinsic to the words themselves. Hence, our starting question is: How does swearing get its power? In this Overview Paper, our aim is threefold. (1) We present an interdisciplinary analysis of the power of swearing (‘what we know’), drawing on insights from cognitive studies, pragmatics, communication, neuropsychology, and biophysiology. We identify specific effects of swearing, including, inter alia: emotional force and arousal; increased attention and memory; heightened autonomic activity, such as heart rate and skin conductance; hypoalgesia (pain relief); increased strength and stamina; and a range of distinctive interpersonal, relational and rhetorical outcomes. (2) We explore existing (possible) explanations for the power of swearing, including, in particular, the hypothesis that aversive classical conditioning takes place via childhood punishments for swearing. (3) We identify and explore a series of questions and issues that remain unanswered by current research/theorising (‘what we don't know’), including the lack of direct empirical evidence for aversive classical conditioning; and we offer directions for future research. 

This chapter focuses on a selection of single-panel comics by two Swedish comics artists, seeking to explicate how gender norms are invoked and subverted in depicted talk-in-interaction. Informing the analyses are theories of positioning and framing, which aim to help us make sense of interactions as taking place in different sorts of occasions, how these differences are signalled, and how we behave according to social conventions and moral commitments. The female perspective on these conventions and commitments is expressed in the comics of Hemmingsson and Sjöberg, in which frames and positions are made particularly salient in the single-panel format. Of particular significance is the use of humour to reveal absurdities of gender roles, gender inequality, and sexism. The chapter thus also investigates how linguistic resistance to positioning, framing, and conversational script represents a feminist act of subversion and solidarity.

This edited collection explores how the relationship between comic art and feminism has been shaped by global, transnational, and local trends, curating analyses of multinational comic art that encompass themes of gender, sexuality, power, vulnerability, assault, abuse, taboo, and trauma. The chapters illuminate in turn the defining features of the aesthetics, materiality, and thematic content of their source material - often expressed with humorous undertones of self-reflection or social criticism - as well as recurring strategies of visualising and narrating female experiences. Broadening the research perspective of feminist comics to include national comics cultures peripheral to the cultural centers of Anglo-American, Franco-Belgian, and Japanese comics, the anthology explores how the dominant narrative or history of canonical works can be challenged or deconstructed by local histories of comics and feminism and their transnational connections, and how local histories complement or challenge the current understanding of the relationship between feminism and comic art. This is an essential collection for scholars and students in comics studies, women and gender studies, media studies, and literature.