Journal Editors: SMILJANA KOMAR and MOJcA KREvEL Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani Ljubljana, 2017 vol. 14, No. 2 (2017) nglish anguage verseas erspectives and nquiries 3 Contents PARt I: LANgUAgE Ivo Fabijanić 9 English Word-Formation types in croatian: The case of Morphological Adaptation of Noun Phrases in Economic terminology Angleške besedotvorne vrste v hrvaščini: primer morfološke adaptacije samostalniških zvez v ekonomski terminologiji Marko Hladnik 25 variability in the Syntax of Idioms variabilnost skladnje idiomov PARt II: LItERAtURE Lahoucine Aammari 41 Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine cunninghame graham’s travel Account Mogreb‑El‑Acksa: A Journey in Morocco (1898) Diskurzivna heterogenost v potopisu Roberta Bontine cunninghama grahama Mogreb‑El‑Acksa: A Journey to Morocco (1898) Emmanuel Idowu Adeniyi 55 Bourgeois tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of communal Spirit in Sembene Ousmane’s god’s Bits of Wood and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross Buržoazne napetosti, marksistična ekonomija in afereza kolektivnega duha v God's Bits of Wood Sembeneja Ousmaneja in Devil on the Cross Ngugi wa Thiong’oa Alberto Lázaro 69 The Dark Side of British Horror Fiction: Politics, taboos and censorship temna plat britanske grozljive proze: politika, tabuji in cenzura 5 PARt III: ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg Ivana Cindrić, Snježana Pavić 85 tendencies and characteristics of Feedback given by Primary English Language teachers in croatia Smernice in značilnosti dajanja povratnih informacij pri pouku angleščine v osnovni šoli Darija Skubic, Mateja Dagarin Fojkar 103 Pre-Service teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning: A Study of Three Different teacher training Study Programmes in Slovenia Prepričanja bodočih učiteljev o učenju tujih jezikov: študija treh različnih študijskih programov za izobraževanje učiteljev v Sloveniji PARt Iv: LISt OF cONtRIBUtORS 7LItERAtURE Part I LAnguAgE 9LANgUAgE Ivo Fabijanić University of Zadar, croatia 2017, vol. 14 (2), 9-23(122) revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope doi: 10.4312/elope.14.2.9-23 UDc: 811.111'367.4 English Word-Formation Types in Croatian: The Case of Morphological Adaptation of noun Phrases in Economic Terminology ABStRAct The influx of Anglicisms is no longer limited to simple and open-class words in a lexicon, but it is also open to complex words and multiword expressions (e.g., phraseological units and simple sentences). complex words are not only borrowed with their original English affixes (prefixes), but can also be formed with the addition of bound morphemes from the recipient language. This paper aims to shed more light on current Anglicisms in terms of noun phrase formation and adaptation from economic terminology into the croatian language. It presents the results of transmorphemisation within a three-degree adaptational framework: zero, partial/compromise and complete transmorphemisation. Each adaptational degree is exemplified by English models and croatian replicas, all described and explained in these terms. For the sake of comparison, illustration and the applicability of the model, some examples of noun phrases found in Russian, Slovene and Serbian are also provided. Keywords: English; croatian; Anglicisms; noun phrases; adaptation; zero; compromise and complete transmorphemisation Angleške besedotvorne vrste v hrvaščini: primer morfološke adaptacije samostalniških zvez v ekonomski terminologiji POvZEtEK Dotok anglicizmov v jezik ni več omejen zgolj na enostavne polnopomenske besede, ampak zajema tudi sestavljene besede in večbesedne izraze (npr. frazeološke enote in enostavčne povedi). Sestavljene besede se prevzemajo skupaj z angleškimi ponami (predponami), hkrati pa se lahko tvorijo tudi z dodajanjem morfemov jezika prejemnika. Članek obravnava tvorjenje samostalniških anglicizmov ter njihovo adaptacijo v hrvaški jezik na področju ekonomske terminologije. Predstavljeni so rezultati transmorfemizacije v okviru tri-stopenjskega procesa adaptacije: ničta, delna/kompromisna in popolna transmorfemizacija. vsaka stopnja adaptacije je podprta in razložena z angleškimi zgledi in hrvaškimi replikami. Za potrebe primerjave, predstavitve in uporabnosti modela so za nekatere samostalniške besedne zveze navedeni primeri iz ruskega, slovenskega in srbskega jezika. Ključne besede: angleščina; hrvaščina; anglicizmi; samostalniške besedne zveze; adaptacija; ničta; kompromisna in popolna transmorfemizacija 10 Ivo Fabijanić English Word‑Formation Types in Croatian: The Case of Morphological Adaptation of Noun ... English Word-Formation Types in Croatian: The Case of Morphological Adaptation of noun ... Phrases in Economic Terminology 1 Introduction So far, a lot has been said about the adaptation of Anglicisms or other -isms (e.g., Russianisms, Italianisms, gallicisms, etc.) in various European languages at different linguistic levels (phonological, morphological and lexico-semantic).1 globalisation and its implications for wor(l)d transformations are huge. The English language has at least a two-fold function in this process: direct or incidental function as a medium of communication, and indirect or coincidental function as a medium of transformations within the linguistic structures of receiving languages. The influx of English lexemes is becoming more evident in both formal and informal contexts (i.e., replicas become more susceptible to models).2 In this research we present the widening of morphological analysis on noun phrases that are Anglicisms, as a result of which a revised methodology of their three-degree morphological adaptation and classification is both devised and applied (zero, partial/compromise, and complete transmorphemisation). Our aim is to present and test the applicability of the proposed transmorphemisational approach on a number of Anglicisms in croatian economic terminology, and to examine their formational possibilities when compared with the analytical approach used in the analysis of monolexemic Anglicisms. For the sake of comparison, illustration and the applicability of the model, some examples of noun phrases from the economic terminology in Russian, Slovene and Serbian are also provided. The article is divided into three major sections. It starts with the theoretical background of the field, the methodology and corpus description, which is followed by the definition of noun phrase citation form, and the explanation of different noun phrase structures. The central part deals with the analysis of Anglicism noun phrases within the framework of transmorphemisation, and the third part presents analytical examples for a potential description of Anglicism noun phrases in the aforementioned Slavic languages. 2 Theoretical Background, Methodology and the Corpus The methodology used in this paper is comparative and qualitative. The comparative part is concerned with the comparison of English models and croatian replicas, whereas the qualitative part with the quality of morphological substitution/adaptation of replicas in the receiving language. The main methodological apparatus for the analytical part of the morphological adaptation is the one elaborated by Rudolf Filipović (cf. 1980, 1981, 1986, 1990, 1995) which, for the sake of saving space, will not be described here in detail. Filipović (1995, 109) states that: there are three types of transmorphemisation: (a) zero transmorphemisation, (b) compromise transmorphemisation, (c) complete transmorphemisation. Zero transmorphemisation takes place when a model (an English word) is taken over by the receiving language as a free morpheme with a zero bound morpheme. Then the Anglicism corresponds to a replica from a morphological point of view. Compromise or partial transmorphemisation occurs when 1 See, for example, Filipović (1986, 1990); görlach (2001, 2002) for Anglicisms; Ajduković (2004) for Russianisms in different Slavic languages; and Sočanac et al. (2005) for adaptation of different European -isms into croatian. 2 See, for example, Fabijanić (2005). 11LANgUAgE a loan, the citation form of an Anglicism, keeps a final bound morpheme that does not conform to the morphological system of the receiving language and keeps the form of a compromise replica on the morphological level. Complete transmorphemisation takes place when an English bound morpheme is replaced by a borrowing-language bound morpheme (a suffix) with the same function. The process is based on the fact that a compromise replica tends to become a replica and to conform to the morphological system of the receiving language. Adaptation of a model depends on its form. It can have a structure of a free morpheme with a zero bound morpheme or a free morpheme with a bound morpheme (two monoradical or polyradical words, at least), either from a lending or a receiving language. Importation of morphemes is a gradual process and is represented by the scheme: model – compromise replica – integrated replica. Basic (citation) and compromise forms are adapted during the primary adaptation process, whereas receiving language morphemes are adapted during the process of secondary adaptation (see, for example, Filipović 1986). The same principles of morphemic substitution and adaptation will be applied in the analysis of Anglicism noun phrases (ANP) in this work. However, the analysis will be improved by innovative approaches in dealing with polyradical words adapted in different constituents of ANPs, whose morphemic structure needs a slightly different analytical method. The paper presents the adaptation analysis of approximately 80 ANPs in croatian, together with 24 ANPs in Russian, seven in Slovene, and eight in Serbian. For the sake of presenting a wider scope of terms, ANPs were collected from various economic fields, i.e., from the fields of business, investment, finance, accounting, bookkeeping, monetary economy, insurance, banking, management, marketing, stock exchange terminology, and so on. As to the transparency and easier comprehension of the adaptational stages, specific abbreviations and indices were used. Adaptation at the morphological level (transmorphemisation) is illustrated by the use of index M, together with a numeral for a corresponding adaptational degree, i.e., 0 for zero transmorphemisation, 1 for compromise transmorphemisation, and 2 for complete transmorphemisation. For the examples of models and replicas, abbreviations EN for English, HR for croatian, RU for Russian, SL for Slovene, and SR for Serbian are used. 3 Definition of the Citation Form of AnPs The citation or basic form of ANPs is formed according to the morphological rules of the receiving language and the secondary adaptation of Anglicisms. The order of constituents does not have to be changed, however, they both have to be adapted by the degree of complete transmorphemisation. If the constituents in a noun phrase have been reordered, they have to be adapted with the corresponding rection and the case form of the receiving language. As to the latter, it is usually realized with a noun inflected either in a genitive (e.g., HR imidž brenda) or, in some situations, a dative case (e.g., RU директор по маркетингу). 4 The Structure of AnPs An ANP consists of two or more words, i.e., they are polyradical words with (or without) affixational morphemes. These can either be nouns or adjectives in the following combinations: noun + noun (noun adjunct + head of the phrase), (1a), noun as adjective + noun, (1b), adjective + noun (attributive adjective + head of the phrase), (1c). 12 Ivo Fabijanić English Word‑Formation Types in Croatian: The Case of Morphological Adaptation of Noun ... (1) a) HR cash flow < EN cash flow b) HR floor broker < EN floor broker c) HR financijski supermarket < EN financial supermarket various combinations of constituents within the corpus of noun phrases have been attested. All combinations have been determined according to the degree of their morphological adaptation, i.e., according to a corresponding degree of transmorphemisation. The degree of transmorphemisation is determined according to the type of adapted morphemes and the types of possible constituent combinations. 5 The Analysis of AnPs: An Overview of Structural Components and Transmorphemisation Degrees 5.1 Zero transmorphemisation (M0) Zero transmorphemisation refers to ANPs for which both constituents have been adapted by zero transmorphemisation degree (2). (2) M0 + M0 The structure of NPs can be realized as: noun + noun (M0 + M0), noun as adjective + noun (M0 + M0), or adjective + noun (M0 + M0). 5.2 compromise transmorphemisation (M1) compromise transmorphemisation refers to ANPs whose first constituent is substituted with zero transmorphemisation, the second constituent by compromise transmorphemisation, or vice versa (3). It also refers to those for which both constituents have been substituted by compromise transmorphemisation or the first constituent by zero transmorphemisation and the second constituent by complete transmorphemisation, or vice versa (4). Finally, there is a group whose first constituent has been substituted by compromise transmorphemisation and the second by complete transmorphemisation, or vice versa (5). (3) M0 + M1, M1 + M0 (4) M1 + M1, M0 + M2, M2 + M0 (5) M1 + M2, M2 + M1 According to the details of respective parts of speech in ANPs, they can be realized as: noun + noun (M0 + M1, M1 + M0, M1 + M1, M0 + M2), noun as adjective + noun (M1+M2), or adjective + noun (M0 + M1, M1 + M0, M1 + M1, M2 + M0, M2 + M1). 5.3 complete transmorphemisation complete transmorphemisation refers to ANPs whose first constituent is substituted by zero transmorphemisation and the second by complete transmorphemisation (6), or to those whose first constituent has been substituted by compromise transmorphemisation and the second by the degree of complete transmorphemisation (7). Finally, there are those which consist of constituents substituted by complete transmorphemisation (8). 13LANgUAgE (6) M0 + M2 (7) M1 + M2 (8) M2 + M2 According to the details of the respective parts of speech in ANPs, they can be realized as: noun + noun (M0 + M2, M1 + M2, M2 + M2), noun as adjective + noun (M2 + M2), or adjective + noun (M2 + M2). 6 Definitions and Examples of Zero, Compromise and Complete Transmorphemisation of AnPs 6.1 The Definition of Zero transmorphemisation of ANPs An unchanged order of constituents in an ANP does not necessarily mean its adaptation according to the degree of the zero transmorphemisation, because reordered constituents can also be adapted with free morphemes.3 However, the most frequent pattern would be the one which includes the lending language bound morphemes in at least one of the constituents (9). (9) HR back-ø office-ø < EN back-ø office-ø HR wholesale-ø bank-ø < EN wholesale-ø banking Therefore, the definition of zero transmorphemisation describes the ANPs which have been adapted to the receiving language either with the combination of constituents from the lending language or with reordered constituents. They consist of two English free morphemes with zero bound morphemes. The corpus provided the ones combined of two nouns, a noun used as an adjective combined with another noun or the ones combined of an adjective and a noun. 6.1.1 Zero Transmorphemisation of AnPs with Noun + Noun or Noun as Adjective + Noun Combinations The models consist of two noun constituents or of a noun used as an adjective in combination with a noun. The constituents in replica are formed of English free and zero bound morphemes (10). The ANPs are of the M0 + M0 type. (10) HR bear-ø market-ø < EN bear-ø market-ø HR cash-ø flow-ø < EN cash-ø flow-ø HR Dow-ø Jones-ø < EN Dow-ø Jones-ø HR full-ø time-ø job-ø < EN full-ø time-ø job-ø HR master-ø budget-ø < EN master-ø budget-ø HR task-ø force-ø < EN task-ø force-ø 3 Since there were no examples of such Anglicisms in croatian, for the sake of exemplification, we bring several Anglicisms in Russian. These are RU своп коктейль < EN cocktail swap and RU опцион пут < EN put option. More about ANPs in the Russian language can be found in chapter 7. 14 Ivo Fabijanić English Word‑Formation Types in Croatian: The Case of Morphological Adaptation of Noun ... 6.1.2 Zero Transmorphemisation of AnPs with Adjective + Noun Structure Both constituents have a zero bound morpheme – the former in the positive degree and the latter in the nominative case, singular form, (11). The ANPs are formed according to the M0 + M0 type. (11) HR big-ø bath-ø < EN big-ø bath-ø HR bottom-ø line-ø < EN bottom-ø line-ø HR evergreen-ø credit-ø < EN evergreen-ø credit-ø HR free-ø enterprise-ø < EN free-ø enterprise-ø HR front-ø office-ø < EN front-ø office-ø HR open-ø shop-ø < EN open-ø shop-ø HR red-ø herring-ø < EN red-ø herring-ø 6.2 Definition of Partial/compromise transmorphemisation of ANPs ANPs which have been adapted with at least one constituent containing a bound morpheme from the lending language will be considered as adapted according to the rules of partial/compromise transmorphemisation with various types of constituent combinations (12). These combinations presuppose their further adaptation according to complete transmorphemisation. The definition of partial/compromise transmorphemisation describes the adaptation of ANPs whose first or second constituent is adapted either with a zero or bound morpheme from the lending language, or with a bound morpheme from the receiving language. In cases when the first constituent is an adjective, it does not have to be adapted by the degree of complete transmorphemisation with a respective word agreement. (12) M0 + M1, M1 + M0, M1 + M1, M0 + M2, M1 + M2, M2 + M0, M2 + M1 6.2.1 Partial/Compromise Transmorphemisation of AnPs with Noun + Noun Structure The examples of this type of adaptation are formed according to the type of M1 + M0, and the lending language bound morphemes are: ‑s, ‑ing, ‑er, ‑al and ‑’s (13). (13) HR terms of trade-ø < EN terms of trade-ø HR šoping centar-ø < EN shopping centre-ø HR traveler’s check-ø < EN traveller’s cheque-ø ANPs with two English free and bound morphemes are formed according to the type of M1 + M1, and the lending language bound morphemes are: ‑s, ‑ing and ‑er (14). (14) HR insider dealing < EN insider dealing HR insider trading < EN insider trading 15LANgUAgE 6.2.2 Partial/Compromise Transmorphemisation of AnPs with Adjective + Noun Structure In this type of adaptation, adjectives are transferred in their original form of the positive degree. They are made of English free and zero bound morphemes, whereas nouns consist of English free and bound morphemes. The examples of this type of adaptation are formed according to the M0 + M1 type, and the lending language (whether derivational or inflectional) morphemes are: ‑s, ‑ing, ‑er, -ment, (15). (15) HR blue-ø chip/‑s < EN blue-ø chip(-s) HR odd-ø dates < EN odd-ø date(-s) HR public-ø relations < EN public-ø relations HR direct-ø costing < EN direct-ø costing HR front-ø runner < EN front-ø runner HR lean-ø menedžment < EN lean-ø management HR top-ø menedžment < EN top-ø management 6.2.3 AnPs with Adjectives Formed of Free and Bound Morphemes, and Combined with nouns Formed of Free and Zero Bound Morphemes A slightly different situation is with ANPs which consist of English adjectives formed of free and bound morphemes, and combined with nouns formed of free and zero bound morphemes. Examples of this type of adaptation are formed according to the M1 + M0 type, and the lending language morphemes are -ic, -ing and -ed, (16). (16) HR Baltic exchange-ø < EN the Baltic exchange-ø HR closing day-ø < EN closing day-ø HR levereged buyout-ø < EN leveraged buyout-ø HR revolving/rivolving credit/kredit-ø < EN revolving credit-ø HR revolving fond-ø < EN revolving fund-ø HR sinking fund-ø < EN sinking fund-ø 6.2.4 Adaptation of AnPs with English Bound Morphemes in Both Constituents The following examples describe the adaptation of ANPs with English bound morphemes in both constituents – adjectives and nouns. They are formed according to the type of M1 + M1. The lending language bound morphemes are -al, -ed and -y for adjectives, and -ing, -ty, -s for nouns, (17). (17) HR deferred payment < EN deferred payment HR Financial times < EN the Financial times HR gilt‑edged securities < EN gilt-edged securities 16 Ivo Fabijanić English Word‑Formation Types in Croatian: The Case of Morphological Adaptation of Noun ... HR global sourcing < EN global sourcing HR predatory pricing < EN predatory pricing HR strategic marketing < EN strategic marketing 6.2.5 Partially Adapted AnPs with one Constituent Adapted by Complete Transmorphemisation In Filipović (1986, 1990) we find solutions for borrowed monomorphic lexemes which were adapted by the rules of complete transmorphemisation. Our corpus and analysis suggest a different solution for those ANPs which, in their adaptation to the morphological categories of the receiving language, have undergone various types of substitutions. We think that in defining the final stage of ANPs’ adaptation, all stages of every individual constituent in a phrase have to be taken into consideration. This means that it is not sufficient for an ANP, for which at least one constituent has been adapted by complete transmorphemisation, as in the case of nouns whose gender has been changed from English masculine to croatian feminine, to be considered as adapted by the degree of complete transmorphemisation. Since the latter examples are not representatives of the final stage in an ANP’s substitution and adaptation (see subchapter 6.3), the aforementioned cases are classified as those adapted according to the rules of partial/ compromise transmorphemisation. The justification for this approach is found in the fact that the whole process of an ANP’s adaptation is to be taken in consideration, with all its confirmed (and possibly unconfirmed) combinations, if we want to specify a related degree of its adaptation in the receiving language (according to specific rules of word agreement in a language, of course). For example, had an ANP, like HR spot transakcija (M0 + M2) < EN spot transaction, been adapted with a form of *spotovska transakcija, *spotska transakcija or *transakcija spota, it would have been the case of complete transmorphemisation (M2 + M2), or, to be precise, those would be the final forms in the whole sequence of other adaptational forms, as presented in table 1. table 1. The sequence of adaptational forms for the replica spot transakcija. MODEL DEgREE REPLICA spot transaction 1st M0 + M0 - 2nd M0 + M1 - M1 + M0 - M1 + M1 - M0 + M2 spot transakcija M1 + M2 - M2 + M0 - M2 + M1 - 3rd M2 + M2 * spotovska transakcija * spotska transakcija * transakcija spota 17LANgUAgE A similar situation can be observed in table 2 where a compromise replica marketinški menedžer is its final form, without any M2 + M2 confirmed forms. table 2. The sequence of adaptational forms for the replica marketinški menedžer. MODEL DEgREE REPLICA marketing manager 1st M0 + M0 - 2nd M0 + M1 - M1 + M0 - M1 + M1 marketing menedžer M0 + M2 - M1 + M2 * menedžer marketinga M2 + M0 - M2 + M1 marketinški menedžer 3rd M2 + M2 - - 6.2.6 AnPs Adapted by Compromise Transmorphemisation and with One Constituent Completely Transmorphemised The group of ANPs adapted by compromise transmorphemisation and with one constituent completely transmorphemised is represented by English models formed of nouns or nouns as adjectives combined with other nouns, whereas in croatian they are represented by two noun combinations (M0 + M2). A replica’s first constituent contains a free morpheme with an English zero bound morpheme, and the second contains a free morpheme with the receiving language bound morpheme, i.e. –a, (18). (18) HR cost‑benefit/kost‑benefit-ø analiza < EN cost-benefit-ø analysis-ø HR greenfield-ø investicija < EN green field-ø investment-ø HR spin‑off/spin off-ø kompanija < EN spin-off-ø company-ø HR spot-ø transakcija < EN spot-ø transaction-ø HR trend-ø analiza < EN trend-ø analysis-ø Another type of ANP is represented by a replica which conforms to the rules of M2 + M1 adaptational type and has adjective + noun structure. The first element may be formed of the receiving language bound morphemes for adjectives formation (‑ski, ‑ni), and the second retains the lending language bound morphemes (‑ing, -ment), (19). (19) HR financijski inženjering < EN financial engineering HR financijski leasing < EN financial leasing HR financijski menedžment < EN financial management HR viralni marketing < EN viral marketing 18 Ivo Fabijanić English Word‑Formation Types in Croatian: The Case of Morphological Adaptation of Noun ... 6.3 Definition of the complete transmorphemisation of ANPs The third degree of substitution or complete transmorphemisation of ANPs describes the adaptation of Anglicisms for which both elements have been integrated by complete transmorphemisation or by a reordered structure of constituents with the corresponding morphemic material. A changed order of constituents is also designated by the corresponding rection and a change of case form of constituents in the receiving language. 