This is the introduction to a selection of papers presented at the international conference Thirty Five Years of English Studies in Osijek (35YESO) held from 18-19 October 2012 in order to mark the 35th anniversary of English studies at the University of Osijek

Tanja Gradečak-Erdeljić

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                 14.2-3 (2013): 259-262 259      Tanja Gradečak-Erdeljić Josip Juraj Strossmayer University Osijek   Introduction to the special issue In this special, two-volume issue of Jezikoslovlje we offer a selection of papers pre-sented at the international conference Thirty Five Years of English Studies in Osijek (35YESO) organised by the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University in Osijek, Croatia. The conference was held from 18-19 October 2012 in order to mark the 35th anniversary of English studies at the University of Osijek. This was the second meeting in the newly established series of international conferences, which started in 2007 when the Department’s 30th birthday was celebrated with a conference on a much smaller scale but with very positive feedback from its participants. Our initiative to organ-ize a similar conference in five years received so much support that our Department decided to try to meet the challenge and keep pace with the high standards set at the initial meeting (30YESO). The conference itself hosted more than fifty scholars who presented their pa-pers/works/work in twelve sections with a range of topics covering the areas of English language and linguistics, SLA, Anglo-American literature and culture and translation. Due to the nature of the journal, this issue includes a selection of works from the linguistic sections of the conference, which mostly reflect the wide variety of interests that the members of our Department pursue as well as the research in-terests of our colleagues from Zagreb, Tuzla, Mostar and Novi Sad. Some of the conference section titles were: English (studies) in translation studies, Pairing form and meaning (from a theoretical and/or descriptive perspective), Figurative lan-guage: empirical and methodological issues, Current trends in SLA and TEFL, Cognitive Linguistics and English studies, English and the new media and Seman-tic-pragmatic interface in English studies. Thus it may be safely said that the major-ity of the papers included in this special issue derived their research topics from the     260Tanja Gradečak-Erdeljić:  Introduction to the special issue  framework set by the central issues discussed at the conference. After a thorough peer review procedure, in accordance with the regular policy of the journal, from the presented papers, a selection of twenty-one papers has been included in this is-sue. The first two papers discuss some of the most interesting issues of English mor-phology in the light of Cognitive Linguistics where both researchers established conceptually grounded cognitive semantic networks of particular lexemes, i.e. morphemes. Dubravka Vidaković Erdeljić discusses the results of the corpus-based research on the posture verb SIT in English, Croatian and German and reveals that besides a range of its literal meanings, semantic extensions of its figurative meanings are clearly delineated by image schemas organised along basic spatial orientations. Similar findings can be traced in the following paper by Jasmina Hanić where she analyses the use of the English prefix SUPER- in different word classes (verbs and nouns) and establishes a unique superschema which is present in and central to the meanings of all the words formed with the same prefix. The next set of papers deals with an attractive area of figurative language. In the first contribution Adisa Imamović studies the use of conceptual metaphors and me-tonymies in legal texts, as she contrasts their use in the English and Bosnian lan-guage in the legislation systems of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the UK and the US. Her findings reveal both the converging tendencies of mostly ontological meta-phors (e.g. SPECIFIC FOR GENERIC) and the diverging ones when it comes to the more specific, lower-level metaphors and metonymies, such as, FACE FOR PERSON. Similarly, in the paper by Sanja Berberović we witness another interplay of con-ceptual metaphor and blending where a figurative expression, to play the race card, creates a network of meanings providing discourse coherence at the intertextual level in the context of contemporary American political discourse. Continuing within the context of political discourse, Nihada Delibegović Džanić provides an-other level of application of conceptual integration in her study of visual represen-tations of modified idiomatic expressions in political cartoons and Gabrijela Bul-jan and Ana Werkmann present a very detailed study of another political setting, this time of Croatia’s EU accession, where they tease out some finer points of dif-ference in the metaphorical framing of Croatia in EU political discourse, focusing on British and Austrian media. With Draženka Molnar’s study of the colour term red in English and Croatian, we focus on the problems of lexical and cognitive semantics, and her exhaustive analysis shows both semantically divergent ‘literal’ readings and the vast array of metaphorical and metonymic senses. Adjective-noun collocations