http://hdl.handle.net/11089/14921 Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:57:43 GMT 2026-04-03T18:57:43Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/14927 Paula Meehan’s Cell: The Imprisoned Dialogue of Female Discourses Poloczek, Katarzyna The paper discusses Paula Mehan’s play Cell with focus on the female discourses present in the context of this literary work and the multifold metaphorisation that both the title of the work and the contents invite. The discourses are analysed against the relevant social background and critical literature. The focal types of discourses under discussion involve imagery from maternal and familiar discourse, the “biological” discourse related to hygiene, the sexual discourse, the mock feminist discourse, the discourse of the military and the propaganda of the common good, and the discourse related to the animal world. Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/14927 2015-06-15T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/14926 Measuring Syntactic Complexity in Spoken and Written Learner Language: Comparing the Incomparable? Lintunen, Pekka; Mäkilä, Mari Spoken and written language are two modes of language. When learners aim at higher skill levels, the expected outcome of successful second language learning is usually to become a fluent speaker and writer who can produce accurate and complex language in the target language. There is an axiomatic difference between speech and writing, but together they form the essential parts of learners’ L2 skills. The two modes have their own characteristics, and there are differences between native and nonnative language use. For instance, hesitations and pauses are not visible in the end result of the writing process, but they are characteristic of nonnative spoken language use. The present study is based on the analysis of L2 English spoken and written productions of 18 L1 Finnish learners with focus on syntactic complexity. As earlier spoken language segmentation units mostly come from fluency studies, we conducted an experiment with a new unit, the U-unit, and examined how using this unit as the basis of spoken language segmentation affects the results. According to the analysis, written language was more complex than spoken language. However, the difference in the level of complexity was greatest when the traditional units, T-units and AS-units, were used in segmenting the data. Using the U-unit revealed that spoken language may, in fact, be closer to written language in its syntactic complexity than earlier studies had suggested. Therefore, further research is needed to discover whether the differences in spoken and written learner language are primarily due to the nature of these modes or, rather, to the units and measures used in the analysis. Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/14926 2015-06-15T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/14925 What is the ‘Future’ of Greek? Towards a Pragmatic Analysis Chiou, Michael The paper investigates the problems related to futurity and modality in modern Greek. The discussion of Greek temporal future expressions is conducted with reference to relevant literature from the areas of English linguistics, cognitive studies and pragmatics. The focus is on the status of future-oriented expressions and the question whether they are primarily epistemic in nature, whether they are tense-based, or modality-based. It is argued that the future tense in Greek has a modal semantic base conveying epistemic modality and that the preferred future prospective reading is a pragmatic development of the semantic modal base. The author further suggests that the future reading is a kind of presumptive meaning which follows from the neo-Gricean Principle of Informativeness, known as the I-principle (Levinson 2000) being a generalised interpretation which does not depend on contextual information. Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/14925 2015-06-15T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/11089/14924 Degrees of Propositionality in Construals of Time Quantities1 Deckert, Mikołaj; Pęzik, Piotr The paper investigates the possible conceptual bases of differences between seemingly synonymous and easily definable temporal expressions. Looking at the usage patterns of nominal temporal phrases in reference corpora of English and Polish we attempt to relate these subtleties to the different granularity of the cognitive scales on which construals of time quantities in general are based. More specifically, we focus on a subset of nominal temporal expressions which adhere to the “number + time unit” pattern, matching what Haspelmath (1997: 26) describes as “culture-bound artificial time units”. Using the British National Corpus (BNC) and the National Corpus of Polish (NCP), we first analyse both the variation and the regularity found in naturally-occurring samples of Polish and English. Finally, we compare the patterns of use emerging from the two corpora and arrive at cross-linguistic generalisations about the conceptualisation of time quantities. Mon, 15 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/11089/14924 2015-06-15T00:00:00Z