6.3.1 Complete Transmorphemisation of AnPs with Noun + Noun Structure The first group of examples has the noun + noun structure adapted by complete transmorphemisation and formed according to the M0 + M2 type, in which the first constituent stays unchanged but the second is changed by the corresponding case form. In our corpus the cases are either genitive or accusative. The replica’s first constituent contains a free morpheme with a zero bound morpheme, and the second contains a root morpheme with a receiving language inflectional morpheme, i.e., ‑a, (20). (20) HR imidž-ø brenda < EN brand-ø image-ø HR efekt-ø outputa < EN output-ø effect-ø The second group, formed according to the M1 + M2 type, consists of noun + noun replicas in which both constituents are formed of root morphemes with lending language bound morphemes, e.g.: ‑ant, ‑or, ‑er, ‑ment, ‑ing, along with the addition of the receiving language inflectional morpheme ‑a, (21). (21) HR konzultant za menedžment < EN management consultant HR direktor marketinga < EN marketing director HR menadžer marketinga < EN marketing manager The first example in (21) shows an additional feature, which is the use of a preposition za (‘for’) within the NP, and with same function of introducing a genitive or accusative form of the second constituent. 6.3.2 Complete Transmorphemisation of AnPs with Noun as Adjective + Noun Structure Both constituents are adapted by the degree of complete transmorphemisation, i.e., according to the M2 + M2 type. The first constituent is formed of free English morphemes combined with croatian bound morphemes for adjectives, e.g.: ‑na, ‑sk‑/‑šk‑, -stv, and with the addition of corresponding receiving language inflectional morphemes, e.g.: ‑a, ‑o, and ‑e (22). The first example in (22) contains a derivational morpheme ‑ica for the formation of diminutives. (22) HR kreditna kartica < EN credit-ø card-ø HR debitna kartica < EN debit-ø card-ø HR kreditna linija < EN credit-ø line-ø 19LANgUAgE HR holdinška kompanija < EN holding company-ø HR internetsko bankarstvo < EN internet-ø banking HR marketinške komunikacije < EN marketing communications 6.3.3 Complete Transmorphemisation of AnPs with Adjective + Noun Structure complete transmorphemisation of ANPs with the adjective + noun structure has the features of the M2 + M2 type. Both constituents in replicas have undergone the degree of complete transmorphemisation and have the same order of constituents as the one found in models. Adjectives are adapted with the receiving language bound morpheme ‑sk‑, and nouns are formed with a feminine gender morpheme ‑a (23). In the third example of (23), we also note the adapted giving language bound morpheme ‑al. (23) HR financijska piramida < EN financial pyramid-ø HR menedžerska revolucija < EN managerial revolution-ø HR multinacionalna kompanija < EN multinational company-ø 6.3.4 Complete Transmorphemisation of AnPs with Reordered Noun + Noun Structure These ANPs are adapted by complete transmorphemisation and formed according to the M2 + M2 type, in which the first constituent is in the nominative case with a derivational morpheme ‑(a)nje, and has changed gender from masculine into feminine (-a). The second constituent is in the genitive case with the corresponding inflectional morpheme (‑a, ‑e). Both constituents in replicas contain either free and zero bound morphemes or free and inflectional morphemes (24). (24) HR analiza trenda < EN trend-ø analysis-ø HR supervizija banke < EN bank-ø supervision HR minglanje menadžera < EN manager mingling 7 Further Perspectives of the Analytical Approach and Research So far, the analysis of ANPs in Russian computer and economic terminology has also shown the applicability of this transmorphemisational approach (see, for example, Fabijanić 2003, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011), and there are many examples of noun phrases that conform to the proposed model with regard to their adaptation. We thus present here some examples of ANPs for different degrees of transmorphemisation in Russian, (25a–i): (25) a) noun + noun, M0 + M0 RU боттом-ø лайн-ø < EN bottom-ø line-ø RU Доу-ø Джонс-ø < EN Dow-ø Jones-ø RU джамбл-ø сейл-ø < EN jumble-ø sale-ø 20 Ivo Fabijanić English Word‑Formation Types in Croatian: The Case of Morphological Adaptation of Noun ... RU фул‑тайм-ø джоб-ø < EN full-time-ø job-ø RU импульс-ø пёчес-ø < EN impuls-ø purchase-ø RU кэш-ø флоу-ø < EN cash-ø flow-ø RU своп-ø коктейль-ø < EN cocktail-ø swap-ø RU опцион-ø пут-ø < EN put-ø option-ø b) adjective + noun, M0 + M0 RU лейм-ø дак-ø < EN lame-ø duck-ø RU франт-ø офис-ø < EN front-ø office-ø RU форвард-ø пёчес-ø < EN forward-ø purchase-ø c) adjective + noun, M0 + M1 RU биг-ø бизнес < EN big-ø business RU блю-ø чип-с < EN blue-ø chip-ø RU паблик-ø рилейшнз < EN public relation-s d) adjective + noun, M1 + M0 RU лимитед кoмпани-ø < EN limited company-ø RU слипинг партнёр-ø < EN sleeping partner-ø e) noun + noun, M1 + M1 RU лидз энд лэгз < EN leads and legs f ) adjective + noun, M1 + M1 RU Файнэншл таймс < EN The Financial times g) noun + noun, M0 + M2 RU план-ø маркетинга < EN marketing plan-ø RU анализ-ø тренда < EN trend-ø analysis-ø RU банк-ø клиринговый < EN clearing bank-ø h) noun + noun, M1 + M2 RU клиринг чеков < EN check-ø clearing i) adjective + noun, M2 + M2 RU консалтинговая компания < EN consulting company-ø RU финансовые фьючерсы < EN financial futures Preliminary results for ANPs in Slovene and Serbian have shown similar results. We present here some examples of several different formational patterns for their adaptation (examples (26a–d) for Slovene, and examples (27a–e) for Serbian). Accordingly, in our forthcoming research we shall be dealing with the study of ANPs in Slavic languages, primarily within the South Slavic group of languages, which will give us a more transparent and systematic image of their adaptation. 21LANgUAgE (26) a) noun + noun, M0 + M0 SL spoil-ø sistem-ø < EN spoil-ø system-ø b) noun + noun, M1 + M1 SL recourse-ø faktoring < EN recourse-ø factoring c) noun + noun, M1 + M2 SL faktoring financiranje < EN factoring financing d) adjective + noun, M2 + M2 SL kreditna kartica < EN credit-ø card-ø SL kreditna linija < EN credit-ø line-ø SL horizontalna segregacija < EN horizontal segregation SL vertikalna segregacija < EN vertical-ø segregation (27) a) noun + noun, M1 + M0 SR revolving credit-ø < EN revolving credit-ø b) adjective + noun, M2 + M0 SR bilateralni monopol-ø < EN bilateral monopoly-ø SR budžetski plan-ø < EN budget-ø plan-ø c) adjective + noun, M2 + M1 SR kreditni clearing < EN credit-ø clearing SR bilateralni kliring < EN bilateral clearing d) adjective + noun, M2 + M2 SR bazna industrija < EN basic industry-ø e) noun + noun, M2 + M2 SR akumulacija kapitala < EN capital accumulation SR analiza rizika < EN risk-ø analysis-ø 8 Conclusion In this paper we have proposed and confirmed the approach to classification and analysis of ANPs according to three different adaptational degrees of transmorphemisation: zero, partial/ compromise and complete transmorphemisation. The principles of substitution have been applied in consonance with the combination of their constituents and according to the presence or absence of either lending or receiving language bound morphemes. Zero transmorphemisation describes the ANPs which have been adapted to the receiving language either with a combination of constituents found in the lending language or with reordered constituents, and consist of two English free morphemes with zero bound morphemes. The ANPs are formed according to the M0 + M0 transmorphemisation type for noun + noun, noun as adjective + noun, or adjective + noun combinations. Partial/compromise transmorphemisation describes the adaptation of ANPs whose first or second constituent is adapted either with a lending 22 Ivo Fabijanić English Word‑Formation Types in Croatian: The Case of Morphological Adaptation of Noun ... language zero or bound morpheme, or with a receiving language bound morpheme. According to the details of the respective parts of speech in ANPs, they can be realized as: noun + noun (M0 + M1, M1 + M0, M1 + M1, M0 + M2), noun as adjective + noun (M1+M2), or adjective + noun (M0 + M1, M1 + M0, M1 + M1, M2 + M0, M2 + M1). complete transmorphemisation describes the adaptation of ANPs for which both elements have been integrated by complete transmorphemisation or by a reordered structure of constituents with the corresponding morphemic material from the receiving language, and changed by the corresponding case form. In our corpus the cases used are either genitive, accusative or dative. According to the details of respective parts of speech in ANPs, they can be realized as: noun + noun (M0 + M2, M1 + M2, M2 + M2), noun as adjective + noun (M2 + M2), or adjective + noun (M2 + M2). References Ajduković, Jovan. 2004. Uvod u leksičku kontaktologiju. Teorija adaptacije rusizama. Beograd: Foto Futura. 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Москва. 1992. 25LANgUAgE Marko Hladnik Utrecht University, Netherlands 2017, vol. 14 (2), 25-37(122) revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope doi: 10.4312/elope.14.2.25-37 UDc: 811.111'367.4 Variability in the Syntax of Idioms ABStRAct given that the meaning of idioms is not predictable from the literal meaning of their parts, we can broadly define idioms as expressions with a non-compositional interpretation. Since language is a compositional system, this characteristic of idioms might suggest that they are atomic building blocks of language with no internal syntax. However, that turns out not to be the case. This paper explores the syntax of English verbal idioms and their degree of compositionality. Idioms do have an internal syntactic structure that is actually variable to an extent and, despite being superficially similar, different idioms exhibit different syntactic properties. The topics discussed include the variability of determiners in idioms, the subcategorisation of idioms based on their relative compositionality into two groups that behave differently with respect to their syntactic flexibility, and the identification of grammatical categories that are obligatory components of certain idioms but not others. Keywords: idioms; syntax; compositionality; determiners; passivisation Variabilnost skladnje idiomov POvZEtEK glede na to, da pomena idiomov ni moč predvideti na podlagi dobesednega pomena njihovih sestavnikov, lahko idiome v grobem definiramo kot izraze z nekompozicionalno interpretacijo. Ker je jezik kompozicionalen sistem, bi lahko na podlagi te lastnosti idiomov sklepali, da so idiomi atomarni gradniki jezika brez notranje skladnje, vendar se izkaže, da ni tako. Prispevek obravnava skladnjo angleških glagolskih idiomov in njihovo stopnjo kompozicionalnosti. Idiomi imajo notranjo skladnjo, ki je do neke mere variabilna, in čeprav so si na prvi pogled enake, ima- jo podskupine idiomov različne skladenjske značilnosti. Obravnavane teme vključujejo variabil- nost členov in ostalih določilnikov v idiomih, klasifikacijo idiomov glede na njihovo skladenjsko prožnost in prepoznavanje slovničnih kategorij, ki so obvezen sestavni del določenih idiomov. Ključne besede: idiom; skladnja; kompozicionalnost; določilniki; pasivizacija 26 Marko Hladnik Variability in the Syntax of Idioms Variability in the Syntax of Idioms 1 Preliminaries Faced with the task of illustrating what an idiom is, a proficient language user will readily suggest a number of typical examples, such as: (1) a. to bite the dust b. to have a bone to pick (with somebody) The idioms in (1) belong to arguably the most frequent idiom type, namely verbal idioms, and the paper will focus on examples of this kind as well. Their defining feature is that they contain a lexical verb, and will thus commonly consist of a combination of a verb and a nominal phrase functioning as its object (for a further discussion of verbal idioms, see Harwood et al. (2016) and references therein). The key property shared by all idioms is the unpredictability of their meaning, which cannot be derived from the literal meaning of the constituent parts. Let us, at least for the time being, settle on the following definition that captures this core understanding of what an idiom is: (2) An idiom is an expression with a non-compositional interpretation. We discuss this definition and its theoretical corollaries in sections 2 and 3 before proceeding to the core subject matter of the paper, namely the syntactic properties of English verbal idioms (with a few passing references to Dutch data). Even though idioms are often considered frozen, atomic units of language, we will see that they have an internal syntactic structure that is actually variable to an extent, and that, despite being superficially similar, different verbal idioms exhibit different syntactic properties. In section 4 we discuss the variability of determiners in idioms, section 5 deals with subcategories of idioms that behave differently with respect to their syntactic flexibility, while section 6 is concerned with grammatical categories that are obligatory components of certain idioms but not others. Section 7 concludes the paper. 2 The Principle of Compositionality to put the definition in (2) into perspective and explain the importance of the key term ‘non-compositional’, we first take a step back and look at the bigger picture with a basic, deceptively simple question: What is language? Most often, we think of language as a means – a method of human communication that makes use of one of several available channels, be it spoken, written, or signed. This use of language, however, is made possible because the faculty of language at its core is a system of mapping form to meaning (and of course vice versa). A crucial property of the human language system is discrete infinity. Language is made of a finite set of individual, discrete building blocks (a finite set of meaningless phonemes make up a set of smallest meaning-bearing units, morphemes) that combine to build an infinite number of sentences that can, in principle, also be infinitely long.1 This property is one of the design features of language – as described by the linguistic anthropologist charles F. Hockett 1 Due to the recursive nature of syntactic rules, a sentence of any length can be embedded under a further superordinate clause, e.g. ‘She said (that) …’ for declaratives or ‘He wonders …’ for interrogatives. This results in an even longer, fully grammatical (although admittedly impractically long) sentence. 27LANgUAgE in the sixties – that distinguishes human language from animal communication (Hockett 1966; Hauser, chomsky, and Fitch 2002). given this discrete infinity property of language, the form–meaning mapping needs to be systematic and predictable in such a way that makes it compatible with the observation that speakers are able to reliably produce and understand completely novel phrases and sentences. How is the meaning of these larger linguistic units computed, then? This is where the principle of compositionality comes into play. Its modern formulation is generally attributed to the german philosopher, logician, and mathematician gottlob Frege,2 and the version of the principle commonly used in linguistics is as follows (cf. Partee 1984, Pelletier 2004, Dever 2006, among others): (3) The meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meaning of its constituent parts and the manner in which they are combined. By means of illustration, let us examine the meaning of the following sentence. (4) I saw a man with binoculars. We can see that the sentence is ambiguous, as there are two possible meanings associated with it. Either (a) ‘I used binoculars to observe a man’, or (b) ‘I saw a man who happened to be in possession of binoculars’. Where do the two interpretations come from? First, note that none of the individual words has a double meaning and that they of course appear in the same linear order (as there is only one sentence). crucially, language is organised hierarchically, not linearly, and there are two different syntactic structures associated with the sentence, each giving rise to one of the two interpretations. In the first structure, ‘with binoculars’ modifies the verb, resulting in meaning (a), and in the second one, ‘with binoculars’ modifies the object, resulting in meaning (b). While the constituent parts of the sentence in (4) remain the same, the possible ways they combine into a larger syntactic structure determine the possible interpretations of the sentence, in accordance with the second part of the principle of compositionality. 3 Idioms and Compositionality In light of what has been discussed so far, we can see that idioms are special in that they apparently flout the principle of compositionality. consider the meaning of the following sentence, with the idiom indicated in italics: (5) Ned Stark bit the dust. The interpretation of (5) is that Ned Stark died. However, none of the lexical items the idiom comprises corresponds in any way to the idiomatic meaning: ‑ bite = use one’s teeth to cut into something ‑ the = definiteness ‑ dust = fine, dry powder consisting of tiny particles of earth or waste matter 2 Friedrich Ludwig gottlob Frege, 1848–1925 28 Marko Hladnik Variability in the Syntax of Idioms The meaning of such an idiom is thus not built compositionally.3 A possible way to reconcile idioms with compositionality is to view them as having no internal structure at all – they are stored in our mental lexicon as single, opaque, atomic items (cf. among others gibbs and gonzales 1985; Mcglone, glucksberg, and cacciari 1994; see also Jackendoff 1997 and works in the phraseological tradition, e.g. cowie 1981, 1998; Mel’čuk 1988; Howarth 1996). If any of the items that make up the idiom in (5) are replaced, even by synonyms, the figurative interpretation is lost, as illustrated in (6). This follows if idioms are viewed as multi-word expressions that function as single words in syntax. (6) a. # bite the dirt4 b. # bite some dust c. # chew the dust However, there are also good indications that idioms are to some extent built compositionally. In general, idioms are formed in a manner which obeys the regular syntactic rules of the language (cf. among others Fellbaum 1993; Nunberg, Wasow, and Sag 1994; Ifill 2002; Mcginnis 2002; Svenonius 2005; Everaert 2010; Stone 2013). Let us examine some arguments in support of this stance. Firstly, bite the dust formally behaves like any other fully regular verbal phrase (vP). This conformity to regular phrase structure rules is shown below, where the form of the idiomatic vP repeated in (7a) is parallel to that of the non-idiomatic vPs in (7b) and (7c). (7) a. Ned Stark bit the dust. b. Ned Stark bit the bread. c. Ned Stark swept the dust. Secondly, idioms exhibit regular word order, and we make a comparison between English and Dutch to illustrate this point. Both main and embedded clauses in English have the Subject- verb-Object order, while Dutch is SvO with the verb-second rule in effect in main clauses, and SOv in embedded clauses. Importantly, in both cases, the idioms in the two languages conform to the regular word order. English idiomatic examples are given in (8), and Dutch ones in (9): (8) Main clause: a. Yesterday Ned Stark bit the dust. [SvO] Embedded clause: b. I think that Ned Stark bit the dust. [SvO] (9) Main clause: a. gisteren gaf mijn camera de geest. [SvO, v2] yesterday gave my camera the spirit ‘Yesterday my camera broke down.’ 3 Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow (1994, 495–99) keep apart the notions of compositionality, the level of which is determined by the possibility of analysing the meaning of an idiom in terms of the contribution to meaning of the individual parts of the idiom (as will be discussed later in this paper), and transparency, which they define as the ease of recovering the etymology of the idiom – or constructing the motivation for its use – once we know its meaning. Howarth (1996, 18) uses the term motivation for the latter. 4 The # sign is used throughout to indicate the unavailability of idiomatic interpretation. 29LANgUAgE Embedded clause: b. Ik denk dat mijn camera de geest gaf. [SOv] I think that my camera the spirit gave ‘I think that my camera broke down.’ It is therefore meaningful to consider the syntax of idioms as an object of study. Idioms are not atomic, despite their relative rigidity, and they do have an internal structure. At the same time, as the reader will have observed by now, idioms also interact with the rest of the sentence they are a part of and conform to it morphosyntactically (the form of the verbal part of the idiom changes accordingly without affecting the availability of the idiomatic interpretation). We will examine these and other properties of idiom syntax in the present paper. 4 Determiner Variability The literature on idioms has traditionally and predominantly focused on their lexical content (i.e. the verb and the noun and the relation between them in the case of typical verbal idioms), much more than on grammatical/functional categories, but if we are to study idiom syntax then it is precisely the grammatical content of idioms we should turn our attention to. A clear place to start is thus to look at determiners in idioms and their properties. A key paper in that regard is Fellbaum (1993), which examines the form of determiners in English idioms and the degree to which it is actually invariable. As it turns out, determiners in idioms may, subject to systematic constraints, change without any loss of idiomaticity. This is therefore an additional argument in favour of idioms having meaningful internal structure. Fellbaum (1993, 275) observes that certain nominal phrases (NPs) occurring in idioms are actually denoting, i.e. they have a referent. In this respect the nominal part of the idiom resembles a conventional metaphor. We can identify what such NPs denote – for example, in the context of the idioms in (10), ‘the hatchet’ refers to a dispute, whereas ‘a bone’ refers to a contentious issue. (10) a. to bury the hatchet b. to have a bone to pick (with somebody) An additional argument in support of Fellbaum’s observations about the referential nature of object NPs in idioms is that we are able to refer back to just that part of the idiom with a pronoun in the subsequent discourse. For the idioms in (10) we illustrate this in (11), with the coreferential pronoun marked in italics: (11) a. george and Harry seemed ready to bury the hatchet there and then, but as it turned out they only buried it months later. b. I have a bone to pick with you and it is a big one. 4.1 Indefinite Article Importantly, in these cases the use of determiners is predictable, and the range of possible determiner variation and modification of the NP depends on general language rules that apply outside idioms as well. The use of the article in (10b), for example, is thus compatible with the interpretation of the NP – there is a specific indefinite contentious issue to be discussed. In 30 Marko Hladnik Variability in the Syntax of Idioms accordance with this, the idiom may be modified as in (12a); likewise, the article may be replaced by quantifiers, including negative ones, as in (12b). (12) a. to have a certain/particular bone to pick b. to have many/few/no bones to pick Just to reiterate, these possibilities are all also in accordance with the rules of literal language: (13) a. to ask a question b. to ask a certain/particular question c. to ask many/few/no questions When the idiom contains a verb of creation (i.e. a verb whose object denotes an entity that does not exist prior to the action expressed by the verb), the modification by certain/particular is predictably impossible (14a), just as in literal language (14b). (14) a. *She made a certain scene. b. *She wove a certain rug. 4.2 Zero Article Idioms with zero articles also occur, such as the often discussed one in (15a), where ‘strings’ denote connections. Accordingly, the idiomatic NP is a plural indefinite, and grammatically behaves as such, allowing a range of modifications shown in (15b). (15) a. to pull strings b. to pull many/no/these/certain strings In contrast, zero articles in idioms also pattern with singular nouns, which is unexpected from a syntactic point of view: (16) a. to save/lose face b. not to be able to make head or tail (of something) c. to take heart However, an explanation may be found if we, once more, consider the denotation of the nominal part of these idioms. In each case, they denote (i.e. are metaphors for) mass nouns – honour, sense, and courage, respectively – and mass nouns are expected to appear without an article (Fellbaum 1993, 292). Such idioms are also predictably compatible with quantifiers, when the referent is quantifiable, as in (17), for example: (17) They couldn’t make much head or tail of his story. 4.3 Definite Article Different possible uses of the definite article can likewise be found in idioms. The non-specific or institutional use (such NPs are also known as weak definites, cf. Aguilar-guevara and Zwarts (2013), among others) is illustrated in (18) for literal language. The sentence is still true, even if Sue and Mary went to two different post offices (which means that the use of the definite article cannot be due to the ostensible uniqueness of the post office in the context). 