may prove in-                 14.2-3 (2013): 259-262 261dicative of the level of both L2 awareness and knowledge, as presented by Višnja Pavičić Takač and Morana Lukač, who compared and statistically analysed cor-pora of both native and non-native speakers of English in order distinguish between general characteristics of learner language and L1-transfer. Mirna Begagić focuses on another collocational set, make sense, and her corpus analysis of different mor-phological realizations of the collocation show that there is a significant difference in the realisation of semantic preference and semantic prosody in different registers and that they can be inferred and used in order to provide a more precise and de-tailed lexicographic descriptions of collocations in general. With the paper by Sanja Runtić and Melita Aleksa Varga the horizon of the re-search topics widens into more interdisciplinary spheres, so that their original liter-ary-linguistic approach to Joyce’s Ulyssis provides quantitative analysis of the text on its hermeneutic and formal plane as the text develops its technical codes and conventions, forcing its own structure upon itself. Qualitative analysis sheds light on the use of face-threatening acts and other politeness strategy utterances in the study by Ana Kedveš, who concentrated on their use in what might be termed spe-cific advertising corpus of calls for applications to universities. Another pragmatic analysis is undertaken in the paper by Olga Panić Kavgić, who analysed the scripts of several American and Serbian films in order to compare mitigation strategies in the process of verbal disagreement. Her conclusions point at discernable differ-ences in linguistic materials which reflect strong pragmatic and cultural preferences of speakers of English and Serbian. The interplay of language and culture is also presented in the research undertaken by Jadranka Zlomislić and Suzana Režić who analysed the academic novel as a genre in order to pont out the importance of the culture-specific campus vocabulary for the process of learning English as a for-eign language. The paper by Mirza Džanić deals with the switch from denotative to connotative meanings of contemporary advertisements revealing more or less sub-tle strategies in applying semiotics to visual representations of specific concepts or ideologies. The analysis of the annotated corpus of specialized magazine columns done by Aleksandar Kavgić focuses on finding a correlation between the frequency of anglicisms in a particular combination of sentence features and shows that bor-rowed words appear in more subjective contexts, such as speculative or emotion-ally charged sentences.  With the study undertaken by Ivana Grbavac we move into the territory of so-ciolinguistic research and her analysis of the linguistic landscape in the city of Mo-star shows that street signs may reveal quite a lot about its inhabitants and the lan-guage(s) they use, such as their etnolinguistic composition, geographical distribu-tion, power relations, prestige, symbolic value, vitality and literacy. In his article on     262Tanja Gradečak-Erdeljić:  Introduction to the special issue  the use of language and Netspeak in blogs, Sanel Hadžiahtemović Jurida offers an overview of the new technological “walls” for original and creative linguistic pro-duction where electronic media replace the physical walls of urban and political arenas.  The final set of articles concentrates on a more applied strand of linguistics. Go-ran Schmidt’s diachronic case study of the processes of foreignisation and domes-tication in the process of translation, on the example of three differrent, temporally distanced translations of Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, shows that translation strategy in general reflects the social and cultural trend in the contempo-rary society. Another research strategy of the process of translation is offered by Tanja Pavlović where she compared the methods of collaborative and individual translation and concluded that the final products of translation of general texts de-pends on both direction of translation (L1 into L2 or vice versa) and its type (col-laborative vs. individual). Kristina Cergol Kovačević introduces a novel methodol-ogy in her research of Croatian-English dominant bilinguals. She analyses their spoken and visual language processing as well as presents the interplay of different approaches to language switch. The final paper is a study of the relationship be-tween linguistic structures of different complexity and foreign language learners’ linguistic knowledge. Vildana Dubravac and Višnja Pavičić Takač analysed dif-ferent English grammatical structures (articles, modal verbs, noun plural and ad-verbs) and their quantitatively processed results show a clear link between structure characteristics and the level of implicit and explicit knowledge of English as a for-eign language. The selection of papers presented in this special issue of Jezikoslovlje displays the wide range of current interests in all aspects of the use of the English language as the central area of the authors’ expertise. It is our sincere hope that the readers will find them as interesting and compelling in their wide variety as they are valu-able in the depth of their analytic power. 

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