Grace E. Fielder

A New Slavic Language Is Born: The Rusyn Literary Language of Slovakia

Following the collapse of communism, the establishment of democratic rule, and the national revival of the Rusyn people, concerted efforts are being taken to codify a Rusyn literary language. This book documents such efforts.

Macedonian discourse markers in the Balkan Sprachbund

This paper examines the adversative discourse markers ама and ами in Macedonian in order to shed light on the interdependence of typology and convergence. Macedonian is typically located in the center of the Balkan Sprachbund. At the same time, a comparison of these two particular discourse markers in Macedonian and Bulgarian, both Balkan Slavic languages, demonstrates that a simplistic application of the criterion of Turkish borrowings would suggest that Bulgarian be considered the more central member of the Balkan Sprachbund. What the following discussion will reveal, however, is that the source of borrowing (i.e. Turkish versus Greek) is not as important as the actual fact of borrowing, i.e. the intensity of multilingual contact, for the determination of centrality.

European spaces and the Roma: Denaturalizing the naturalized in online reader comments

With the entry of several Eastern European nations into the European Union (EU), a ‘third’ space has developed in the discourse for nations perceived as not fully integrated ‘inside’ the EU system. This article investigates the construction of this ‘third space’ in the resultant ‘moral panic’ about undesired immigration from other EU countries and its potential drain on the social services of the United Kingdom and links it to Euroskeptic discourse in British media. The article uses construal operations from cognitive linguistics combined with critical discourse studies as a way of denaturalizing the discourse in online comments that focus on the Bulgarian/Romanian immigration issue which we then connect to anti-Roma discourse. Results reveal a view of the United Kingdom as contaminated by Roma and underscore the need for novel metaphors to be countered before they become entrenched and used as tools for political propaganda.