31LANgUAgE (18) Sue went to the post office today, and so did Mary. According to Fellbaum (1993, 281), the same institutional use of the definite article can be seen in the idiom in (19), where ‘the clock’ refers to (social) progress. This particular reading is lost as soon as the definite article is substituted for another, both in literal language (20a) and in idioms (20b): (19) This court ruling will set the clock back. (20) a. Sue and Mary went to a post office today. b. This court ruling will set (all) clocks back. Alternatively, the appearance of the definite article in (19) may also be linked to the existence of a pragmatically presupposed non-specific referent, which can be referred to without having occurred previously in the discourse, i.e. another regular use of the definite article. Using a definite article is also the only option when the NPs referent is inferable from preceding discourse, again in both literal and idiomatic examples. compare the following two cases from Fellbaum (1993, 283): (21) When John gives a lecture, he always forgets the notes. (22) At every party John manages to break the ice. In the idiomatic example (22), the nominal part of the idiom, i.e. ‘the ice’, refers to social unease in the context set up by the presence of ‘at every party’. Note how this idiomatic reading disappears (or is at least pragmatically infelicitous) in the absence of a suitable context in (23). (23) # At every supermarket John manages to break the ice. Next, the definite article is used in NPs with a given referent, known to the participants in the discourse, again in both literal and idiomatic language. In (24a), ‘the beans’ refers to a secret whose existence and content are known to the participants. (24) a. John spilled the beans about his girlfriend. b. Bob and John buried the hatchet. The idiom NP can be modified by a quantifier that is compatible with that interpretation, as in (25a), or have the article replaced by a demonstrative, as in (25b). (25) a. John spilled all the beans about his girlfriend. b. Bob and John finally buried that hatchet. So far, we have seen a variety of cases where the NP part of the idiom is (a) referential, and (b) the choice of determiner and its possible variation conforms to the regular rules for the use of articles and other determiner elements in the language. These facts reinforce the idea that idioms have regular syntax and are more compositional than initially believed. However, there is also a group of idioms with a definite article which does not fall under any of the categories described above. Some examples of such idioms are as follows: 32 Marko Hladnik Variability in the Syntax of Idioms (26) a. kick the bucket b. bite the dust c. shoot the breeze d. chew the fat e. give the slip (to somebody) What these have in common is that their NP object is non-referential – therefore, in contrast to the examples discussed previously, we cannot decompose these idioms. They are assigned a meaning as a whole (the first two mean to die, the next two to chat (casually/extensively), and the last one to evade or escape), while there is no meaning associated with just the nominal part. In other words, the object NP cannot be seen as a metaphor for a subpart of the idiom’s meaning. These cases thus illustrate a particular idiomatic use of the definite article, which cannot be replaced by another form. In (27), for example, any change to the article results in the loss of idiomatic meaning: (27) a. george gave the slip to his pursuers. b. # george gave a/that slip to his pursuers. The use of the definite article in idioms such as those in (26) is decidedly not context-dependent either, as shown by the examples in (28) – compare these to the to break the ice examples (22) and (23). (28) a. In the hospital, John kicked the bucket. b. At the party, John kicked the bucket. c. At the supermarket, John kicked the bucket. We look more closely at further differences between these two groups of idioms in the following section. 5 Syntactic Flexibility to recap, we have identified two types of verbal idioms, based on their semantic – more specifically, referential – properties. Idioms of the first type are relatively more compositional, in that their constituent parts map to individual components of the meaning of the idiom as a whole. Idioms of the second type, in contrast, do not display that property, as the individual parts of the idiom have no referents of their own. Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow (1994) explore the distinctions between the two groups of idioms further, respectively labelling them idiomatically combining expressions (IcEs, for short) and idiomatic phrases (IdPs). They recognise the previously addressed referential properties of object NPs in IcE idioms, supported by the observations that these individual parts can be quantified and serve as antecedents to anaphoric coreferential pronouns. two examples of quantified NPs in idioms are given in (29), while examples with coreferential pronouns (from: Nunberg Sag, and Wasow 1994, 502) are provided in (30). (29) a. to touch a couple of nerves b. to pull yet more strings 33LANgUAgE (30) a. We thought tabs were kept on us, but they weren’t. b. Kim’s family pulled some strings on her behalf, but they weren’t enough to get the job. c. Pat tried to break the ice, but it was chris who succeeded in breaking it. Importantly, the authors also observe a systematic correlation between the degree of compositionality and the overall syntactic flexibility of idioms. First, IcEs allow for the modification of the object NP by adjectives and relative clauses; since the NP has a meaning of its own, it stands to reason that this meaning can be independently modified, as in (31). (31) a. Pat got the job by pulling the strings that weren’t available to anyone else. b. John left no legal stone unturned. Note how in (31b) the adjective is compatible with the idiomatic meaning of ‘stone’ in this idiom: John exhausted all legal recourses. Such modification, on the other hand, is not possible with the non-compositional IdPs, even when the modifiers are chosen to be semantically compatible with the idiom: (32) a. # Bob kicked the final bucket. b. # We chewed the fat that we found most interesting for about an hour. Second, IcE idioms allow for the passivisation of the object, while IdPs do not. The idioms thus preserve their meaning in IcE examples such as the following: (33) a. I could tell that a nerve was certainly touched by that coarse remark. b. The beans were spilled by Bob in the end. In contrast, the idiomatic reading is lost when passivisation is applied to an IdP, as demonstrated in (34). (34) a. # The fat was chewed by the three friends for the better half of an hour. b. # The bucket was kicked by Jack. Third, in a similar vein, while this is allowed in the case of IcEs, the object of an IdP cannot readily be displaced for the purpose of topicalisation. compare: (35) a. Well, these strings he would not pull for you. b. Those beans Bob has most certainly spilled already. (36) a. # The breeze they definitely shot for at least an hour. b. # The bucket Jack has gone and kicked. 6 Dependency of Idioms on Functional Material In the preceding sections we discussed the variability in the syntax of idioms both in the area of determiner selection and the availability of syntactic operations, such as modification, passivisation, and topicalisation. The findings show that idioms follow general syntactic rules and have an internal structure. At the same time, they fall into different subcategories with regard to the degree of their compositionality. 34 Marko Hladnik Variability in the Syntax of Idioms Beyond that, there is yet another dimension of idiom syntax variation that requires attention. As briefly mentioned at the beginning, verbal idioms are properly embedded in the larger syntactic structure, so we find them conforming to it morphosyntactically, e.g. in terms of subject -verb agreement. It is, however, not the case that all idioms are specified only for the lexical content, i.e. what verb-noun combination they consist of, while the verb can appear in any grammatical form. We also come across idioms dependent on particular functional categories that are therefore also part of the idioms in question (cf. Harwood and temmerman 2015). Thus we find English idioms that are dependent on the passive voice, such as those in (37). Without the passive, the idiomatic reading is suddenly not available anymore, as shown by the examples in (38), which do not mean ‘I was saved from a difficult situation at the last moment’ and ‘I was moved to sympathy or emotion’, respectively. (37) a. to be saved by the bell b. to be touched by an angel (38) a. # The bell saved me from what could have been a rather embarrassing speech. b. # An angel really touched me when I was watching that film. Yet other English idioms crucially depend on the progressive aspect. We can see in (40) that as soon as the indicative or the perfect forms are used, the meaning associated with the idioms in (39) is lost. (39) a. to be spitting feathers b. to be flying blind c. to be pushing at an open door (40) a. # The evil emperor spat feathers after he heard about the destruction of the Death Star. b. # Since there is no precedent for countries leaving the EU, the UK has flown blind in the wake of the Brexit vote. c. # My proposals to switch to a green renewable energy source were met with unanimous approval. It turns out I had been pushing at an open door the entire time. For a further discussion on passive and progressive idioms, see also Bowers (2010), Sailor and Ahn (2010), Horvath and Siloni (2015, 2016), Harwood (2013, 2015), and Sailor (2014), among others. There are also some examples of idioms that appear to be dependent on a particular tense: (41) a. fell off the back of a lorry/truck (past) b. heads will roll (future) However, the dependence is superficial. While these idioms are most commonly used in the tense forms given above, and may therefore be listed in dictionaries with a particular tense as well, the decisive criterion is always whether the idiomatic meaning is preserved if we change the 35LANgUAgE grammatical category. As shown in (42), the past tense in (41a) and the future tense in (41b) are not necessary ingredients of the two idioms, since the idiomatic interpretation is still present.5 (42) a. And how do we know that everything in this dump hasn’t fallen off the back of a lorry? b. Heads roll daily over at the Daily Mail HQ. 7 By Way of Conclusion In this paper we have looked at three areas in which the syntax of idioms is not necessarily fixed. One and the same idiom may appear with various determiner forms as long as the regular rules of determiner use in non-idiomatic language allow for it. An exception seems to be idioms where the nominal part has no referent of its own, which makes them decidedly non-compositional – such idioms appear with a definite article by default. We label these idiomatic phrases (IdPs), while the relatively more compositional idioms whose constituents can be mapped onto individual parts of the idiomatic interpretation are called idiomatically combining expressions (IcEs). This distinction has been explored in the continuation of the paper, examining another area of syntactic variability. While IcEs may undergo adjectival and relative clause modification, passivisation, and topicalisation of the object, such syntactic operations are not possible with idioms of the IdP category. Lastly, we have looked at functional material that may constitute a necessary part of an idiom. There are English idioms that do not comprise only lexical material, i.e. a particular combination of a verb and a noun, but are dependent on the presence of grammatical categories, such as passive voice or progressive aspect. These findings lead us to the necessary conclusion that the idioms discussed are far from being monolithic and syntactically frozen, but instead display an active internal syntactic structure and interact with the syntax of the clauses they are embedded in. The present overview highlights the particular syntactic properties and dimensions along which idioms may differ from one another. These considerations are of importance not only to theoretical linguists, but also with regard to the way idioms and their properties are – or should be – presented in (learner’s) dictionaries. Further research is needed to assess the cross-linguistic validity of the IcE–IdP distinction and the generalisations that follow from it. A contribution to that end is the work done on Dutch within the Syntax of Idioms project (corver et al. 2017), while at the Department of English at the University of Ljubljana MA-level students have taken the initial steps in comparing the 5 A related issue, though more theory-specific than the topics discussed in the rest of the paper, is the link between the IdP-IcE distinction and the clausal functional hierarchy. The findings of cinque (1999, 2001, 2016), Nauze (2008), and others working in the generative framework suggest that functional material is, just like lexical elements, hierarchically organised. For example, elements associated with tense appear higher in the syntactic structure than those associated with, say, progressive aspect. IdP idioms, which are non-compositional, need to correspond to a complete syntactic constituent, i.e. a contiguous section of the structure. We can then pose the question of how big this constituent can be (that is, how much of the functional material it can encompass), and the findings are consistent with the proposed hierarchy – if an IdP depends on a particular functional category, it will depend on all categories lower on the hierarchy as well. The syntactic size of IdP idioms, in this sense, may differ across languages. In English, idioms may depend on the progressive aspect and voice (as seen in this section; the reader can also confirm that the idioms discussed are all IdPs by applying the syntactic flexibility tests from section 5), while in Dutch some depend on the perfect aspect and root modality, categories located even higher in the hierarchy (Harwood and temmerman 2015). 36 Marko Hladnik Variability in the Syntax of Idioms syntactic properties of English idioms to those of idioms in Slovenian and a handful of other languages as part of a seminar course offered in the 2016/17 spring semester. 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Svenonius, Peter. 2005. “Extending the Extension condition to Discontinuous Idioms.” Linguistic Variation Yearbook 5: 227–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/livy.5.08sve. 39LItERAtURE Part II LITERATuRE 41LItERAtURE Lahoucine Aammari University of Sultan Moulay Slimane, Beni-Mellal, Morocco 2017, vol. 14 (2), 41-54(122) revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope doi: 10.4312/elope.14.2.41-54 UDc: 821.111.09-992 cunninghame graham R. B. Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame graham’s Travel Account Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco (1898) ABStRAct Robert Bontine cunninghame graham is a less-examined British traveller who made his peregrinations into Western Barbary, or the “Land of the Furthest West,” in the late nineteenth century, the era of full-blown empire. He reveals his solid support for the British Empire and its complex discursive apparatuses. Expressing his Orientalist desire to know Moroccans as Other, this traveller claims an epistemological mastery and narrative invasion over the field of his observation. However, the traveller is not a wholly root-and-branch imperialist; he is caught between narrative mastery and a fantasy of Western Barbary as a toponym, where his different desires can be validated and an image of Moroccan society as an impenetrable, concealed domain of inaccessibility and total invisibility. These paradoxical viewpoints reveal certain discursive “heterogeneities, inconsistencies and slippages” (Lowe 1991, 7) within graham’s travel account Mogreb‑El‑Acksa: A Journey in Morocco (1898) Keywords: ambivalence; cunninghame graham; colonial discourse; oriental desire; travel narrative; discursive heterogeneity Diskurzivna heterogenost v potopisu Roberta Bontine Cunninghama grahama Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Journey to Morocco (1898) POvZEtEK Robert Bontine cunninghame graham je manj znani britanski popotnik, ki je konec devetnajstega stoletja, ko je bil imperij na višku, potoval k Berberom v »najbolj zahodno deželo«. Njegovo pisanje kaže na trdno zasidranost v britanskem imperializmu in njegovih diskurzivnih aparatih. Pri izražanju orientalistične želje po spoznavanju Maročanov kot Drugega so njegova opažanja podvržena njegovim lastnim družbeno-zgodovinskim izhodiščem. vendar pa ta popotnik ni zagrizen imperialist; ujet je med pripovedno veščostjo in fantazijo afriškega severozahoda kot toponima, kjer se preverjajo njegove različne želje, in podobo maroške družbe kot nepropustnega, skritega kraja, ki je nedostopen in popolnoma neviden. ta paradoksalna stališča razkrivajo značilne diskurzivne »heterogenosti, nedoslednosti in zdrse« (Lowe 1991, 7) v grahamovem potopisu Mogreb‑El‑Acksa: A Journey to Morocco (1898). Ključne besede: ambivalentnost; cunningham graham; kolonialni diskurz; orientalistična želja; potopis; diskurzivna heterogenost 42 Lahoucine Aammari Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Travel Account ... Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame graham’s Travel Account ... Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco (1898) 1 Introduction Robert Bontine cunninghame graham’s Mogreb‑El‑Acksa: A Journey in Morocco (1898) is the main travel text on which this article will focus. The choice of this travel narrative is because it constitutes a corpus which is multifarious and complex in nature, and which reflects the heterogeneity and ambivalence within travel discourse, or what I dub travel narrative’s discursive heterogeneity. The latter’s purpose is to dismantle the monolithic concept of travel discourse as a purely reductive and biased discourse of power. The premise in this article is reminiscent of the work of the following two critics: Lisa Lowe and Ali Behdad. The former argues about “the heterogeneity of the Orientalist object, whose contradictions and lack of fixity mark precisely the moments of instability in the discourse” (Behdad 1994, 140). Moreover, and in what appears to be one of the strongest critiques of the fixed binary approach to travel discourse, Lisa Lowe (1991, 7) claims: When we maintain a static dualism of identity and difference, and uphold the logic of the dualism as the means of explaining how a discourse expresses domination and subordination, we fail to account for the differences inherent in each term [...] the binary opposition of Occident and Orient is thus a misleading perception which serves to suppress the specific heterogeneities, inconsistencies and slippages. As for Ali Behdad, he does not view the European discourse on the Other as a “single developmental tradition,” but treats it instead as a complex field of heterogeneous practices marked by a plurality of interests and critical formations, even though his argument is more historically and polemically specific than Lowe’s (1991, 140). In this article, the focus will be on an exploration of this lesser known imperial travel text on Morocco. The travelogue consolidates the traveller’s vision vis-à-vis the idea of imperialism, its rhetoric and strategies; graham cogently romanticizes and virtually demonizes Moorish locations, mores and cultural markers, and publishes an anti-conquest narrative. Still, he is gazing at this far-flung place through an imperial lens. In this vein, the first section will focus on cunninghame graham’s travel account as a paradigmatic illustration of the empire’s paradoxes. Second, I will deal with some ideological splits in graham through his strong desire for Western Barbary as an elsewhere. 2 graham’s Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Quintessence of the Empire’s Paradoxes The choice of cunninghame graham as an essential travel writer is that his travel account really mirrors the heterogeneity of travel discourse and produces certain aspects of discursive discontinuity in the colonial episteme. His travel text also puts into practice a complex interplay of thematically and ideologically heterogeneous positions that disrupt the narrative unity and discursive order that are characteristic of the official and scientific discourses of Orientalism. cunninghame graham came to Morocco at the end of the nineteenth century and journeyed in various parts of the “Shereefian Empire” such as tangier, Asila, Larache, Rabat, Salé, Saffi, 43LItERAtURE Mogador (Essaouira), Amezmiz and Morocco (Marrakech). His objective during this stay was to reach the city of tarudant, which was off-limits to christians at the time, and it was within and part of what colonial sociologists and historians dub “the land of dissidence”, that is, the “land of Siba”. He recorded his picaresque attempt to reach the forbidden city in what soon became the most well-known English language travel book on Morocco, first published on December 9, 1898: Mogreb‑El‑Acksa: A Journey in Morocco. The author has a keen eye as regards the country, its people and their culture, and comments on everything he sees while moving from one place to another and learning from different communities: Berbers, Arabs, Moors and Jews (chaouch 2008). There are at least three biographies that have been written about cunninghame graham, H. F. West’s A Modern Conquistador: Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (London, 1932), tstiffley’s Don Roberto: Being an Account of the Life and Work of R.B. Cunninghame Graham (London, 1937), and cedric Watts and Laurence Davis, Cunninghame Graham: A Critical Biography (1979). graham relies on and deploys many authors like Ibn Khaldoun and others’ accounts and travelogues, such as those of Walter Harris, Leo Africanus, and Joachim gatell, especially his Description du Sous and Bulletin de la Société Geographique (1871), as well as gerhard Rohlfs’ Adventures in Morocco (1874) and Oskar Lenz’s Timbouctou (1886). graham’s travelogue is a kind of textual interrogation of empire at the turn of the century. His ambiguous and self-questioning Mogreb‑El‑Acksa: A Journey in Morocco is an informative text with which to better understand empire’s paradoxes, and it is also about a journey that is meant to act as an antidote to the traveller’s feeling of a sense of ennui and angst. In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt argues that travel writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “produced ‘the rest of the world’ for Europeans” (1992, 5; italics in original), but creeping into the travel writing of the late nineteenth century and beyond is the fear that “the rest of the world” is losing its distinctive otherness, and the disconcerting recognition that the lines of demarcation between Europe and Other are becoming disturbingly blurred. Without doubt, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) has been a powerful point of departure for postcolonial critics and readers, as well as an act of divergence, of moving away from its orbits. In this context, Said’s theory is of note to reflect upon before moving on to the thesis of this article. Following Foucault’s critique of “pure” knowledge, Said demonstrates for the first time that “Orientalist representations are not ‘natural’ depictions of the Orient,” but constitute the backbone of “a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (1978, 12). Said undertakes the arduous task of describing the systematically “coherent” structure of Orientalism, the essentializing modes of its representations, and the “internal consistency” of its institutional configurations. This Orientalist discourse depends upon some strategies like the essentialist distinctions between the Self and Other, the purpose of which is to create a paradigm to justify the appropriation of the Oriental Other. Armed with an epistemological mastery, the Orientalist/travel writer can then act as a “judge on the Orient,” and as an “egotistic observer” who represents and appropriates the Oriental Other for the benefit of imperial power (Said 1978, 103). Ironically, in denouncing the essentialist and generalizing tendencies of Orientalism, Said’s critical approach repeats these very faults. It is precisely away from such essentialist and monolithic views of the Orientalist/travel discourse that this article intends to venture. Edward Said expresses compelling and cogent arguments when he notes that European discourses of the Other are exercises of power that contribute to the exploitation of all facets of the Other; 44 Lahoucine Aammari Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Travel Account ... still, his insistence on the monolithic and coherent aspect and character of Orientalism/travel discourse seems paradoxically consistent with the logic of Orientalism/colonialism. For Ali Behdad (1994, 11), “[t]o argue that all representations of the Orient are always produced according to the discriminating strategies of a hegemonic cultural discourse is to remain within the limits of the old metaphysical binary structure on which the discourse of Orientalism is predicated.” Instead, difference, ambivalence and heterogeneity, as Lisa Lowe contends in her Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, are fundamental attributes of orientalist representations, and they allow the possibility of multiplication and dispersion of statements (1991, 9). It is clear that cunninghame graham was a belated traveller when he sojourned in Morocco at a time, in the mid- and late nineteenth century, wherein there was an anxious search for the “authentic Other”. cunninghame graham’s discursive practices are thus divided, for they are inscribed within both the economies of colonial power and the exoticist’s desire for a disappearing Other. Moreover, the postulation is based on the idea that graham is a supporter of imperialism, as he buttresses the