This study aims to evaluate the benefits of integrating the Speech Act Theory (SAT) in an English L2 course training within Translation and Interpretation studies, to investigate how it allows and scaffolds the development of pragmatic competence while also fostering professional skills and intercultural awareness. The research uses a mixed-methods approach, with 35 translation students enrolled in an English L2 course. Students translated a selection of public service announcements (PSAs) covering health, safety, and social awareness campaigns which were chosen to include a variety of speech acts. The results highlight improvements in students' ability to identify speech acts, preserve perlocutionary effects, and adapt translations to cultural contexts, with 85% of students showing enhanced practical skills and pragmatic refinement. However, challenges remain, particularly in distinguishing illocutionary and perlocutionary effects and adapting translations to culturally distinct audiences, suggesting a need for further development in curriculum and feedback strategies.

Although the short story lacks the novel’s capacity to construct a broad picture of society and does not offer the possibility of interconnecting different perspectives to act as a chronicle or to draw a wide canvas of the social arena, it remains an apt form for evoking the unsaid and, in doing so, encapsulating the spirit of an age in a few words. By examining Samuel Beckett’s late prose pieces, this article aims to assess the potential of the experimental short story as a marker of contemporary times. In this analysis, Beckett is revealed as an unconventional writer who could, nevertheless, capture the mindset of an anxious age. Additionally, Beckett’s contribution to the genre of short fiction will be explored.

English as a foreign language (EFL) learners are often confronted with grammatical errors in writing. This study aimed thence to identify types of errors made by Chinese EFL learners in their writing and to explore the reasons behind these committed errors as well as the corrective feedback given by EFL instructors in responding to students’ errors. A mixed-methods case study research design was employed. Data were collected from the essays produced by 62 third-year senior high school students (equivalent to 12th grade) at Jining No.1 Middle School in Shandong, China and semi-structured interviews with five EFL instructors from China. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis and descriptive statistics. This study found that omission was the most common error made by Chinese EFL learners. Inappropriate learning strategies, negative transfer, overgeneralization, lack of motivation and positive attitude were the reasons of this phenomenon. It was found that both implicit and explicit corrective feedback were used by the EFL instructors in responding to their students’ errors. The findings provide valuable pedagogical evidence for EFL instructors to scaffold EFL learners’ writing skills.

This work explores the intricate connection between contemporary philosophical debates in the ethics of technology and speculative fiction through the analysis of the novel Machines Like Me (2019) by British author Ian McEwan. In line with McEwan’s continued literary interest in the intersection of science, morality, and ethics, this novel scrutinises the moral complexities that emerge from the encounter of humans with a technological other. Following the postphenomenological and relational ethical approaches of Peter-Paul Verbeek and Mark Coeckelbergh that overtly align with posthumanist thought, the article reassesses the moral dilemmas that emerge when a conscious nonhuman other challenges traditional ethical codes and the core of humanist moral ascription.

The aim of this study is to reexamine the status of constructions in ARTEMIS (Automatically Representing TExt Meaning via an Interlingua-based System), a Natural Language Understanding prototype that seeks to provide the syntactic and semantic structure of a given fragment in a natural language. The architecture of ARTEMIS has been designed to conform to the tenets of the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM), a theory in which constructions are a central tool for the linguistic description of languages. However, since ARTEMIS is a computational device, there are many formalization requirements which involve the adaptation of the LCM, a process which necessarily leads to reconsidering several issues, as are: (i) what counts as a constructional structure; (ii) how constructions contribute to parsing operations in ARTEMIS; and (iii) the location and the format of constructional patterns.

The analysis and identification of figurative language is one of the largest research areas in cognitive linguistics, and metaphor is one of these tropes. Focusing on the genre of TV advertising, a structural method for the identification of metaphorical components used in films in a cross-modal fashion is developed in the present paper. A corpus of eleven TV commercials is analyzed under seven steps that guide analysts from the content description of the multimodal materials to the concrete identification of metaphorical elements. This research presents the Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure (FILMIP, Bort-Mir 2019) as a tool for the identification of metaphorically used filmic components in multimodal filmic materials. More concretely, the paper presents the application of the procedure to two TV commercials from different perfume brands. FILMIP offers a valuable contribution not only to metaphor scholars but also to researchers focused on other fields of study such as multimodality, discourse analysis, communication, branding, or even film theory.

This article analyses 23 different lexical items in Old English denoting positive aesthetic emotion, more specifically, related to the expression of appearance, moral qualities, and personal pleasant experience with the aim of gaining a better understanding of aesthetic standards in Anglo-Saxon England. Using different lexical tools, corpora and software, I have built a database where I have annotated the attestations from the corpus taking into account different sociolinguistic criteria. An in-depth analysis of these fragments and their statistical treatment has shown that descriptions of beauty in Old English poetry have two main routes: a) one that addresses the object’s aesthetic qualities objectively and b) another that focuses on the subject’s response to it. Furthermore, these two alternatives were often complementary in texts of a religious nature.

The goal of this paper is to study several YA novels by Chicana writer Gloria Velásquez, the Roosevelt High School series (1994-2018), as an educating tool within the framework of multicultural education. The analysis takes into account Velásquez’s choice of problematic situations (related to racism, sexism, or homophobic harassment, among others) and the solutions her novels propose, which include both individual responses and community-organized measures. Special attention is given to the criticism according to which Velásquez’s Latinx and multi-ethnic characters are steeped in stereotypes, which would cancel the books’ potential capacity to inspire social change. In contrast with this negative vision, this paper proves that Velásquez’s series offers empowering role models for teen Latinxs of various ethnic backgrounds and effectively calls for the neutralization of race, class and gender stereotypes, thus contributing to the implementation of Jesse Jackson’s 1984 proposal that ethnic minorities should form a “rainbow coalition”.

In spite of her criticism against farce in the paratexts of The Emperor of the Moon (1687), Aphra Behn makes an extensive use of farcical elements not only in that play and The False Count (1681), which are actually described as farces in their title pages, but also in Sir Patient Fancy (1678), The Feign’d Curtizans (1679), and The Second Part of The Rover (1681). This article contends that Behn adapts French farce and Italian commedia dell’arte to the English Restoration stage mostly resorting to deception farce in order to trick old husbands or fathers, or else foolish, hypocritical coxcombs, and displaying an impressive, skilful use of disguise and impersonation. Behn also turns widely to physical comedy, which is described in detail in stage directions. She appropriates farce in an attempt to please the audience, but also in the service of her own interests as a Tory woman writer.

Punctuation in early English has been traditionally considered to lack consistency and systematicity, as shown in the relevant literature. Yet, recent research has uncovered that individual texts followed particular punctuation practices regarding signs and functions that were relatively systematic and consistent, even if they were also quite frequently text-based. In line with this, the present article explores the punctuation practice found in a copy of the Middle English medical text called Letter of Ipocras, the one held in London, Wellcome Library, MS 405. This contribution first reviews research on punctuation practices in Middle English texts and discusses the functions that historical punctuation has been reported to perform. Then, a cursory description of both the manuscript and the text is offered. Next, the punctuation signs found in the text are described and discussed, and their various functions at different levels illustrated with the help of examples. The article closes with a reflection on the global function of the pointing practice of the text, which veers towards the grammatical and pragmatic functions.