In most countries of the world, including Austria, people with diverse cultural backgrounds live and communicate in more than one language. Such individuals often identify with biculturalism or multiculturalism. The purpose of this study is to examine the attitudes of respondents originating from various countries of Europe and the USA living in Austria towards bilingualism, biculturalism, and individual identity. The central research question focuses on how the social environment influences the formation of identity among bilingual and multilingual individuals. To address this, the study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and ethnolinguistic observations to capture both statistical trends and in-depth personal narratives. These methods enabled the collection of data on language use in different social contexts, cultural practices, and perceptions of belonging. Findings indicate that multilingual speakers tend to adopt not only several languages but also multiple cultural affiliations and identities simultaneously, with their self-concept strongly shaped by everyday interactions in family, educational, and community environments.

This article proposes an integrative approach to the analysis of political logos by combining relevance theory, speech act theory, the Gricean cooperative principle, and the grammar of visual design. The findings show that both the verbal and visual elements of a logo can be pragmatically interpreted through weak and strong implicatures, speech acts, and the flouting of conversational maxims, as they function as ostensive stimuli that prompt cognitive effort toward optimal relevance. When stimuli are incongruent, greater inferential effort is required to derive coherent meaning. The analysis identified multiple sources of incongruity both within and between modes: (a) mismatches between formal indicators of speech acts and their felicity conditions, often undermined by visual context or verbal vagueness; (b) discrepancies within the visual mode itself – between ideational, interactive, and compositional meanings – or between these visual layers and the verbal message; (c) conceptual inconsistencies between a slogan and the visual representation. These incongruities stimulate deeper cognitive processing but can hinder optimal relevance and increase the likelihood of unintended interpretations. Special attention is given to visual cues. At the ideational level, logos incorporate symbolic elements; the interactive level includes modality cues aligning with the sincerity condition of speech acts. Compositionally, the right part of the visual field signals new or rhematic information, affecting conceptual strength, while the upper part corresponds to “promise”, reinforcing or weakening commissive illocutionary force. In sum, ambiguity or inconsistency in multimodal cues can compromise the communicative effectiveness of political logos by violating relevance-based expectations.

Natural translation or natural interpreting (NI) – performed by bilingual speakers without formal training – has received little attention in bilingualism studies, as it is often unfairly considered a byproduct of linguistic competence development (e.g., Harris, 1980a, 1980b, 2013; Álvarez de la Fuente & Fernández Fuertes, 2015, 2024; Hornáčková Klapicová, 2021; Álvarez de la Fuente et al., 2019). Similarly, the field of translation has largely dismissed it, regarding it as non-professional and rudimentary (see Álvarez de la Fuente & Fernández Fuertes, 2012a for a review). However, our paper presents a theoretical proposal that frames NI as a language-contact phenomenon playing an essential role not only in L1 bilingualism studies but also in those of L2 bilingualism. In fact, the way bilingual children acquire their two languages simultaneously in natural and family contexts has been recently drawn upon to offer a more accurate model for language production in fields such as language teaching (e.g., Marsh, 2000; Leonardi, 2010; Sneddon, 2012; García, 2013; Laviosa, 2019; González-Davies, 2020). The authenticity of family interactions presented in such bilingual acquisition contexts seems to provide better insights for the study of both language acquisition and teaching because they reflect how language naturally evolves. Therefore, our goal is to highlight that L1 NI studies can be extended to an L2 context. In this spirit, we offer an analysis of L2 NI cases following the framework of L1 NI to showcase the universality of NI and its pervasiveness in language interactions, whether in L1 or L2, within family or school settings.

In this paper I investigate the development of pill from a lexeme to a highly productive derivational affix. This productivity is manifested in the creation of numerous neologisms based on the constructional schema provided by stems combined by the newly-formed affix (redpill, bluepill, blackpill, pinkpill, dogpill, etc.). I focus on the semantic and functional development of pill in the online discourse of the members of the so-called manosphere as well as its gradual spread beyond these communities. I adopt the general theoretical framework of the usage-based approach to language change with special reference to the field of construction morphology. I apply the notion of constructionalization in order to place adequate focus on the semantic and functional aspects of change that the lexeme pill undergoes. Constructionalization bypasses the limitations and biases present in grammaticalization research and allows a focus on the more abrupt modifications in form and meaning that are taking place in limited pockets of language over relatively short timespans.

Apprehension predicates, such as the verbs fear and dread or adjectives afraid or terrified, can combine with a number of complementation patterns, including to-infinitives, bare and prepositional gerunds, as well as finite clauses. In many cases there is no immediately apparent difference in function between the alternative constructions. Still, they are characterized by their own sets of collocations, syntactic idiosyncrasies and specific pragmatic functions, which suggests that the complement choice is conditioned by a number of probabilistic factors. The aim of this study is to investigate selected variables affecting the choice of the non-finite complements of the verbs fear and dread, the to-infinitive and the –ing form. Logistic regression is applied to data from the COCA corpus in order to establish the relative importance and statistical significance of a range of factors, from strictly syntactic constraints, including the horror aequi principle and extraction, through semantic aspects such as volition, to pragmatics, specifically the implicativity of the constructions. The study investigates if the choice of non-finite complement constructions with fear and dread is affected by the same set of factors, or whether there is a specific type of motivation – semantic, syntactic, lexical or pragmatic – that prevails with each of the two analyzed verbs.