idea of imperium and as his travelogue contains within its folds some strategies and conventions that are deeply rooted in colonial discourse. Nevertheless, he is not a wholehearted imperialist, as he is also anti-imperialist. cunninghame graham’s very late nineteenth-century travel account is a key work in the shift of Western, and mainly British, travel writing as a genre that started to develop a modernist tenor, like other genres, and especially the novel. graham’s account is an archetype of “the anxieties and uncertainties of the fragmented, haphazard, contentious nature of imperialism, the profound doubts of the continuation of Western progress, indeed doubts about the possibility of progress at all” (carr 2002, 73). graham’s wanderings in a forbidden and dangerous part of the Moroccan territory were inspired by an unremitting urge to escape and criticize the sprawl of Western civilization, rather than from the traveller’s desire to contribute to its expansion. This shift indeed culminated in postcolonial travel writing as an exploration of the author’s perennial and inexorable obsession with the idea of human restlessness and uprootedness. In this postmodern era, the rhetoric of nostalgia has become rampant and conspicuous. The following conditions have largely contributed to this rhetoric of nostalgia: the ubiquitousness and commodification of travel, the rise of mass tourism as an industry, the persistent globalization of a village formerly perceived infinite and inexhaustible, the shrinking of time and space, the incessant mechanization of life and the reinvention of the world in terms of virtual mapping and digitalized cartography. Within this contradictory framework, I find Herbert Marcuse’s remarks on the radical qualities of art in his The Aesthetic Dimension: toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1978) of note; graham’s travelogue, a work of art in touch with and alienated from the consciousness and unconscious of imperialism, “emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behaviour while preserving its overwhelming presence” (1977, 6; emphasis added). to quote Marcuse in full: The radical qualities of art, that is to say, its indictment of established realities and its invocation of the beautiful image […] of liberation are grounded precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behaviour while preserving its overwhelming presence […] The aesthetic transformation becomes a vehicle of recognition and indictment […] only as estrangement does art fulfil a cognitive function: it communicates truths not communicable in any other language; it contradicts. (Marcuse 1978, 6–10; emphasis original) 45LItERAtURE This duplicity and duality in graham’s attitude are due mainly to some discursive ambivalences and ideological uncertainties that we often encounter among the belated traveller-writers of the nineteenth century. According to Behdad, these discursive ambivalences and dual attitudes have their genealogical roots in a desire for the Orient. The belated traveller is a duplicitous figure who appropriates the dominant discourse, but then goes beyond its contours of ideological assumptions by his perversion and by unsettling its “order by producing noise in its system” (Behdad 1994, 55). We have the impression that graham actually rebukes and debunks the discourse of colonialism, and hesitates and shows a kind of resistance to the imperial agenda in Morocco. In this regard, we can subsume his discourse within “a counter-discourse,” to use Foucauldian and Saidian terms, running in opposition to the dominant tendency in the West. At the outset of his travelogue, graham posits the following: I fear I have no theory of empires, destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, spread of the christian faith, of trade extension, or of hinterlands; no nostrum, by means of which I hope to turn Arabs to christians, reconcile Allah and Jahve, remove the ancient lack of comprehension between East and West, mix oil and vinegar, or fix the rainbow always in the sky so that the colour-blind may scan it at their leisure through the medium of a piece of neutral- tinted glass. (1898, x) graham headed towards ‘Mogreb-el-Aksa’ or the ‘Land of the Sunset’ at the end of the nineteenth century. The traveller feels that there is something absent which he tries to fill, and it is precisely this primeval absence that motivates the subject’s quest for Oriental paradise, the search for a beyond that always lies somewhere he is not. He undergoes a kind of displacement in time and space. The experience of this ontological and epistemological break is what makes the traveller recognize the identity of his desire as a lack, as an absence. He tries to liberate himself from the banalities of the dominant discourses during his time, the very late nineteenth century. By the same token, he is prompted and motivated by his constant and eager search for the fascinating, strange, pristine and atavistic, and something outside the common British, and mainly Scottish, modes of life, which to his mind have grown insipid, stale and musty: It may be that my poor unphilosophic recollections of a failure may interest some who, like myself, have failed, but still may like to hear that even in a failure you can see strange things, meet as strange types, and be impressed as much with wild and simple folk. (1898, x) Equally, graham’s aim is to reach the city of tarudant, in the Sus region that is difficult to enter, and this desire and sense of mystery is what spurs him to undertake this adventure and finally arrive at this destination. The subject’s desire for the Orient is thus stimulated by the city’s inaccessibility, which blocks his vision, and it is this impenetrability that arouses the traveller’s scopic urge to overcome the barriers he faces. What’s more, the traveller aspires to achieve something heroic from his detour. In the introduction to Travellers’ Tales, Robertson et al. (1994, 5) write: [t]he imperative to travel signifies the quest for the acquisition of knowledge and a desire to return to a Utopian space of freedom, abundance and transparency. Psychic desires are displaced in partial and vicarious participation in another set of relations (another place and time), and the self becomes realized as the hero of its own narrative of departure and return. 46 Lahoucine Aammari Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Travel Account ... The forbidden city of tarudant is surrounded by a mysterious aura and spectrum, and it is a place that may assuage graham’s angst and anxiety: Our bourne was tarudant, a city in the province of the Sus, but rarely visited by Europeans, and of which no definite account exists by any traveller of repute. Only some hundred and fifty miles from Mogador, it yet continues almost untouched, the only Moorish city to which an air of mystery clings, and it remains the only place beyond the Atlas to the south in which the Sultan has a vestige of authority. (graham 1898, 2) The period of graham’s journey is characterized by its malaise, melancholy and anarchy in terms of culture and social values. This sense of sordidness and maelstrom is clearly stated by Anne Mcclintock: “the fetid effluvia of the slums, the belching smoke of industry, social agitation, economic upheaval, imperial competition and anti-colonial resistance” (1995, 211). In the same vein, even Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), notes Young (1995, 3), “is predicated on the fact that the English culture is lacking, lacks something, and acts out an inner dissonance that constitutes its secret, riven self.” This state is attributed mainly to the dissolution and decadence of victorian values, or what is known as the fin de siècle malaise, because at the heart of this period, as Homi Bhabha avers in The Location of Culture (1994, 2): [W]e find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the ‘beyond’: an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au‑delà – here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth. At the end of the nineteenth century, there was an escape to the fantastic, the imaginative, and, in turn, the non-Western. In the chapter “Late victorian to Modernist” in The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, Bernard Bergonzi writes: “In fiction, the fin de siècle mood of withdrawal from everyday reality and the pursuit of a higher world of myth and art and imagination led to a taste for fictional romances” (2001, 389). In this manner, the world the traveller reports on will often be foreign, but as Barbara Korte writes in her English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (2000, 5): “[t]he traveller’s own country may equally be the object of his or her investigation. Accounts of travel let us participate in acts of (inter) cultural perception and cultural construction, in processes of understanding and misunderstanding.” What’s more, the representation of the Other or the desire for this Other is a desire for self-recognition and self- realization on the part of the traveller. The travelling first-person narrator not only looks at those who inhabit the places through which he passes, but views them in ways that throw light on his own anxieties and desires, as well as on the home culture: The Other becomes – or always already is – a sign, an empty space invested by a consciousness fascinated with the problems of identity and history, self and becoming. Representing the primitive Other provides a way to call man and society into question, to analyze the values, customs, and institutions of European civilization. Europe puts the Other to work in order to think itself and to consolidate its place within a unified history and science. (Brewer 1984, 56) In his Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (1996), Stephen Arata points out that it has been widely recognized that British culture in the 1880s, 1890s and outset of the twentieth century was marked by a sense of irrevocable decline. For Arata, whose subject is the stories of loss and decadence 47LItERAtURE written at the turn of the century, “the turn outward to the frontiers” visible in the engagement with issues of empire in late-victorian male romances is “entangled with anxieties about domestic decay” (1996, 79), an unease given form in “reverse colonization narratives” (1996, 119) such as Dracula, She and The War of the Worlds whose fantasies “are products of the geopolitical fears of a troubled imperial society” (1996, 108). This sense of decay, disillusionment and anxiety permeates not only novels but also other genres, including travel literature: “Across disciplines and genres are heard the same anxieties concerning the collapse of culture, the weakening of national might, the possibly fatal decay – physical, moral, spiritual, creative – of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ as a whole” (1996, 1). In chris Bongie’s account in Exotic Memories (1991), the malaise of the fin de siècle can be attributed to the dissolution of exotic horizons, since with the ending of the age of exploration by the 1880s nothing remained beyond European control and knowledge. What is more, in his The Political Unconscious and practically related to this issue of belatedness, Fredric Jameson (1981) associates transformations in novelistic practice (and travel writing) at the turn of the nineteenth century with the cognitive effects of expansionism on metropolitan social forms and experiential modes. Besides, Jameson attributes these transformations to a crisis within bourgeois society and subjectivity strengthened by the expansion of imperialism at the late nineteenth century, citing conrad’s novels, for instance, as providing “key articulations of the increased fragmentation of individual consciousness in an age of growing commodification and brutal colonization” (1981, 17; also quoted in Parry 2004, 117). The belated traveller’s solitary quest for elsewhere as a response to the onset of modernism in Europe became crucially productive in the micropolitics of imperial quest during the late nineteenth century. There are many writers who delve into this situation as they find it depressing and gloomy, and this shadow of angst contributes to “fracturing metropolitan horizons, eroding confidence in the West’s undisputed and indisputable cognitive power and engendering disillusion in the ethos of an imperialist ascendency” (Parry 2004, 116). It is in this context that graham falls in love with the Moorish culture and ways of life: We rose at daylight, drank green tea and smoked, went down to bathe, came back and breakfasted, looked at the horses led to water, listened to the muezzin call to prayers, walked in the olive grove or watched the negroes in the corn field; engaged in conversation with some of the strange types, we read el Faredi, speculated on how long the “rekass” would tarry on the road from the Sultan’s camp, and wondered at the perpetual procession of people always arriving at the castle to beg for something, a horse, a mule, a gun, some money, or in some way or other to participate in the Kaid’s Baraka. (graham 1898, 236) In the main, graham as a belated traveller is a flȃneur, to use Behdad’s own expression, that is, “an idler who tries to see more of the Orient through his erratic sauntering and by remaining dependent on chance” (Behdad 1994, 57). This is partly what sealed his decision to “go native” by outrageously impersonating and dressing up in the manner of a Moor. The process of “going native” is imposed on graham as it serves as a protective device, especially in a Muslim society depicted as a fanatic anti-christian community. The belated traveller is a cultural transvestite, so to speak, as he takes the adventure of wearing the Other’s clothes; graham finds it difficult to enter the city of tarudant in a European outfit, so he carries out a masquerade as a mimetic mode of identification with the Moorish Other. clothes are conspicuous signs of social and cultural identity. As such, wearing a Moorish costume poses a problem of identity for the traveller; to wear Moorish clothes is both a way of renouncing one’s identity and a form of conversion to the Other’s imaginary. More than a dialectic, graham’s 48 Lahoucine Aammari Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Travel Account ... relation to mimesis and alterity, identification and difference, is an unremitting movement between these two terms. Identification is simultaneously alienating and confrontational, as Bhabha (1994) puts it. to deal with this threat, the subject can adopt the Other’s identity through which he can accomplish several aims and tasks. Put otherwise, by donning Moorish dress, which he greatly enjoys, graham crosses cultural bridges, violates national barriers, and denies difference by becoming artificially Other. The romantic and pastoral tradition and its idealisation and fantasisation of the Orient has a clear impact on the representation of Morocco in British travelogues. graham’s romantic desire to “go native” dismantles his colonial discourse, even as it blurs the boundaries between the subject and object, between Western and native identities, and subsequently problematises the very notion of difference. By desiring to be Other and be in an ‘Other’ place, graham attempts to disavow his identity. The writer viewed his Moorish transvestism as a form of cultural resistance to his Europeanness, a mode of self-fashioning through which he constituted his desired image: the Other mesmerized in himself. He disguises himself first as a turkish doctor: “Even my friends were all agreed that to reach tarudant in European clothes was quite impossible. Thus a disguise became imperative. After a long discussion I determined to impersonate a turkish doctor travelling with his “taleb,” that is, scribe to see the world and write his travels in a book” (1898, 2–3). Then graham dresses like a sacred Sheik (the word is used here religiously, not politically, to refer to a sacred person) from Fez: “I had to give up this as I spoke little Arabic and no turkish, and as I looked rather like a Moor from Fez, finally called myself Sheikh Mohammed el Fasi; but I fear few were taken in by that name” (1898, 4). The traveller imitates the Moors in their dress, eating, and riding habits: “Riding along and dangling my feet out of the stirrup to make the agony of the short stirrup leather hung behind the girths, endurable, it struck me what peaceful folks the Arabs really were” (1898, 100). This desire for the Orient is a desire for self-exoticism which destabilizes the intentional coded message of cultural colonialism. graham holds this positivistic contention that a full understanding of the Other is possible through immersion, an extended experience that authorizes the subject to speak about the Orient. For Behdad, the belated Orientalism of travellers like graham vacillates and fluctuates between “an insatiable search for a counter-experience in the Orient and the melancholic discovery of its impossibility; they are, as a result, discursively diffracted and ideologically split” (Behdad 1994, 15). graham’s shift between wearing turkish clothes and Moorish ones is evocative of his unstable and unsteady search and desire for a wholly unified identity and personality in a stifling victorian context. 3 Desire for the Orient: Ideological Splits in graham to what extent can we say that graham does adopt an anti-imperialist standpoint in his travelogue vis-à-vis the Moors? We can contend that he comes to Morocco in search of a discontinuity with his European selfhood; once there he becomes retentive of the Oriental referent as he witnesses or predicts its slow disappearance under the weight of European colonialism. Arriving at Moghreb-el-Alksa at a time when the Other was on the verge of being fully consumed by European hegemony and imperialism, graham tries to preserve its last traces. The reason why he refuses colonialism is that he wants to keep the status quo as it is, because of the Europeans’ would-be intervention that is in the offing; for him, modernity, in the shape of tourists even not colonialists, is about to sweep away the picturesque customs he has come to seek. In this vein, we can say that graham is anti-imperialist; not only does he mock imperialism’s grandiloquence, but 49LItERAtURE he also feels that he still finds some glimpses of authenticity, the Oriental desire and exoticism in Morocco and its people. He thus tries all the harder to salvage this, so to speak, from any external contamination: “no doubt, in every town throughout the East, the presence of even a small quantity of Europeans forces prices up, upsets the national life, unsettles men, and after having done so, gives them no equivalent for the mischief that it makes” (1898, 162). Moroccans and their traditional ways of life are an antidote to a mechanistic and modern way of life that gnaws slowly at most Britons: […] for a thousand (perhaps ten thousand) years the Oriental life has altered little, nothing having been done to “improve” the land, as the Americans ingenuously say. And so may Allah please, bicycles, gatling guns, and all the want of circumstance of modern life not intervening, it may yet endure when the remembrance of our shoddy paradise has fallen into well-merited contempt. (1898, 130) graham is fed up with Europeans’ hankering after what is material, forgetting what is spiritual. As a prime example of this we can refer to what he avows in his “Preface” to Emily Keene’s My Life Story (1911). Here, graham shows a kind of adoration of the Oriental/Moorish ways of living by stating the following: The Oriental is only occupied with life: the sun, the rain, the stars (how many of us gaze upon the stars, except a government official now and then), love, and the condition of his horse, his petty bargains, prayers, hatreds, and jealousies, are what take up his thoughts. He lives for life, and we for things exterior, sometimes superfluous and always rather of the body than the mind. (1911, xi–xii) He thus starts to harbour a kind of envy and fear towards his European peers and colonizers, because if they intervene in the Land of the Sunset they would bring with them all those terrible aspects of Western civilization. For him, Europeans are as scum in the land of the Moors, as they came to Morocco and brought with them degeneracy deeply rooted in the metropole of the time, and transferred it to the “authentic” periphery or soon-to-be colony. tangier is an example of an outlying territory that swarms with people from different countries, and one that is already tinged with all manner of motley and shoddy things due to the presence of Europeans: I do not mean that the state of affairs in tangiers is an ideal one. No; there is a large proportion of the scum of all Europeans gathered there. There is a mismanagement of public affairs that passes all belief. There is great injustice on all sides; but-but-but- there is no great hurry and push for life. There is no great machine industry; no public opinion; no roads; no railways; no standing army; and little or no education. (166) Instead, graham writes, “I should prefer to see Morocco as it is, bad government and all, thinking but little as I do of the apotheosis of the bowler hat, and hiding as an article of faith that national government is best for every land, from Ireland to the “vexed Bermoothes” and then to timbuctoo” (1898, 254). For graham, “Europeans are a curse throughout the East” (1898, 23), and they bring guns, gin, powder, and shoddy cloths, dishonest dealing only too frequently, and flimsy manufactures which displace the fabrics woven by the women; new wants, new ways, and discontent with what they know, and no attempt to teach a proper comprehension of what they introduce; these are the blessings Europeans take to Eastern lands. Example 50 Lahoucine Aammari Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Travel Account ... certainly they do set, for ask a native what he thinks of us, and if he has the chance to answer without fear, ‘tis ten to one he says, christian and cheat are terms synonymous. Who that has lived in Arab countries, and does not know that fear, and fear alone, makes the position of the christian tolerable. (1898, 23–24). The traveller makes efforts to produce different and more sympathetic representations of the Other, and he empathises with the Moors and regards all those oppressive practices, civilizing pretences and other aspects of modern life (“better government, progress, morality, and all the usual “boniment” which christian powers address to weaker nations when they contemplate the annexation of their territory” (1898, 41)) in his home country of England as vices that just “taint” the Moors’ virtues, such as morality, solidarity and a sense of union: a poor Mohammedan, unless in case of famine, is seldom left to starve. Even a begging christian renegade, of whom there are a few still left, always receives some food where’re he goes, and is not much more miserable than the poor Eastern whom one sees shivering about the docks in London and imploring charity for “Native Klistian” with an adopted whine, and muttered national imprecation on the unsuspecting almsgiver. (1898, 41) graham is also fascinated by other ethical values, such as persistence, fortitude and endurance: The sufferer by famine, as in Morocco, suffers enough, god knows, stalks about like a skeleton, dies behind a saint’s tomb; but in the sun. He believes in Allah to the last, and dies a man, his eyesight not impaired by watching wheels whirr round to make a sweater rich, his hands not gnarled with useless toil (for what can be more useless than to work all through your life for someone else?), and his emaciated face still human, and not made gnomish by work, drink, and east wind, like the poor christian scarecrows of glasgow, Manchester, and those accursed “solfataras,” the Yorkshire manufacturing towns. (1898, 125–26) The traveller’s adventure into the city of tarudant makes him the speaking subject caught between a “fantasy of the Orient as a dream world where his desires are realized and an image of Oriental society as an unattainable, concealed domain of absolute repression” (Behdad 1994, 20), as well as a sense of impenetrability and opacity. This splitting or bifurcation, in the Barthesian sense, in the late nineteenth century travel discourse, “marks the primal division […] of the subject and his discourse into a conscious relation that can manifest itself only in the vacillations of the Orientalist subject – and only at the moments of discursive uncertainty” (Behdad 1994, 20). graham is uncertain about his representation and melancholic about his inability to produce a surrogate mode of writing. Indeed, the representations of graham as a belated traveller thus do not “close on an exotic signified but practice an open deferment of signification; they are elliptic discourses, uncertain about [his] representations and melancholic about [his] inability to produce an alternative mode of writing about the desired Other” (Behdad 1994, 15). graham is not contradictory, but rather, to use a Barthesian expression, he is dispersed and split: “[W]hen we speak today of a divided subject, it is never to acknowledge his simple contradictions, his double postulations, etc.; it is a diffraction which is intended, a dispersion of energy in which there remains neither a central core nor a structure of meaning” (Barthes 1977, 143). graham’s relationship with Moroccans includes involvement, participation, indulgence and immersion, a kind of giving oneself over to the experience of the Oriental journey without trying to capture the Oriental ‘signified’. Far from being a self-centred drive for knowledge, 51LItERAtURE “the desire for the Orient is the return of a repressed fascination with the Other, through whose differentiating functions European subjectivity has often defined itself since the crusades” (Behdad 1994, 21). Beyond his interest in self-realization through his journey to Morocco, graham has a great desire to understand and even become part of the Moroccan culture. Such a desire makes the Orientalist subject/the traveller surrender his power of representation and pursuit of knowledge by becoming a self-indulgent participant in the immediate reality of the Moroccan/Oriental culture. In this situation, we can say that the author as an observer who used to occupy a privileged space feels that he is being observed by the Moors/the once observed who become the observer and so occupy a desired and privileged space: Finding myself the observed of all observers in Mogador, I transferred my residence to Mr. Pepe Ratto’s International Sanatorium, about three miles outside the town, which passes generally under the designation of the Palm-tree House. There I essayed to live my filibustering character down, and for a day or two went sedulously out shooting in the hottest time of day, to show I was a European traveller; collected “specimens,” as butterflies and useless stones; took photographs, all of which turned out badly; classified flowers according to a system of my own; took lessons in Arabic, and learned to ride upon the Moorish saddle. A few days of this exhilarating life made all things quiet, and the good citizens of Mogador were certain that I was a bona-fide traveller and had no design to attack the province of the Sus. (1898, 50) This concept of observation or the gaze is very deeply rooted in post-colonial theory. Because such observation, which corresponds to and confirms the gaze of the traveller or the soon-to- be-colonizer and his colonial authority, may be reversed as the above excerpt conspicuously elucidates. This is, in Bhabha’s (1994, 127) formulation, a peculiarly important and potent aspect of the menace inherent in mimicry: “the displacing gaze of the disciplined where the observer becomes the observed and ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from its essence.” According to Minh-ha, “in travelling, one is a being-for-other, but also a being-with-other. The seer is seen while s/he sees. to see and to be seen constitute the double approach of identity: the presence to oneself is at once impossible and immediate” (2011, 41; emphasis in the original). In this way, we can say that the metaphoric displacing and returning of the imperial gaze is a fundamental operation of the appropriation of the imperial discourses and cultural forms. Behdad ascertains that the belated Orientalist dissolves himself in images, figures and signs of otherness, hence allowing for the dissolution of the boundaries between those binary and Manichean entities and racialized constructs: Self/Other, traveller/travellee, narrator/narrated, observer/observed, subject/object, British/Moorish, etc., that are deeply seated in colonial discourse: “Instead of keeping his ideological distance from the Other, the belated Orientalist dissolves himself in images, figures, and signs of otherness, allowing the abolition of observer and observed, subject and object, self and Other” (Behdad 1994, 60). Indeed, the nineteenth- century imperial project most clearly focuses upon the “racialised notions of Self and the Other. Imperialism operated within an ideal of the Manichean binary, which constructed a demonized Other against which flattering, and legitimating, images of the metropolitan Self were defined” (Jacobs 2001, 2). Through these Manichean entities, Orientals are perceived in general as representative of an inferior Orient, which is taken to be constant, timeless, defined by various recurring traits (femininity, idleness, capriciousness, inefficiency, disorganization, dishonesty, and so on) against which a West with the opposite tendencies (manliness, hard 52 Lahoucine Aammari Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Travel Account ... work, straightforwardness, efficiency, organization, honesty, and so forth) can be defined. These entities, however, fade away, and so there is a kind of subversion of the self from within by the traveller to show that colonial discourse is not monolithic and homogeneous, but rather it is riven from within. The racialized constructs and binaries moulded by imperialism were never stable and always threatened not only by “the unpredictability of the Other but also the uncertain homogeneity and boundedness of the Self ” (Jacobs 2001, 2–3). By disclosing this ambivalence, the authority of colonial discourse is disrupted. There is thus the emergence of native empowerment, erasing the notion of the Other as a silenced victim of Western domination. There is the inversion and alteration of the above-mentioned constructs and entities by which the hegemonic ideology produces and marginalizes the dominated and indigenous people (Parry, 2004, 15). This radically subversive strategy is asserted by Jonathan Dollimore in his “The dominant and the deviant: a violent dialectic” (1986): Jacques Derrida reminds us that binary oppositions are ‘a violent hierarchy’ where one of the two terms forcefully governs the other. A crucial stage in their deconstruction involves an overturning, an inversion ‘which brings low what was high’. The political effect of ignoring this stage, of trying to jump beyond the hierarchy into a world quite free of it, is simply to leave it intact in the only world we have. Both the reversal of the authentic/inauthentic opposition […] and the subversion of authenticity itself […] are different aspects of overturning in Derrida’s sense. Moreover they are stages in a process of resistance. (1956, 90) graham is an ambivalent traveller whose reflections are fragmentary; he finds the place of his displacement and the locus of his discontent in Morocco. The belated travel writer’s journey is always a disorientation, for the search for a “counter-experience” in the Other turns out to be a discovery of its loss and the absence of an alternative. The traveller oscillates between two different worlds which are far removed from each other: the East and West. In Minh-ha’s view, “The traveller’s ‘identity crisis’ often leads to a mere change of appearance - a temporary disguise whose narrative remains, at best, a confession” (1994, 22). The encounter with the Other enables the Self to regain, if only momentarily, a sense of wholeness, and therefore the temporary feeling of a meaningful existence. He treks through and journeys into the world of the Other, but his journey, or rather his detour, is fleeting, as he quickly returns into his original world because he finds it difficult to find out exactly what he searches for that may change his life entirely: “I had been put to a pretty strong test, and had emerged triumphantly” (1898, 134). graham was caught by a Berber Kaid, and his dream of reaching the mysterious city of tarudant was thus displaced, and his desire for the Orient stopped at this moment. cunninghame graham journeys and moves from one identity to another, evoking and conjuring up the ambivalent aspect of colonial discourse and travel narratives, as the latter is a literary genre that contributes to bringing some of the features of colonial discourse to the forefront. The traveller’s desire to be like the Other shows the discursive heterogeneity of travel discourse. graham’s transvestism, that is, his disguise in Moorish masquerade, is an attempt to reconstruct his split and hybrid Self as a Moorish Other. The desire for the Orient, as Behdad points out, is “a hybrid force that posits uncertainty in the orientalist’s consciousness and enables possibilities of dialogic articulation because it propagates different identity effects and ideological positions” (Behdad 1994, 30). We can say that cunninghame graham settles on the cusp of two different cultures, and he engages, therefore, in a kind of self-parody and self-irony as a strategy of self- protection and self-presentation. Pratt (2001) expresses this as follows: 53LItERAtURE The European’s relations with the Other are governed by a desire for reciprocity and exchange. Estrangement and repulsion are represented as entirely mutual and equally irrational in both sides. Parody and self-parody abound. […] This discourse does not explicitly seek a unified, authoritative speaking subject. The subject here is split simply by virtue of relating itself as both protagonist and narrator, and it tends to split itself even further in these account […] the self sees, it sees itself seeing, it sees itself being seen, and always it parodies itself/and the Other. (2001, 145–46). Patrick Holland and graham Huggan capture this idea more clearly when they state: Self-irony also affords a useful strategy of self-protection – as if the writer, in revealing his/ her faults, might be relieved of social responsibilities. Some travel writers, hiding behind the mask of escapist explorer-adventurers, or lurching from one disaster to the next for the delectation of their readers, are reluctant to be held accountable for their gauche but “inoffensive” actions. Others, quick to moralize about the ills of other cultures, exempt themselves from complicity in the cultural processes they describe. (2003, 7) This Moorish masquerade is symbolic of the traveller’s desire to self-exoticize, and the idea that European clothes as a masque symbolize certain values that are hollow at the core: It must not be forgotten that in the East […] European clothes, hard hats, elastic-sided boots, grey flannel shirts, with braces, mother-of-pearl studs, two carat watch-chairs, all the beauty of our meanly contrived apparels, are to Mohammedans the outward visible sign of the inward spiritual maxim gun, torpedo boat, and arms of precision on which our civilization, power, might, dominion, and morality really repose. (1898, 216) In most of travel writers of the late nineteenth century, costume poses the problem of identity. graham aims at liberating himself from the European sameness symptomatically manifested in the murky and drab redingote. 4 Conclusion graham is more concerned with deconstructing and destabilizing the centrality of Western christian civilization than with propagandizing the superiority of Western society. His journey into Moghreb-el-Acksa produces a travel account that is schizoid in nature, and this is attributed mainly to the expansion of a mechanical way of life that spurs the author to free himself from this kind of life and assuage his angst in Morocco as a remote elsewhere. Besides, we can deduce the unattainability of graham’s desired break with the dominant discourses and the impossibility of an alternative mode of representation. cunninghame graham is driven to search for deep significations and finds Western Barbary as an Oriental space characterized by its belatedness, devoid of meaning, composed of purely aesthetic objects which he sometimes appreciates and most often ridicules. So, at the same time, Morocco is a pristine place, but also an eerily novel, arcane, indeed inscrutable site of the Other. Acknowledgement I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. I owe a debt of gratitude also to Dr. Moulay Lmustapha Mamaoui for leading the way. 54 Lahoucine Aammari Discursive Heterogeneity in Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham’s Travel Account ... References Arata, Stephen. 1996. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle, Identity and Empire. cambridge: cambridge University Press. Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy, An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. London: Smith, Elder and co. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. translated by Richard Howard. London: Macmillan. Behdad, Ali. 1994. Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Durham, Nc and London: Duke University Press. Bergonzi, Bernard. 2001. “Late victorian to Modernist.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, edited by Pat Rogers, 379–430. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bongie, chris. 1991. Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de Siècle. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brewer, Daniel. 1984. “Diderot and the Image of the Other (Women).” L’Esprit Créateur 14 (1): 53–65. carr, Helen. 2002. “Modernism and travel (1880–1940).” In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and tim Youngs, 70–86. cambridge: cambridge University Press. chaouch, Khalid. 2008. “English travel Accounts as a Source of Moroccan History.” Middle Ground, Journal of Literary and Cultural Encounters 2: 8–31. Dollimore, Jonathan. 1986. “The Dominant and the Deviant: a violent Dialectic.” Critical Quarterly 28 (1–2): 179–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.1986.tb00017.x. graham, R. B. cunninghame. 1898. Mogreb‑El‑Acksa: A Journey in Morocco. London: Duckworth and co. Holland, Patrick, and graham Huggan. 2003. Tourists with Typewriters. Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Jacobs, Jane Margaret. 2001. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge. Lowe, Lisa. 1991. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalism. Ithaca: cornell University Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1978. The Aesthetic Dimension, Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston: Beacon Press. Mcclintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather, Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. London: Routledge. Minh-ha, trinh t. 1994. “Other than Myself/My Other Self.” In Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, edited by george Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa tickner, Jon Bird, Barry curtis, and tim Putnameds, 8–26. London: Routledge. —. 2011. Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event. London: Routledge. Parry, Benita. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. —. 2001. “Scratches on the Face of the country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen.” In Defining Travel, Diverse Visions, edited by Susan L. Roberson, 132–52. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Robertson, george, Melinda Mash, Lisa tickner, Jon Bird, Barry curtis, and tim Putnam, eds. 1994. Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement. London: Routledge. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Routledge. Young, Robert J. c. 1995. Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge. 55LItERAtURE Emmanuel Idowu Adeniyi Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria Bourgeois Tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of Communal Spirit in Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood and ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross ABStRAct This article appraises the poetics of two of the foremost African creative writers whose literary sensibilities exhibit conspicuously Marxist conceptual models. The writers have poignantly deployed their creative ingenuities towards raising social consciousness against the bourgeois economy which imposes a politics of asymmetry, parasitism and stratification on the economic thought of the African society that once projected a communal spirit. considering the precarious conditions of Africa’s economy due to the pernicious effects of capitalism, it is imperative to examine the sordidness of classism, alienated labour, commodification or thingification of the underclass and other bourgeois tensions in African literature, as portrayed by these writers. Marxist theoretical models of economic determinism and historical materialism are discussed as the simulacrum of vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle. Though Marxists are fixated on revolution as the only solution to end the misery of the underclass and terminate the hegemony of the oligarchy that exploits sellers of labour, the paper advocates economic revivalism through the exploration of the opportunities offered by the communal mode of production. Keywords: Marxism; Sembene Ousmane; Ngugi wa Thiong’o; capitalism; African literature; communalism Buržoazne napetosti, marksistična ekonomija in afereza kolektivnega duha v God ’s Bits of Wood Sembeneja Ousmaneja in Devil on the Cross ngugi wa Thiong’oa POvZEtEK Članek obravnava poetiki dveh vodilnih afriških piscev, katerih literarna senzibilnost izkazuje očitne marksistične konceptualne modele. Pisca svoje ustvarjalne sposobnosti usmerjata v oblikovanje družbene zavesti, naperjene proti buržoazni ekonomiji, ki je v ekonomsko misel afriške družbe, za katero je bil nekoč značilen kolektivni duh, nasilno vnesla politiko asimetrije, zajedavstva in razslojenosti. Z vidika negotovosti, ki so jo v afriški ekonomiji povzročili škodljivi učinki kapitalizma, je v okviru književnosti nujno izpostaviti pokvarjenost razredne razslojenosti, odtujenega dela, komodifikacije in stvarifikacije najnižjega razreda ter drugih buržoaznih napetosti. Marksistični teoretski modeli ekonomskega determinizma in historičnega materializma so obravnavani kot simulaker Paretovega načela 80/20. Čeprav marksisti izpostavljajo revolucijo kot edini način za odpravo trpljenja in revščine najnižjih razredov ter uničenje nadvlade oligarhije, ki izkorišča delavce, se v članku zavzemam za oživitev nekdanjih ekonomskih praks in raziskujem možnosti, ki jih ponuja skupnostni model proizvodnje. Ključne besede: marksizem; Sembene Ousmane; Ngugi wa Thiong’o; kapitalizem; afriška književnost; komunalizem 2017, vol. 14 (2), 55-68(122) revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope doi: 10.4312/elope.14.2.55-68 UDc: 141.82: 821.42/.45.09-31 56 Emmanuel Idowu Adeniyi Bourgeois Tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of Communal Spirit in Sembene ... Bourgeois Tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of Communal Spirit in Sembene ... Ousmane’s God ’s Bits of Wood and ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross 1 Introduction: Poetics of Marxist/Socialist Realist Writers Sembene Ousmane’s God’s Bits of Wood (Les bouts de bois de Dieu) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross can be described as blueprints for social transformation and enthronement of classlessness in Africa through a series of planned revolutionary actions (Ikiddeh 1985, 47). The texts are the chef d’oeuvre and creative contributions of the writers to polemics on class struggle, bourgeoisie- proletariat oppositionality as well as the knotty issues of inequality and poverty. Through the texts, Sembene and Ngugi explore the appropriateness or otherwise of an economic system suitable for African socioeconomic space and exploitation of the poor by the unscrupulous oligarchy. The novels reify some conceptual models of Marxism to interrogate the moral philosophy underpinning bourgeois or laissez-faire economics in a sociocultural space that frowns at individualism, because its indigenous economics is largely communal-driven. This article, therefore, considers the parlous state of Africa’s economy and connects its precariousness to the pernicious effects of capitalism. It examines the sordidness of classism, alienated labour, commodification of the underclass and other bourgeois tensions as portrayed by both Sembene and Ngugi. Marxist theoretical models of economic determinism and historical materialism are discussed as the simulacrum of vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle, just as the article advocates economic revivalism as a possible panacea to bourgeois tensions foisted on the African economic logic. Since Marxism is a sociological critical theory (Onoge 2007, 471; Ogundokun 2014, 74) that negotiates the material/historical relationships among people living in society,1 the tone and mood of the texts are tense and swing in favour of the oppressed masses in their bid to win the economic power needed for the control of means of production (Ngugi 2007, 481). Through their poetics, Sembene and Ngugi have often evinced anti-bourgeois sentiments, and it may be apposite to regard the duo as combative elements and the “vanguard [of ] the revolutionary efforts [for] a better society” (Olaniyan and Quayson 2007, 461)2. They actualise these revolutionary agenda through their poetics, which is a form of social action for whipping up the feeling of the impoverished in Africa against the “combined forces of bourgeois establishment” (Adebayo 1985, 58). considering a number of tropes, imageries, signs, symbols, and metaphors that run through their texts, both Sembene and Ngugi can be said to have engaged in intertextual dialogism or dialogic intertextuality.3 1 Marxism operates through the complex process of the socioeconomic base and related cultural, intellectual, legal, spiritual, or ideological superstructures (tyson 1999). Being “a social, political and economic philosophy that examines the effect of capitalism on labor, or productivity and economic development,” Marxism gives prominence to the struggle between social classes, because of the belief that the struggle between social classes “defines the development of the state, and the bourgeoisie seek to gain control of factors of production from the ‘masses’ … [and] only by eliminating the control of the economy from private ownership will the economy continue to grow.” See also www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marxism. 2 A quote from tejuomola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson’s editorial comment on Marxism in their volume: African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (2007, 461). 3 An attempt is made here to combine Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Julia Kristeva’s terms of dialogism and intertextuality, 57LItERAtURE As Marxist writers who deploy their creativities to “reflect social reality or certain aspects of social reality” (Ngugi 2007, 478) within the African cultural milieu, their poetics clearly reflect their partisanship. Their prejudice is possibly a corollary of their sentiments against the trajectories of the capitalist mode of production in Africa and the attendant rupture or damage that this economic system has caused to the African communal spirit. Besides, the intensity of their concern for the proletariat presents them as tribunes of the underclass and oppressed masses. This thus indicates that the writers may demonstrate Marxist sensibilities in their works. to lend credence to the foregoing statement, Ngugi (2007) provides what may be regarded as the credo of a socialist realist/Marxist writer – to defend the oppressed against destructive and organised capitalist structures engendered to ensure their alienation. Since capitalism embodies inhumanity and lacks redeeming features (Adebayo 1985, 59), it is imperative for African writers to “join the proletarian and the poor peasant struggles against the parasitism of the comprador bourgeois, the landlords and the chiefs, the big business African classes that at the same time act in unison and concert with foreign interests” (Ngugi 2007, 481). A socialist realist or Marxist writer, Ngugi (2007, 481–82) further posits, must: recognize the global character of imperialism and the global character and dimension of the forces struggling against it to build a new world. He must reject, repudiate, and negate his roots in the native bourgeoisie and its spokesmen, and find his true creative links with the pan-African masses over the earth in alliance with all the socialistic forces of the world … He must write with all the vibrations and tremors of the struggles of all the working people in Africa … He must actively support and in his writing reflect the struggle of the African working class and its class allies for the total liberation of their labour power. Yes, his work must show commitment, not to abstract notions of justice and peace, but the actual struggle of the African peoples to seize power and hence be in a position to control all the forces of production to lay the only correct basis for real peace and real justice. Sembene’s and Ngugi’s principles for socialist realist literature and writers are dominant in both God’s Bits of Woods and Devil on the Cross. The texts present an interplay of actions and counteractions, as well as events or happenings that validate the Marxian/Engelsian materialist philosophy in Communist Manifesto.4 The materialist philosophical thought reiterates the hypothesis that the history of all hitherto existing societies is one of class struggles between the Manichean duality of freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild‑master and journeyman, oppressor and oppressed, progressives and reactionaries, tyrant and liberator, darkness and light5 who are often in “constant opposition to one another … [and] a fight that … [may end up in] either … a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”6 respectively. Some scholars believe that the terms can also be used interchangeably, while some believe that dialogism can also mean auto-textual or intra-textual dialogue, while intertextuality refers solely to dialogue between a text and its precursors. 4 The version of Manifesto of the Communist Party consulted is Marx/Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969, vol. 1:98–137, translated by Samuel Moore). 