This article aims at exploring the (im/)politeness strategies developed in Supreme Courts’ judgments and opinions. For this purpose, various politeness tokens ranging from sharedness markers and approximators to hedging devices and boosters are taken into account. Multi-words such as “you know”, “you see”, “I mean”, “I think”, “kind of” and “please” or “thank you” are analysed in three different corpora. The corpora considered are the following ones: a corpus composed of the judgements of the UK Supreme Court’s; a corpus of the opinions of the US Supreme Court’s, and a corpus of the decisions of the European Court of Justice. The multi-words’ relative frequencies are compared across the corpora and sample phrases are extracted and analysed in detail. In this way, politeness strategies and pragmatic usages come to the fore. The paper findings reveal different distributions of relative frequencies, where the corpus of the ECJ shows the fewest occurrences. The paper also highlights various pragmatic strategies that often go beyond the politeness intents described in the literature. For example, corpus analysis brings to the surface stance markers in reformulation devices or (apparent) hedges, as well as cohesive elements in approximators. Markers of (negative) impoliteness are found in new-information tokens.

  The present paper explores how native and non-native speakers evaluate (im)politeness in intercultural requests in the Myanmar language from the perspective of the speaker. It is aimed to investigate how (im)politeness is processed in making requests in intercultural communications between native and non-native speakers of Myanmar language, not only from the point of speakers in the conversations but also from the point of native and non-native speakers of Myanmar language. Since this study focuses on the intercultural communication, the target participants are native and non-native speakers of Myanmar language. Two different groups of participants responded to the questionnaire including eight intercultural requests from the speaker’s perspective. Using the data obtained from 40 participants (20 from each group), the data analysis was conducted using Descriptive statistics and Inferential statistics. For being a pilot study, the validity and reliability scores of the questionnaire were also explored. A group of experts from Myanmar acted as the panel for testing content validity and approved the validity of the questionnaire. For the reliability, 0.806 Cronback’s alpha score was obtained. As for the main finding, native and non-native speakers’ different perceptions of (im)politeness can be seen obviously towards every intercultural request, highlighting the role of culture in (im)politeness procession. Moreover, perceptions of (im)politeness are not similar pattern even in the same group of informants (native speakers or non-native speakers). The most striking fact is that (im)politeness evaluation is not related to the contextual factors in intercultural communication.

This article presents a case study of COVID-related terms in popular science articles. It is a corpus-based analysis of articles published in Scientific American and translated into Polish. Its aim is to observe COVID-related terminology variation in translated popular science texts. The bilingual corpus used in this study comprises 51 pairs of texts published in 2020, 2021, and 2022 in Scientific American and translated into Polish and then published in Świat Nauki. The design for this study included corpus creation and compilation, automated term extraction, exploration of the corpus for relevant contexts, equivalent terms and variants (concordance, parallel concordance). The findings confirm variation in medical terminology in popularizations, possibly motivated by language structure and the need for clarity in popular science communication. The study revealed denominative, conceptual and linguistic variants. The most prominent variation concerned the term COVID.

Research into event and argument structure within Distributed Morphology has been centred on the assumption that the vP head is present in the structure of only those lexically deverbal words that behave eventively in terms of their external syntax (that is, they can license modifiers that describe the event of the underlying verb). The vP layer has been claimed to perform two main roles, namely serving as the locus of event implications and categorizing the structure syntactically as a verb. This paper, using evidence from root-derived -ble adjectives in English (e.g. applicable, perceptible, visible), argues that these two functions are fulfilled by two different functional heads. Specifically, it is shown that root-derived -ble adjectives can undergo event-related modification and thus be derived by a suffix that selects for an eventive functional head. Their structure nevertheless does not include the cyclic vP projection, present only in -ble adjectives derived from verbs as well as truncated roots (e.g. operable, tolerable, calculable).  

This article is aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of developing research competence in post-graduate foreign language students, enhancing their scientific and research skills, enabling independent problem-solving in their professional field, and improving their academic training through project-based methods.   Today's educational paradigm puts students themselves at the center of the educational process, their needs, characteristics and talents and their development, the need for a teacher to master research competence is obvious. One of the most effective ways to form specialists with creative thinking is to involve post-graduate foreign language students in research activities. With research competence, a specialist is able to actively and productively analyze evidence, develop and apply new, more efficient algorithms, resources and technologies, instead of being limited to using ready-made, sometimes outdated solutions. The authors of this study highlight that while post-graduate foreign language students understand the concept, goals, and objectives of research, they often lack the motivation and skills required for independent work, information analysis, and research competence development. To address this challenge, research competence must be systematically cultivated from the early stages of postgraduate education. A well-structured educational environment is essential for developing students' research skills. The study, conducted at Kazakh Ablai Khan University of International Relations and World Languages, used surveys and pedagogical observation to assess the research competence levels of master’s degree students. The findings emphasize the importance of targeted instructional strategies in fostering research competence, ensuring that by graduation, students possess the necessary skills for conducting independent research effectively.