5 This is a quote from the Manifesto of the Communist Party, otherwise known as the Communist Manifesto. The phrases: “progressives and reactionaries”, “tyrant and liberator” and “darkness and light” are not part of the quote. I included them to elaborate on the binary oppositional forces struggling against each other in Marxist dialectics. 6 Ibid. 58 Emmanuel Idowu Adeniyi Bourgeois Tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of Communal Spirit in Sembene ... 2 Towards the Creation of Marxist/Socialist African Society Sembene’s text reveals the interpolation of Marxist historical materialism in colonial Senegal, while Ngugi’s text spotlights the evils of class struggle in post-independent Kenya. Since the aim of Marxism is to engender a classless society, whereby ownership of means of production, distribution and exchange is vested in the community and not in the hands of private individuals (Barry 1995), it is understandable why the writers are fixated on creating a Utopian socialist African society that will tackle the questions of inequity, inequality and corruption. With the aim of achieving this surreal mission, literature is used as a necessary tool and opportunity to idealise and build a Utopian African society based on the foundation of Marxist dialectics. The praxis of Marxism underscores the belief that social consciousness in a society is often determined by the nature of its economic basis, and that no social reality is left uninfluenced by this. This is called economic determinism in Marxist discourse (Barry 1995, 158). As such, Karl Marx believes that the chief determinants of a society and its institutions are basically economic factors (guralnik 1979, 665). Historical materialism, on the other hand, is the reification of the belief in Marxism that the most important determinants of society and its institutions are economic in nature, while dialectical materialism refers to the observable social and economic processes that an idea or event (thesis) generates its opposite (antithesis), leading to a reconciliation of opposites (synthesis) (guralnik 1979, 665). The antithesis as portrayed in God’s Bits of Wood is the resolution of an anti-bourgeois-capitalist system to revolt against an oligarchic regime that expropriates the sweat of the poor. The bourgeois establishment nurtures a warped socio-economic philosophy where 10 or 20 per cent of the population in colonial Senegal (property owners or bourgeoisie) has access to and enjoys the wealth produced by 90 or 80 per cent of the population – the working class in the Francophone country. This is a simulacrum of the Pareto Principle7 in Marxist dialectics. The Pareto Principle – like Marxist dispositions against oppression, injustice and inhumanity – comments on, but not necessarily condemns, inequality, inequity and exploitation of the poor by those who control the means of production, distribution and exchange in a society. The nexus between this concept and Marxism is signified by the evils of expropriation, social injustice, and oppression or suppression of the working class. The Pareto Principle, like Marxism, calls attention to the plight of the underclass whose labour is expropriated by an unconscionable oligarchy. capitalism is thus erected on a foundation of injustice or criminality. Its coercive structures (the police, army, and other security apparatuses) and its non-coercive ideological agencies of school, religion, patriotism, and consumerism (tyson 1999) work surreptitiously to chain or imprison the consciousness of the oppressed working class, hence the dogged determination of the oppressed to end their misery and create a Utopian society. 7 The Pareto Principle, or 80/20 Rule, emphasises the level of asymmetry in a society, organisation or other areas of human existence. It was propounded by vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) after his realisation that 80 per cent of wealth in his country, Italy, was owned by 20 per cent of the people. The theory helps to validate the Marxist concern about inequitable production, distribution and exchange of wealth among people in a capitalist milieu, and the fact that the bourgeoisie, due to their unfettered access to the means of production and possession of stupendous wealth, often exploit the proletariat. This theory has also been applied to topics in management studies, engineering, mathematical science, economics, and so on. For more on the Pareto Principle, see https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle. 59LItERAtURE 2.1 Marxist Reading of God’s Bits of Wood A Marxist hermeneutics of Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood brings to the fore the age-long social conflicts that often shape any society torn apart by class struggle and inequality. As portrayed in the novel, social conflict in Senegal pitches two diametrically opposed groups against each other in a bid to negotiate better economic conditions for the “exploited sellers of labour” (Ikiddeh 1985, 47), that is the working class, against the economic interests of the bourgeois establishment. Sembene historicises the social conflict brought about by the 1947–48 workers’ strike on the Dakar-Niger railway line, and the economic determinist conditions that necessitated industrial action. Ibrahim Bakayoko, a hard-headed activist who symbolises self-sacrificing leadership in the narrative, embarks on the mission of economic liberation and restoration of the dignity of the working class. The workers, who mainly depend on railway work as their only source of income, have gone on strike to demand a pay rise and better conditions. Dejean, the regional director of the railway company, scornfully states the workers’ demands as: “A raise in the pay scale, four thousand auxiliary workmen, family allowances, and a pension plan!” (Sembene 1960, 29). The workers’ demands are not in any way political but economic. This captures the thrust of economic determinism and historical materialism. to corroborate the foregoing, Bakayoko tells Dejean not to see their struggle as a politically motivated one, but a class struggle necessitated by economic considerations: “We know what France represents … and we respect it. We are in no sense anti-French; but once again, Monsieur le directeur, this is not a question of France or her people. It is a question of employees and their employer” (Sembene 1960, 184–85). In her comment on the thematic thrust of Sembene’s text, Adebayo (1985) states that the desire to restore the dignity of workers, improve their living conditions, and end their misery is immanent in Sembene’s creative productions. All Marxist creative writers or socialist realist authors share this passion, as they highlight in their works the desire for proletarian or social revolution and the conflicts birthed by “economic rather than racial or political” (1985, 58) motives. She believes that the conflict between the opposing forces in the text is occasioned by the “tension … between labour and capital, between the forces of progress and those of reaction” (1985, 62). The struggle, however, results in the loss of lives – a loss which, nevertheless, is seen as the inevitable price to be paid for the emancipation of the working class. characters such as Penda, Houdia Mbaye, Doudou, Samba N’doulogou, Niakoro and others lose their lives in the process. The workers, through their doggedness, overcome the hardship unleashed on them by the management of the railway company. They discover that the massing together of individuals against industrial capitalism is a prerequisite for their own emancipation (Adebayo 1985, 62). Sembene perhaps expresses this motif better in his poem “Fingers,” where he calls for a mass action against the bourgeoisie who neither toil nor spin but control the “wealth of nations”: Fingers, skillful at sculpture At modeling figures on marble At translation of thoughts Fingers of artists. Fingers, thick and heavy That dig and plough the soil And open it up for sowing. And move us. 60 Emmanuel Idowu Adeniyi Bourgeois Tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of Communal Spirit in Sembene ... Fingers of land tillers. A finger holding a trigger An eye intent on a target finger Men at the very brink Of their lives, at the mercy of their finger The finger that destroys life The finger of a soldier Across the rivers and languages Of Europe and Asia Of china and Africa Of India and the Oceans. Let us join our fingers to take away All the power of their finger Which keeps humanity in mourning8 Sembene’s poem includes two different fingers: that of the rich and that of the poor, the oppressor and oppressed, haves and have-nots. The synecdochic tensions that dominate the poem account for the representation of human life with fingers. The lexeme, finger, evokes imageries of work, toil, labour and oppression. consequently, some fingers only “dig and plough the soil,” plant and exist at the mercy of other fingers. Some fingers only exploit other fingers and unleash a reign of terror on them. Sembene, through the poem, exposes the evil of capitalism and its oppressive structures against the working class. to him, the only way to break down capitalist structures lies in the hands of the oppressed people who need to unite and join their efforts (fingers) to combat the combined forces of the bourgeois establishment. Suffice it to say that this poem shares some intertextuality with a work of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Entitled “Song to the Men of England,” the poem catalogues the asymmetric and parasitic relations between the owners of the means of production and the working class. Rather than having an equitable distribution of wealth and resources, the oligarchic bourgeoisie treat societal wealth as their exclusive preserve. They also use such resources to further impoverish the masses who, in a very real sense, generate the wealth. This disparity and the lord‑serf relationship are shown by Shelley as the pitiable fate of the working class. The poet calls the bourgeoisie tyrants, ungrateful drones and bees. He sounds a clarion call to the oppressed masses to come to full awareness of what Ikiddeh (1985, 38) calls the condition of “sub-human imbecility and viciousness” to which the bourgeois economy has relegated them. Shelley writes: Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear? 8 “Fingers” is contained in Ngugi’s “Writers in Politics: The Power of Words and the Words of Power,” African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (2007, 482). 61LItERAtURE The seed ye sow, another reaps; The wealth ye find, another keeps; The robes ye weave, another wears; The arms ye forge, another bears.9 The imagery of fingers in Sembene’s poem and Shelley’s metaphor, ungrateful drones, are correlates. Both typify the privileged few who do nothing, like drones (male bees) in a bee colony, but oppress the poor. Like drones who manipulate queens and worker bees the bourgeoisie hegemonise the proletariat with a view to exploiting them. The tropes of alienation and revolution that pervade Shelley’s poem are also noticeable in Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, as well as his other works, such as Le Docker Noir (1956), O Pays Mon Beau Peuple (1957) and his films. The tropes reflect social disorderliness and a call for proletarian revolution or violent uprising against the oppressors of the underclass. By telling the oppressed to “Sow seed, – but let no tyrant reap;/Find wealth, – let no imposter heap:/Weave robes, – let not the idle wear:/Forge arms, – in your defence to bear” (Miller and greenberg 1981, 269), the persona in Shelley’s poem projects a Marxist spirit. to “forge arms” and defend one’s rights is a euphemism employed by the persona to ignite the proletarians against their taskmasters. The Marxist temper in the text thus underlies the workers’ stand against the bourgeois establishment, hence their desire for social revolution and passion to overthrow the status quo. Another revelation brought about by the Marxist reading of the novel is the repressive structure which the management of the railway company fosters on its striking workers. Peter Barry (1995, 164), while explaining the Althusserian terms “Repressive structures and ideological structures or [s]tate ideological apparatuses,” notes that they are: institutions like the law courts, prisons, the police force, and the army, which operate … by external force … groupings as political parties, schools, the media, churches, the family, and art … which foster an ideology – a set of ideas and attitudes – which is sympathetic to the aims of the state and the political status quo. This conceptual model is evident in the killings and arrests of some leaders of the strike committee. Fa Keita (the Old One) and Konate as well as other striking workers are unlawfully arrested and maltreated in prison by Bernadini. Sembene (1960, 236) paints a grotesque picture of Bernadini’s brutality as a symbol of colonial repressive force against the striking workers: as Fa Ke’ita began to kneel, the ‘commandant’s’ boot caught him in the kidney and hurled him head first into the strands of barbed wire. Little drops of blood flecked the skin of the old man’s shoulders and back and sides. The ideological apparatuses10 used by the state to quell uprising and silence the oppressed are indicated in the texts. Through the characterisation of Imam, who is pejoratively regarded as the spiritual guide of the oppressor, futile attempts are made to muffle dissenting voices. gaye, El Hadji Mabigue and their ilk also use similar tactics to discourage the striking workers from pursuing their struggle. The Imam uses his religious sermons to discourage the workers. He 9 Shelley’s “Song to the Men of England” is from the anthology Poetry: An Introduction (Miller and greenberg 1981, 268–69). 10 This term is credited to Louis Althusser, a French Marxist. State ideological apparatuses are structures that the state uses to oppress the underclass and muffle the voices of opposition. Peter Barry (1995, 164) identifies the apparatuses as including “… political parties, schools, the media, churches, the family, and art (including literature) which foster an ideology … sympathetic to the aims of the state and the political status quo”. 62 Emmanuel Idowu Adeniyi Bourgeois Tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of Communal Spirit in Sembene ... tells them that their leaders are evil and that the French government has been magnanimous to them, hence the need for the workers to end their protests. Marxist dialectic materialism, in which social and economic processes are observed based on the theories of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, is evident in the narrative. Thesis is often conceived as a proposition or action advanced to support a view or perspective, while antithesis presents a counter view or action. Synthesis is a fusion or syzygy of the opposite positions. The thesis of the narrative is the resolve of railway workers to down tools in order to demand a pay rise, while the narrative’s antithesis is generated through the variety of subtle or violent means employed by the management of the railway company to break the dissidents and their collective will. The synthesis of the narrative is signposted by the syzygy of pro- and anti-workers’ demands and the eventual acceptance of key demands of the workers by the management. This signals the victory of collective solidarity over selfish arrogation of wealth by the bourgeoisie and a possible justification of the view that the goal of Marxism is not to breed dissidents or die-hard revolutionaries. Instead, Marxism seeks to create a just and egalitarian society where proletarians do not exist at the mercy of the bourgeoisie. 2.2 The Image of Woman as tribune of the Oppressed Of importance to the victory recorded over the oligarchic bourgeoisie is the invaluable contribution of women in the text. Without them, the strike would have been quelled without any positive outcome. The first man to heed the call for strike says: “We are not ashamed to admit that it is the women who are supporting us now” (Sembene 1960, 73). Beyond providing active support and serving as the intellectual force driving the strike, women in the novel, as symbolised by Dieynaba, Maimuna, Mame Sofi, Houdia M’Baye, Ramatoulaye and Penda, break the patriarchal barriers and sexist ordering of African society to become leaders and revolutionary voices. It should be noted, though, that Adebayo (1985, 69) believes otherwise, stating that “characters are never perceived in terms of their sex in [Sembene’s] novels. Like the men, his women are either progressive or reactionary.” However, the roles of female characters in the text and his other creative productions should not be given a loose or superficial hermeneutics. Their actions typify an exchange or a swap of roles between the sexes, in such a way that women assume the position of a provider while men are at the receiving end of their actions. Mame Sofi’s dialogue with N’Deye touti on the role of men in the struggle against their colonial oppressors and men’s vaunted claim of superiority over women is revealing. She tells N’Deye touti: “You’ll see – the men will consult us before they go on another strike. Before this, they thought they owned the earth just because they fed us, and now it is the women who are feeding them” (Sembene 1960, 48). Sembene thus expounds Marxist-feminist ideology where women negotiate freedom from the inhibiting forces stymieing the actualisation of their dreams and aspirations. Sembene – as a rebel-revolutionary and so-called Father of cinema in Africa – fixates on the image of female-character as a protagonist in most of his works (filmic and non-filmic) to champion the rights of the oppressed. As female characters dominate his textual narratives, they also do in some of the films produced by this self-made literary icon who said in a documentary, Sembene Across Africa,11 that he took to literature in order to “give voice to the voiceless” and challenge the warped Eurocentric conception of Africa as a “moribund” and underdeveloped milieu of 11 The documentary was produced by Samba gadjigo and shown at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, on 9th June 2017, as well as in some African countries at around the same time. 63LItERAtURE sub-humans. The documentary contains snippets of films made by Sembene with conspicuous dominant female protagonists. In La Noire de (Black Girl 1966), for instance, the protagonist, Diouana, is lured into child labour by a French couple who hire her as a maid in Senegal and take her to France to do home chores “[w]ithout salary or friends, [but] treated as invisible by her employers, confined to the house except for shopping” (Landy 1982). Diouana eventually commits suicide to protest against her dehumanised condition and disillusionment. The film dramatises how those who control the means of production exploit the vulnerability, ignorance, innocence and illiteracy of the poor to reap the benefits of their labour. With Diouana’s suicide, however, the heroine buried in her personality is unmasked, and Sembene draws attention to her strength of character. She refuses to be cowed by the capitalist system typified by her bourgeois French mistress. Despite her death, she symbolises freedom, resistance and victory over the inhuman bourgeois social system. Diouana’s death attacks the materialist foundation of capitalism and exploitation of the poor. This image of a woman as a leader, a tribune of the voiceless or an activist also features prominently in Sembene’s filmic productions, such as Mandabi (1969), Emitai (1972), Xala (1974) and Ceddo (1977). 3 Impoverishment of Proletarians through Mercantilism In Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross, the post-independent Kenyan society is displayed for clinical scrutiny. The work presents binary opposites as forces that engage in a struggle for socioeconomic gain and supremacy. These social forces include the haves and the have-nots, centre and margin, core and periphery, oppressor and oppressed, bourgeoisie and proletariat. commenting on the forces at work in the text, and, by extension, in post-colonial Kenya, Muturi notes that: the force of the clan of producers, (and) forces of destruction, of dismantling, of harassing and oppression, the builders and the creators, the forces that seek to suppress our humanity turning us into beasts in order that we should create our own Hell, thus taking on the nature of Satan – these are the forces of the clan of parasites. (Ngugi 2002, 54) Ngugi uses the novel to call on Kenyan proletarians – and all the abjected people of Africa who live in drudgery – to rise against their oppressors. The oppressors promised a prosperous, egalitarian post-independent Kenya for all during the struggle for independence, but turned the tables against the cannon fodder who helped in actualising freedom from Britain for the East African country. The Kenyan masses are thus exploited by their countrymen who proudly regard themselves as local thieves and robbers, comprising capitalists such as gitutu wa gataanguru, Kihaahu wa gatheeca, Mwireri wa Mukiraai, Nditika wa Nguunji and other corrupt Kenyan business owners. They converge on Ilmorog to attend the Devil’s Feast organised by the Organisation for Modern Theft and Robbery. Their testimonies reveal how unscrupulous individuals, through carefully designed capitalist ideologies, exploit peasants without the conscious awareness of the oppressed. In the text, Mwireri wa Mukiraai calls for the indigenisation of theft and robbery. In other words, Mukiraai advocates the endorsement of mercantilism – a type of capitalism, which, according to Landreth and colander (2002, 45), operates on the basis that the best way to increase the wealth of the nation is by “encouraging production, increasing exports and holding down domestic consumption” (Rankin 2011). Mukiraai has a cognate understanding of the change he advocates. He knows that mercantilism operates on the logic of inequality and impoverishment of the 64 Emmanuel Idowu Adeniyi Bourgeois Tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of Communal Spirit in Sembene ... working class. In fact, mercantilism is sometimes called a “beggar-thy-neighbour” or “beggar- thy-competitor” (Steil 1994, 14; Rankin 2011, 2) economic system. Landreth and colander (2002) elaborate further on the features of mercantilism. to them, this economic philosophy increases the wealth of a privileged few through the poverty of many. It operates on a warped economic logic that supports payment of low wages to workers (Landreth and colander 2002), thereby deepening their impoverishment. Mercantilists believe that “wages above a subsistence level would result in a reduced labor effort … higher wages would cause laborers to work fewer hours per year, and national output would fall” (2002, 45). With the foregoing scenario, Kenya and the proletarians in the Devil on the Cross are in the grip of the worst set of bourgeoisie practices, hence the metaphor of the Devil that the text often returns to. Ngugi must have chosen it to foreground the atavistic instinct of those who boastfully call themselves robbers and thieves of the people’s labour. Mukiraai undoubtedly speaks the minds of other local capitalists when he intones: I … believe only in the first kind of theft and robbery: that is, the theft and robbery of nationals of a given country who steal from their own people and consume the plunder right there, in the country itself … (Ngugi 2007, 166) Althusserian interpellation better captures the mind-set of Mukiraai and his ilk in the novel. The concept, according to Barry (1995, 165), is a web of tricks spun by capitalists to pull the wool over the eyes of proletarians who they (the bourgeoisie) make believe are “free and independent of social forces” that hinder their upward socioeconomic mobility. In Ngugi’s narrative, it takes the intervention of gatuiria and Jacinta Waringa to expose the precarious state of the exploited in Kenya. Symbolically, Ngugi seems to say that the exploitation or economic deprivation of the underclass will persist unless social critics rise up to the challenge. This is because the economic strangulation of Kenyan peasants by local capitalists operates through some insidious ideological principles. These are woven into a tapestry of lies and propaganda and operate through a set of belief systems that keep the oppressed ignorant of the operation of the socioeconomic forces that work against them. The economic deprivation of the working class, as reflected in the mercantilist goals of low wages, reduced domestic consumption, inflation, scarcity, hoarding of essentials and high unemployment, enables the oppressors to muffle the voices of opposition. Boss Kihara, for instance, fires Jacinta Waringa for refusing to sleep with him. Muturi is jobless for a long time, and is eventually arrested, while looking for work, for being unemployed! githai impregnates Waringa, using money as a tool to deceive her. These events underscore the economic trajectories that influence the larger superstructure in the text. The fate of Waringa and Muturi is built on the base structure of economic privations that keep them alienated or abjected. Rather than operating an economic system that ensures equity, the economics in Devil on the Cross are one-sided, as they only favour the local bourgeoisie in Kenya to the detriment of the less-privileged. In Marxist dialectics, therefore, Kihara commodifies or thingifies12 Waringa. He relates to Waringa the way he would relate to “objects or persons in terms of their exchange value or sign-exchange value” (tyson 1999, 59). In his Marxist reading 12 Thingify is the verb form of thingification – a term coined by Aimé césaire in his seminal work, Discourse on Colonialism (Discours sur le colonialism) (1972, 6). He notes that “colonization = ‘thing-ification’”, because colonisation imposes “ relations of domination and submission” on the “colonizing man” and turns him “into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.” 65LItERAtURE of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Lois tyson (1999, 69) offers a clear interpretation of commodification through the character of tom, noting that: tom’s commodification of people is his ability to manipulate them very cold-bloodedly to get what he wants, for commodification is, by definition, the treatment of objects and people as commodities, as things whose only importance lies in their benefit to ourselves. Ngugi uses the novel to show how social revolution can be used as a weapon to change the socioeconomic status quo. A long procession of women, men and children in Njeruca, for instance, is organised by Muturi and a student leader. The procession moves to the cave where a meeting is on-going, chasing away the thieves. Though five of the protesters die, they succeed in upturning the symbol of oppression and capitalism. Waringa also kills githai, the father of her fiancée, gatuiria. She shoots Kihaahu and gitutu too, thus signalling how the force of clan of workers can subdue and triumph over that of destroyers. The conflict in Devil on the Cross is also both social and economic. It is a struggle that pitches workers against their employers. It is a struggle to gain access to the control and management of the means of production, distribution and exchange in order to ensure the economic wellbeing and enhance the social statuses of people belonging to either the bourgeoisie or proletariat. The repressive structures theorised by Louis Althusser are fully employed against the opposing voices in the text. Senior Superintendent gakono orders his boys to arrest Wangari who has often deluded herself that she will assist the law enforcement agents in clearing Kenya of thieves and hoodlums. She asks when ordered to be arrested: “So you, the police forces, are the servants of one class only?” (Ngugi 2007, 198). tyson (1999) shares Wangari’s concern as to how the state apparatuses are used to suppress opposing voices. He believes that “Other elements oppressing [the poor] are the police and other government strong-arm agencies, who, under government orders, have mistreated lower-class and underclass poor perceived as a threat to the power structure” (1999, 52). 3.1 The Hunter and the Hunted game The “hunter and the hunted” game played by the Old Man of Nakuru is also symbolic of oppositional forces that serve as correlates of Marxist bourgeois-proletariat divides. githai often carries a loaded gun and pursues Waringa in the bush as though she were a game bird. Waringa sometimes acts as the hunter while githai acts as the hunted. The game is a metaphor for oppositional relationship between the haves and have‑nots. to ensure the continued existence of capitalism and its implicit ideologies or structures, the proletariat have to be kept in check to ensure that they do not upset the system. They seem to say that the best way to keep the working class down is to make them poor or create inhibiting structures around them that can deepen or perpetuate their impoverished status. Moreover, since the poor will want to change the status quo, the stage is set for mutual hostility and struggle. Waringa acting as a hunter is a metaphor of role reversion with regard to the bourgeoisie and proletariat in reality. The reversion possibly fulfils the personal unconscious of Ngugi in addressing the inequity and inequality that pervades the entirety of Kenyan society. In fact, Waringa nearly shatters the head of githai on one occasion when she mistakenly pulls the trigger of the rifle in her hands. With the foregoing, Ngugi seems to foreground the collective unconscious of the poor and the desire to end their misery through armed struggle against their oppressors. It symbolically portrays the agitated condition of the proletariat in Kenya who will one day turn the tables and eventually hunt the hunted! 66 Emmanuel Idowu Adeniyi Bourgeois Tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of Communal Spirit in Sembene ... 3.2 Ujaama Socialist Philosophy and African Society What Ngugi advocates in the text is a classless society. capitalism glorifies classism; it further uses it as an ideology to insidiously chain the minds of the oppressed by “colonizing [their] consciousness” (tyson 1999, 60). Doing this will constantly remind them of their underclass status and etch on their consciousness their mental, spiritual and cultural inferiority (tyson 1999, 60). to Ngugi, a society that fails to mutualise love and respect, and thus put humanity at its centre, is a warped one. Such a community is oiled by the lubricant of capitalism that is imbued with a “bourgeois passion … [and] bourgeois egoism” (Dada 1985, 31). to rectify this, Ngugi craves for a society where no one oppresses another, a class-free society where the means of production, distribution and exchange are not concentrated in the hands of private individuals, but controlled by the state for the benefit of all. This he calls Ujamaa wa Mwafrica. Ngugi thus envisions a home-grown African socialism that seeks “to recapture and modernize the communal way of life practiced by the traditional African before the exposure to the world and values of the white man” (Alofun 2014, 69). His socialism is a domesticated version of European socialism/ communism or an African-based socialist philosophy that leverages the traditional communal spirit and consciousness of Africans, where everyone is seen in the light of John Mbiti’s (1970, 141) canonical statement: “I am because we are and, since we are, therefore I am”. His Ujamaa wa Mwafrica forecloses a society ridden with greed, corruption, consumerism, classism, inequality and other capitalist tensions. It embraces the African communal spirit, and preaches oneness as well as love instead of the divisions or struggles that attend capitalism. 3.3 Erosion of communal consciousness in Africa The fight for the enthronement of egalitarianism and better economic conditions for the masses in Senegal and Kenya, as portrayed in the texts analysed in this work, is basically to restore or revive the lost communal consciousness of Africans. capitalism thrives on the aphaeresis or erosion of communal spirit that once defined different African cultural groups. It pushes for self- independence against the foundation of the umbilical, interdependent relationships on which communalism operates in Africa. Sembene and Ngugi want the dethronement of the status quo, hence their bias in favour of revolution of the working class as a counter against the oppression of capitalists. However, the latent content of the texts is not just about revolution, it is probably a lamentation over the loss of Africans’ communal feelings, and the immorality of the ill-gotten wealth of the oligarchic bourgeoisie. current events on the continent perhaps corroborate all this, since just an insignificant number of wealthy folk control the vast resources of Africa, leaving millions in the underclass in penury and misery. Mbiti’s (1970) maxim, therefore, has lost its relevance, as many people on the continent have embraced the individualistic, self‑centring or independent lifestyle of the West. This is the dilemma for Africa and its population. The writers signify this dilemma and project its cataclysmic effects on the social and economic fabric of African societies. to perhaps prevent total loss of communal spirit, the writers seem to suggest the need to go back to the old order that guarantees equality and prevents exploitation of the many by the few. It is important to note that both Ousmane Sembene and Ngugi wa Thiong’o engage in intertextual discourse in their texts, considering the socialist realist mode or literary tradition that the texts belong to and the distillation of Marxist tropes and tensions in them. The two texts contain scenes of mass revolt and procession of the oppressed against the forces that suppress them. The powerful message of mass revolt is perhaps based on the potency of organised struggle 67LItERAtURE and power of collectivism. Sembene, similarly, expounds this motif in his poem, “Fingers,” while Ngugi has indicated this belief in both his creative and non-creative texts. to Marxist or socialist realist writers, mass struggle is the fuel that fires the engine of resistance and revolution. As a weapon used solely by women in God’s Bits of Wood and by both sexes in Devil on the Cross, the efficacy of this approach with regard to engendering social transformation is astounding. Sembene Ousmane and Ngugi wa Thiong’o deploy their creative imaginations to sensitise the oppressed in the locales of the narratives and, by extension, the whole of Africa, to the power inherent in revolution. Shelley, in his poem, “Song to the Men of England,” also employs this revolutionary technique to call on the oppressed to reject their inhuman treatment. Marxist or socialist realist writers are likely echoing Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion that a “stationery object will remain stationery unless and until it is acted on by a force or forces” (Farrow 1999, 164). In order words, freedom is fought for and won through the concerted efforts of the oppressed, not given on a gold plate. The misery of the poor will persist, and even increase, unless the force of revolution is applied. Revolution is the only language that the oppressors and thieves of people’s wealth understand. Should the oppressed remain complacent like the “Men of England” during the English Romantic epoch, their oppressors, the ungrateful drones or tyrants, will ride roughshod over them. Not only that, they will bleed them dry till the value of their labour drops to nothing. (violent) revolution is the sine qua non for the oppressed people of Africa to take up the reins of economic and political power. It is the only weapon they are left with in the face of orchestrated violence and wanton exploitation of their labour and resources. Sembene and Ngugi are conscious of this fact, and thus demonstrate it in their texts and prove that they are uncompromising spokesmen and consciences of the proletariat, with a mandate to unfetter the shackles that tie down the consciousness of the oppressed masses. Their texts, without a doubt, serve as a domain for championing social struggle and revolution. 4 Conclusion Socialist realist literature, with its Marxist orientation or influences, has often created platforms where two opposing forces are brought into contact to enact or re-enact their mutual hostility. The resultant effect is very often that of revolution and social transformation, in which the oppressed overturn the status quo to their advantage. However, this is not always the case, since the bourgeois establishment may use the resources at its disposal to quell any opposition or uprising against its economic interests. Ultimately, the two texts appraised in this essay are quintessentially Marxist in nature, and belong to the literary convention of socialist realism. Apart from having Marxist conceptual models diffused in them, they also offer revolution as a solution to societal problems. The texts have shown how mass solidarity can be used to engender social revolution. The novelists deployed their creative ingenuities to resist oppression, inequality, poverty and other denigrating structures that are used for the exploitation of the masses. Their characters are enormously resourceful, passionate and intuitive. Similarly, the writers covertly draw the mood of their readers to the loss or aphaeresis of African communalism. They suggest that the mode of economic production in Africa needs to change in order to end the misery of the oppressed population. to realise this, they advocate a return to communal living, and this communal consciousness is a parallel of Ngugi’s Ujaama socialist philosophy. 68 Emmanuel Idowu Adeniyi Bourgeois Tensions, Marxist Economics and Aphaeresis of Communal Spirit in Sembene ... References Adebayo, Aduke. 1985. “Heroes and Anti-heroes in the Novels of Sembene Ousmane.” In Modern Essays on African Literature: Studies in the African Novel, edited by Samuel Omo Asein and Albert Olu Ashaolu, 57–71. 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New York: garland Publishers, Inc. 69LItERAtURE Alberto Lázaro University of Alcalá, Spain 2017, vol. 14 (2), 69-81(122) revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope doi: 10.4312/elope.14.2.69-81 UDc: 821.111.09-344«17/19« The Dark Side of British Horror Fiction: Politics, Taboos and Censorship ABStRAct Nearly two and a half centuries have passed since the first British gothic novels began to attract attention with their pages full of monstrous characters, excessive violence, explicit sexual content and all kinds of horrific scenes. For the most part, the reception of this type of literature has been very positive, though not exempt from controversies. This paper seeks to show how, beyond the alluring mystery, inventive plots and attraction of the dark side, British horror fiction appeals to the reader’s inner desires and imagination by means of transgressive political, religious or sexual contents that often defy taboos and social decorum. to illustrate this argument, three well-known authors and texts from three different periods will be discussed: Matthew gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “carmilla” (1872) and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Keywords: British literature; censorship; horror fiction; politics; reception studies; religion; sex Temna plat britanske grozljive proze: politika, tabuji in cenzura POvZEtEK Prvi britanski gotski romani so z značilnimi pošastnimi liki, obilnim nasiljem, eksplicitno spolnostjo in najrazličnejšimi grozljivimi prizorišči začeli zbujati pozornost pred skoraj dvema stoletjema in pol. Recepcija tovrstne književnosti je bila večinoma zelo pozitivna, tu in tam pa tudi kontroverzna. v članku predstavim načine, na katere britanska grozljiva proza – poleg vabljivosti skrivnostnega in privlačnosti temne plati – naslavlja bralske skrite želje in fantazije s transgresivnimi političnimi, religioznimi in seksualnimi vsebinami, ki pogosto ne upoštevajo tabujev in spodobnosti. v ta namen bom analiziral tri znane pisce in dela iz treh različnih obdobij: Meniha (1796) Matthewa gregoryja Lewisa, »carmillo« (1872) Josepha Sheridana Le Fanuja in Peklensko pomarančo (1962) Anthonyja Burgessa. Ključne besede: Britanska književnost; grozljiva proza; recepcijske študije; cenzura; seks; politika; religija 70 Alberto Lázaro The Dark Side of British Horror Fiction: Politics, Taboos and Censorship The Dark Side of British Horror Fiction: Politics, Taboos and Censorship 1 Introduction British horror fiction has enjoyed enormous popularity since the first gothic novels appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, research shows that by the 1790s “gothic” was the most popular form of writing in Britain (cf. gamer 2000, 50). As other types of horror stories1 developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, monsters of all kinds, including ghosts, werewolves, vampires and zombies, have attracted the attention of people from all walks of life. The popularity of the genre remains undiminished today, even when the figure of the vampire has been degraded, as in Stephenie Meyer’s novel and later film Twilight, where Bram Stoker’s count Dracula is turned into an American teenager who goes to high school and protects the beautiful Bella Swan from evil vampires. On the whole, the appeal of the horror story has traditionally been explained in terms of the entertainment value of shock and repulsion, the attraction of violence and evil, as well as the lure of facing our hidden fears in a fantasy world.2 Nevertheless, it has sometimes been pointed out that part of the attraction of horror fiction derives from the way these stories dramatize our innermost desires and secret longings. Thus, Ken gelder, in his collection of essays The Horror Reader, states that Dracula is a highly attractive figure because he combines “terror with an erotic awakening, drawing out latent inner desires” (2000, 146). These secret desires, and this is my argument here, revel in forbidden pleasures, entangled in taboos and social prohibitions, which are not only erotic in nature, but are usually associated with a political and religious message. That is the reason why the reception of these horror stories among critics and institutions has often met with controversies and difficulties. I will illustrate this argument with a discussion of three representative narratives from different periods, the well-known classics The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis, “carmilla” (1872) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess. In line with the theoretical framework proposed by reception studies research, the reactions of reviewers and mainstream critics will be taken into account. Furthermore, in order to understand the public concerns about and transgressive nature of this fiction, references will be made to some cases of British editorial censorship, which will be contrasted with a quick glance at one specific overseas context: the Spanish institutional censorship that occurred during Franco’s regime (1939–1975). 2 The Monk by Matthew Lewis In The Monk Lewis presents the violent downfall of Ambrosio, a pious, well-respected abbot in Spain who goes from virtue to complete evil. First, he is overcome by the carnal lust of the wicked Matilda, who had been disguised as a male novice, and then he is stricken with desire for the innocent Antonia, whom he later rapes and kills, although she eventually turns out to be his younger sister. The story includes the characteristic elements of the gothic novel – ghostly apparitions, ancient monasteries, bad weather, fortune-telling gypsies, shadowy crypts, 1 In what follows the term “horror fiction” will be used in a generic sense without any attempt to delineate differences between “horror,” “terror” or “gothic”. 2 For some good studies on the characteristics of horror fiction, see Barron (1990), Mulvey-Roberts (1998), Punter (1999), Wisker (2005), colavito (2008) and Suchelli (2014). 71LItERAtURE witchcraft, magic and pacts with the devil. But it also brings in some “transgressive” passages with scenes of sexual perversity and acts of horrendous brutality.3 Here is a taste of the language used in the scene after Ambrosio succumbed to Matilda’s seduction: As She [Matilda] spoke, her eyes were filled with a delicious languor. Her bosom panted: She twined her arms voluptuously around him [Ambrosio], and glewed her lips to his. Ambrosio again raged with desire. […] He gave a loose to his intemperate appetites: While the fair Wanton put every invention of lust in practice, every refinement in the art of pleasure, which might heighten the bliss of her possession, and render her Lover’s transports still more exquisite. (1998, 224) It is noteworthy that the novel was widely read by women, as the satirical engraving by James gillray Tales of Wonder (1802) shows. This picture reveals the fascination The Monk held for middle-class ladies of the time, showing a group of ladies in fashionable clothes sitting around a table listening to another young woman who is reading aloud from Lewis’s novel; while an old woman’s face seems to indicate moral outrage, a young lady is listening with great interest and excitement. Perhaps they are in the middle of a passage in which the erotic character of Matilda, “a sensual woman who wields natural and supernatural powers,” plans to make men her victims (Nichols 1983, 201). […] He gave a loose to his intemperate appetites: While the fair Wanton put every invention of lust in practice, every refinement in the art of pleasure, which might heighten the bliss of her possession, and render her Lover’s transports still more exquisite. (1998, 224) It is noteworthy that the novel was widely read by women, as the satirical engraving by James Gillray Tales of Wonder (1802) shows. This picture reveals the fascination The Monk held for middle-class ladies of the time, showing a group of ladies in fashionable clothes sitting around a table listening to another young woman who is reading aloud from Lewis’s novel; while an old woman’s face seems to indicate moral outrage, a young lady is listening with great interest and excitement. Perhaps they are in the middle of a passage in which the erotic character of Matild , “a sensual woman who wi lds natural and supernatural powers,” plans o make men her victims (Nichols 1983, 201). FIGURE 1. James Gillray – Tales of Wonder (1802). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The Monk is a lurid tale of ambition, murder and perversion that not only seems to test the limits of propriety and moral decorum, but also to launch an attack on monastic corruption. Lewis’s intention to cri icise religious orders has traditionally been associated with other anti-religious publications that appeared in France before the Revolution.4 Here we will consider some of the political issues raised in the novel. It seems that at that time British readers and critics could also regard clerical libertinism as “closely allied with the revolutionary radicalism” 4 Emma McEvoy, in her introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Monk, cites the European Magazine of 1797 as a source for this comparison between Lewis’s attack on religious orders and some French anti-religious publications before the Revolution. Figure 1. James gillray – Tales of Wonder (1802). © victoria and Albert Museum, London. 3 Some academic criticism has focused more intently on the sexual themes of this novel. See Mac Andrew (1979), twitchell (1987) and Winter (1992). 72 Alberto Lázaro The Dark Side of British Horror Fiction: Politics, Taboos and Censorship The Monk is a lurid tale of ambition, murder and perversion that not only seems to test the limits of propriety and moral decorum, but also to launch an attack on monastic corruption. Lewis’s intention to criticise religious orders has traditionally been associated with other anti-religious publications that appeared in France before the Revolution.4 Here one could identify some of the political issues raised in the novel. It seems that at that time British readers and critics could also regard clerical libertinism as “closely allied with the revolutionary radicalism” (Ellis 2000, 93). What is more, linked to this representation of monastic life as immoral and depraved is the traditional Protestant prejudice against Roman catholicism, with its perceived political and religious authoritarianism, its superstitious tendencies and cloistered lifestyles. We cannot forget that the story is set in a sinister capuchin monastery in Madrid, during the time of the Spanish Inquisition.5 The cruelty of the Inquisition, together with religious fanaticism and the abuse of indigenous people in the American colonies, were the major ingredients in the development of the “Black Legend” that the British so often used to vilify the Spanish empire. The Monk had immediate popularity and commercial success. It went through three editions within the first year and received enthusiastic reviews in publications closely associated with the Whigs and radical intellectual groups, such as The Morning Chronicle and The Analytical Review.6 However, it was labelled obscene by some other critics, including Samuel taylor coleridge, who writing for the Critical Review stated that it was a blasphemous story and warned that if a parent saw The Monk in “the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale” (1797, 197). The scandal that erupted about the novel coincided with Lewis’s election as a member of the House of commons; therefore, critics like Rev. Thomas Mathias, an anti-Jacobin tory polemicist, declared the book was “an offence to the public” that had been written by a supposedly elected guardian and defender of the laws and good manners, and called for legal action against the author and the novel itself (1798, 291–96). The reaction was so strong that there was even an official move to suppress Lewis’s tale instigated by the Society for carrying into Effect His Majesty’s Proclamation against vice and Immorality. As a part of a wider movement to improve the nation’s morals, in 1787 this Society, also known as the Proclamation Society, was established by William Wilberforce, a tory MP who was also known as a key figure in the movement to end the slave trade. Its main aims were “to check the rapid progress of impiety and licentiousness, to promote a spirit of decency and good order, and to enforce a stricter execution of the laws against vice and immorality” (tomkins 2010, 57).7 According to Lewis’s biographer D. L. Macdonald, the Proclamation Society instructed the authorities to curtail the sale of the novel (2000, 134). Although there is no evidence to show how the case was resolved, all this pressure from critics and censors prompted Lewis to revise his work and expurgate some objectionable passages from the fourth edition that was published in 1798, under the new title Ambrosio; or, The Monk. In this censored version Lewis softened 4 Emma McEvoy, in her introduction to the Oxford World’s classics edition of The Monk, cites the European Magazine of 1797 as a source for this comparison between Lewis’s attack on religious orders and some French anti-religious publications before the Revolution. 5 The novel is set at an unspecified historical period; perhaps, the sixteenth or seventeenth century (there are references to cuba and other places in the New World, so it must be after 1492). 6 For a discussion of the contemporary critical response to The Monk see Ellis (2000, 109–13) and McEvoy’s introduction to the Oxford World’s classics edition of this novel (1998). 7 This Society succeeded in sending a bookseller named Thomas Williams to jail, charged with seditious and blasphemous libel, for publishing Thomas Paine’s attack on traditional religion, The Age of Reason (Macdonald 2000, 133) 73LItERAtURE the language  – “incontinence” to “weakness,” “lust to “desire” and “desires” to “emotions” (Macdonald 2000, 134) – and removed explicit references to sexual activity, descriptions of naked female bodies as well as that section in which Antonia is found reading a version of the Bible given to her by her mother from which scenes of vice had been removed.8 The new expurgated edition had a positive response from both critics and readers, who might well have been attracted by the scandal and controversy surrounding the story. A review of this fourth edition published in the Monthly Mirror claims that now that Lewis has removed the “objectionable passages” the novel is “deserving of the very extraordinary favour it has received from the public” (cited in Perraux 1960, 59). By 1800, as Louis F. Peck shows, “five London and two Dublin editions to say nothing of pirated versions and abridgments, were needed to supply the market” (1961, 28). In the years since, The Monk has never ceased to attract or repel readers and critics. today, stimulated by the renaissance in gothic studies in general, interest in this novel and other gothic works has never been higher.9 Even in Spain, the country of the lascivious monk and Inquisition portrayed by Lewis, the novel has long captured the interest of a wide readership. The first Spanish translation, anonymous and entitled El fraile, o historia del padre Ambrosio y de la bella Antonia, came out in Madrid as early as 1822. There was also another illustrated Spanish translation by León compte, published by the Editorial Juan Pons in 1870 under the title El fraile.10 Nowadays, one can find several editions of Lewis’s novel issued by prestigious publishing houses, such as Editorial Bruguera, círculo de Lectores and cátedra. What is indeed surprising is that the book’s anti-clericalism and obscenity was not a serious concern for the catholic censors of Franco’s regime, a period in which a strict system determined what was morally or politically correct.11 They allowed the publication of The Monk in 1970. It is true that a couple of reports from the censorship office warned against the “entirely negative view of religious life even in its higher levels,” but it was eventually accepted, “given the quality of the work”.12 3 “Carmilla” by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu John Sheridan Le Fanu is another major figure among writers of gothic and horror fiction, mainly known for his short stories and for such sensationalist novels as Wylder’s Hand (1863), Uncle Silas (1864) and The Rose and the Key (1871). critics have praised them for their suggestive and detailed descriptions of physical settings, their insightful characterisations and Le Fanu’s mastery of gothic conventions.13 One of his best-known stories is “carmilla,” published in the collection In a Glass Darkly in 1872.14 Set in a remote Eastern European castle, it features a 8 For a detailed study of Lewis’s changes in his fourth edition of the novel, see the fifth chapter of Joseph James Irwin’s M. G. “Monk” Lewis (1976) entitled “Expurgation of The Monk”. 9 Frederick S. Frank’s bicentennial bibliography (1997) verifies this interest. 10 These translations are cited in José Fernández Montesinos’s Introducción a una historia de la novela en España (1955, 80 and 218). 11 On censorship in post-war Spain, see Abellán (1980), Beneyto (1977) and cisquella (1977). 12 See File 12455-69, Box 66/03686. Files on censorship of this period are found in the “Fondo de cultura” at the Archivo general de la Administración (Alcalá de Henares, Madrid). I am indebted to the archive staff for their unstinting help and friendly guidance on how to find my way through the complexities of these files. All translations from the Spanish are my own. 13 See, for instance, Mccormack (1997), Sage (2004) and Walton (2007). 14 The story, first published in four successive issues in the short-lived victorian periodical The Dark Blue between December 1871 and March 1872, reappeared as the last of the five stories comprising In a Glass Darkly. 74 Alberto Lázaro The Dark Side of British Horror Fiction: Politics, Taboos and Censorship female vampire who seduces a young woman named Laura and drains her lifeblood over a period of weeks. “carmilla” is the first prose tale in English literature whose protagonist is a female vampire, and it has become a classic in vampire literature.15 Laura’s strange fascination with her attractive evil friend has been interpreted in different ways. Whilst some have seen “carmilla” as a straightforward horror story, others have suggested various interpretations of this vampiric relationship. Some critics have highlighted the lesbian undertones of this rapport between the two women. In fact, over the last few decades some scholars have explored the theme of repressed sexuality within the story and suggested that Le Fanu offered a commentary on attitudes towards female sexuality in victorian society.16 Similarly, when the story was adapted for the big screen, the lesbian undercurrent was noted by film directors, such as Roger vadim in Et mourir de plaisir (Blood and Roses, 1960), starring Mel Ferrer, Annette vadim and Elsa Martinelli. All this does not come as a surprise, since in the story carmilla and Laura are often presented together in bed, holding hands, kissing each other passionately, gazing into each others’ eyes, walking with their arms about the other’s waists, and having erotic conversations: She kissed me silently. “I am sure, carmilla, you have been in love; that there is, at this moment, an affair of the heart going on.” “I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.” How beautiful she looked in the moonlight! (1923, 404) In addition, the concluding, explanatory section of the tale also hints at this lesbian relationship between a female vampire and her female victim when it is explicitly stated that The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. […] it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. (1923, 468–69, the emphasis is mine) Le Fanu seems to defy the established patriarchal systems of relationships when he allowed the women of “carmilla” to escape their traditional roles as victims of a male seducer (see Signorotti 1996). Instead of creating a monster, like Dracula, who seeks to take control of a woman’s body for the purposes of male pleasure, Le Fanu depicts a society where women assume the aggressive roles while men become relegated to less powerful positions. Laura’s father even remains nameless throughout the story. Once more, in “carmilla” sexual desires and eroticism seem to be mixed with other political and religious interpretations, some of them focusing on the religious perversions of catholicism. taking into account that Le Fanu was born in Dublin to a Protestant family of Huguenot descent, the Oxford editor of the stories, Robert tracy, suggests that the anxieties of “carmilla” are mainly social and political (1993, xix–xx). He reads it as a tale of the displaced Anglo-Irish who were losing their importance in Ireland. Just as Laura’s father is a displaced Englishman 15 It has been argued that “carmilla” is an adaptation of coleridge’s poem Christabel; see Nethercot (1949), twitchell (1981, 129) and Andriano (1993, 98–99). 16 See, for example, castle (1993), Signorotti (1996), Thomas (1999), Palmer (1999) and coffman (2006). 75LItERAtURE living abroad, so, too, Le Fanu’s father was a minister of the (Anglican) church of Ireland, which ended its role as state church with the Irish church Act of 1869 (that took effect in 1871). This act meant not only the end of state support, but also enabled the government to take control of much of the church’s property. Another critic, Patrick O’Malley points to the national and religious issues involved in carmilla’s vampirism. He argues that this story shows the tension between English domesticity and Protestantism, represented by Laura, and the foreign catholic roots of carmilla: “Straddling the boundary of Englishness and Irishness, Protestantism and catholicism, Anglo-oriented nationalism and foreign ancestry, Le Fanu stands in a multiply determined relationship to the stability of categorical classifications […]” (2006, 143). In other words, Le Fanu seems to establish a contrast between the Anglo-Protestant background of the good character and victim, Laura, and the foreign and catholic nature of the monster, carmilla. As in Lewis’s novel, carmilla’s story is set abroad, in Styria, a region today located southern Austria, north of Slovenia.17 It seems that these kind of horrendous events and experiences can only happen in foreign countries. Whereas Laura’s family is associated with the rational and Protestant English tradition, the vampiric carmilla is linked to the “appalling superstition that prevails in Upper and Lower Styria” (1923, 465), lands of predominantly catholic families. Since, in the end, the vampire is destroyed, the story might represent the victory of Protestantism over catholicism. However, even at the end, “like Laura, England cannot get catholicism or sexual deviance out of its blood or out of its mind” (O’Malley 2006, 146). It is interesting to note that, contrary to the scandal evoked by the publication of Lewis’s The Monk, no controversy among reviewers and critics has been recorded regarding the sexual undertones of “carmilla.”18 One may ask whether the victorian readers of the time recognised the implied lesbianism as a twentieth-first century reader would do.19 What is certain, however, is that Laura, the victim, never realises the implications of the sexual relationship that she is taking part in, and therefore, her mind retains its purity. Perhaps that is also the reason why Spanish censors never identified the erotic elements in the story as a form of perversion, and allowed it to be published several times without any cuts or amendments, despite the moral constraints established by the catholic church during Franco’s regime.20 The censors’ reports did not mention any trace of transgressive sexual behaviour between the two female characters, even when some of the editions included suggestive and daring illustrations. It is indeed surprising that the Spanish censorship office did not find these images offensive or immoral, although they feature naked women, old and young, and women in very sensual robes and poses. One of these illustrations even clearly shows the two protagonists in what might be considered a lesbian attitude, sitting very close together, with heads touching and one arm around the waist of the other. Nevertheless, these illustrations were allowed to be printed. 17 Laura’s castle is ten leagues (about 48 km) from the city of graz. 18 Even if there had been some controversies, Le Fanu might not have been able to follow them or practice any form of self-censorship, as Lewis did, because he died only a few months after “carmilla” was published in book form. 19 Sara Putzell-Korab reminds us that Denis Diderot’s La religieuse (1796), which centres on the physical seduction of a nun by the Mother Superior, went through twenty English editions between 1800 and 1870 (1984, 181). 20 In 1941 permission was granted to import 1,000 copies of a Spanish version published in Narraciones Terroríficas, a magazine edited in Argentina; see File EXt-921-41, Box 21/07067. In the 1960s and 1970s Spanish censors also gave the green light to “carmilla” again and again, when it was published in several collections of horror stories. For a detailed analysis of the reception and censorship of “carmilla” see Lázaro (2010). 76 Alberto Lázaro The Dark Side of British Horror Fiction: Politics, Taboos and Censorship may ask whether the Victorian readers of the time recognised the implied lesbianism as a twentieth-first century reader would do.19 What is certain, however, is that Laura, the victim, never realises the implications of the sexual relationship that she is taking part in, and therefore, her mind retains its purity. Perhaps that is also the reason why Spanish censors never identified the erotic elements in the story as a form of perversion, and allowed it to be published several times without any cuts or amendments, despite the moral constraints established by the Catholic Church during Franco’s regime.20 The censors’ reports did not mention any trace of transgressive sexual behaviour between the two female characters, even when some of the editions included suggestive and daring illustrations. It is indeed surprising that the Spanish censorship office did not find these images offensive or immoral, although they feature naked women, old and young, and women in very sensual robes and poses. One of these illustrations even clearly shows the two protagonists in what might be considered a lesbian attitude, sitting very close together, with heads touching and one arm around the waist of the other. Nevertheless, these illustrations were allowed to be printed. FIGURE 2. Images by Serafín, from the illustrated edition of Narraciones Terroríficas (1961). Despite all the erotic images and manifestations of homosexual feelings, neither nineteenth-century Victorian critics nor twentieth-century Spanish censors perceived the story as immoral, and it is likely, as noted above, that they did not see its lesbian content. Expressions of love and close relationships between women had traditionally been viewed as entirely innocent and without suspicion. Whereas displays of affection between men were not acceptable at all, girls and women exhibiting such amorous behaviour were not assumed to be homosexual, and so these relations were often free from public scrutiny. It was Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and some other 19 Sara Putzell-Korab reminds us that Denis Diderot’s La religieuse (1796), which centres on the physical seduction of a nun by the Mother Superior, went through twenty English editions between 1800 and 1870 (1984, 181). 20 In 1941 permission was granted to import 1,000 copies of a Spanish version published in Narraciones Terroríficas, a magazine edited in Argentina; see File EXT-921-41, Box 21/07067. In the 1960s and 1970s Spanish censors also gave the green light to “Carmilla” again and again, when it was published in several collections of horror stories. For a detailed analysis of the reception and censorship of “Carmilla” see Lázaro (2010). Figure 2. Images by Serafín, from the illustrated editi f Narraciones Te roríficas (1961). Despite all the erotic images and manifestations of homosexual feelings, neither nineteenth- century victorian critics nor twentieth-century Spanish ce sors perceived the story as immoral, and it is likely, as noted above, that they did not see its lesbian content. Expressions of love and close relationships between women had traditionally been viewed as entirely innocent and without suspicion. Whereas displays of affection between men were not acceptable at all, girls and women exhibiting such amorous behaviour were not assumed to be homosexual, and so these relations were often free from public scrutiny. It was Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and some other studies by sexologists in the early decades of the 20th century that began to regard those “too close” friendships between women in a different way. Be that as it may, “carmilla” enjoyed an excellent reception, and was frequently republished in English and translated into Spanish. 4 A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess Since the mid-twentieth century horror fiction has expanded its boundaries and the traditional intrusion of the supernatural element might now be replaced by any morbid, gruesome, surreal or frightening theme. Not only vampires and demons populate these stories, but also psychopathic killers and mutant arthropods. Horror fiction now often overlaps science fiction or other types of fantasy.21 Although A Clockwork Orange was not first marketed or reviewed as a horror story, with the passing of the years it has gained a following among the horror community.22 The key element of horror in this story is the nightmare vision of a near-future world dominated by sex, violence and a corrupt bureaucracy in a repressive totalitarian super-state. The monster here is a teenager called Alex, the vicious leader of a gang of criminals that rob, rape, torture and murder for fun. The word “horrorshow” is part of his usual vocabulary, the “Nadsat” language used by this character; this term represents a transformation of the Russian khorosho (“good”) and the 21 For an illustrative discussion of “horror” in literature see Botting (1998, 123–31). 22 The film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick has often been included in books and discussions about horror films; see, for instance, Muir (2002) and Hogan (1986, 135–36). 77LItERAtURE English “horror show.” What Alex describes as “horrorshow” is usually connected with violence and the horrors he commits. During one of the brainwashing sessions he calls the film he is watching a “real horrorshow film,” to which he receives a suggestive response: “Horrorshows is right, friend. A real show of horrors” (2012, 112). Apart from Burgess’s invention of “Nadsat,” what contributed to the novel’s success and notoriety were the explicit scenes of sex and violence. One of the most striking take place at the beginning of the story, when Alex and his gang got into a cottage labelled “HOME,” beat up the man living there, a writer with a manuscript entitled A Clockwork Orange, and rape his beautiful wife while making the man watch. In another scene, the protagonist also rapes two young girls, Marty and Sonietta, after having drugged them with an aphrodisiac. Sex in the novel is presented as an exhibition and assertion of power and violence. Alex is described as a violent and sadistic monster who simply enjoys having these experiences. He insists that he does evil because he likes it and is in full charge of his actions, illustrating Burgess’s argument that free will is necessary, even though the consequences might be negative. It comes as no surprise that his Heinemann editor, James Michie, was worried about these episodes of sexual violence in the novel; he was afraid that “a delicate-minded critic could convincingly accuse him [Burgess] of indulging in sadistic fantasies” (cited by Biswell 2012, xiv), and thus the novel would be prosecuted and banned under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, which would damage Burgess’s reputation. Despite these worries, the novel was eventually published by Heinemann in 1962. Another horrific feeling assaults the reader’s sensibility when Alex is taken to jail for his vicious crimes and the state tries to suppress his freedom by psychologically removing his power to make free choices. The intention of the government is to reform and “redeem” him, but at what cost? A Clockwork Orange is a frightening political and moral dystopia about good and evil, and about the meaning of human freedom. Burgess’s provocative suggestion is that removing Alex’s ability to choose, no matter how monstrous his behaviour may be, is morally wrong. The state’s experimental treatment for crime control turns Alex into an automaton (a clockwork man), which represents a greater evil than any of his crimes. However, the novel has a positive ending. In the last chapter, the protagonist truly grows as a human being, after the government removes his conditioning, and he is allowed the conscious decision to renounce violence, that is to say, to choose good over evil. What is significant about the publication history of A Clockwork Orange is that the American version of the novel was published without this final chapter, which the publisher, Norton, found to be unconvincing. Burgess reluctantly agreed, mostly for financial reasons,23 though he strongly disapproved of this decision, since he believed the American publisher had distorted the novel into a nasty tale of unredeemable evil. Ironically, it was the American edition of the novel that became a cult classic among college students (Whissen 1992, 62–67), and it was also the edition that Stanley Kubrick used for his 1971 film adaptation. The film, like Lewis’s The Monk, was both commercially successful and highly controversial. The stark terror of the novel was very well captured in Kubrick’s work, which was initially labelled with an X rating and widely criticized for glorifying sex and violence. Some called it “an evil motion picture” which promoted “the kind of nihilism that has political purposes not all of which the young perceive” (Hart 23 This is the explanation Burgess gave in his introduction to the 1986 Norton edition, which restored the book to its original length: “I needed money back in 1961, even the pittance I was being offered as an advance, and if the condition of the book’s acceptance was also its truncation – well, so be it” (1986, vi). 78 Alberto Lázaro The Dark Side of British Horror Fiction: Politics, Taboos and Censorship 1972, 51). There were even reports of riots and street violence after screenings (Morrison 2000, 1). In Britain, the British board film also passed it with an X certificate, and in 1974 Kubrick himself imposed a ban and withdrew the film from distribution in the UK.24 It was only released again in 2000 (Morrison 2000, 1). The novel was also withdrawn from some American schools and libraries on grounds of immorality and violence (Sova 1998, 76–79; turner 2011, 14). It is difficult to know to what extent the omission of that last chapter in the American edition affected the interpretation of the novel and film, and thus stimulated the controversy. What cannot be denied is that A Clockwork Orange became Burgess’s most popular novel and one of Kubrick’s most profitable films.25 In Spain, Burgess’s dystopia was not so popular. Readers had to wait until 1976 to hold a Spanish translation of the American edition in their hands. Perhaps, as an act of self-censorship, no publisher dared to ask the censors for authorisation before, fearing a negative answer. It was only a few months after Franco’s death that a Barcelona publisher, Edhasa, presented a copy of this novel to the still-running censorship office. The censors did not ban its publication but could not resist the impulse to bend the top corner of those pages that they found morally or politically offensive in the copy they read.26 As one might expect, among the marked pages were those that included the brutal rape of the writer’s wife and the sexual scene with the drugged girls. The censors also disliked the disrespectful references to the prison chaplain, an alcoholic priest who preaches to the prisoners about morals, but accepts the cruel treatment that Alex receives at the hands of the government, at least for some time. It is true that this character seems to voice Burgess’s catholic position when he insists that Alex must have moral choices, as when he asks Alex “What does god want? Does god want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad but perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?” (Burgess 2012, 105). However, this priest appears as a naïve, selfish, ridiculous character, so the Spanish censors could not help but react to that. 5 Conclusion Despite the uncertainties over the interpretation of texts such as “carmilla” or the American edition of A Clockwork Orange, we can come to the conclusion that horror stories usually imply more than they apparently say. They are not simply entertaining stories based on fear and gruesome effects. Behind the crimes, cruelties and other events of a terrifying nature, these horror narratives are often concerned with political, religious, moral and sexual issues. It could be the threat of catholic perversion or some revolutionary ideals, as in The Monk; it may be national tensions or repressed sexuality, as in “carmilla”; or perhaps the importance of individual free will, as in A Clockwork Orange. Whatever the issues are, they tend to play along the boundaries of social rules and taboos imposed by the dominant, conservative ideology. Sexuality, linked to violence, is a recurrent motif that often has a disruptive presence in this type of literature. These stories seem to appeal to the private passions and inner desires of human beings as they relate to lust, physical pleasures and control of the Other. It seems that the horrible monster is not so much a threat from a foreign world as one from inside ourselves. What is more, 24 Kubrick never provided an explanation for banning the film in Britain (Polman 1993, 13). 25 In 2000, David cook wrote that A Clockwork Orange was “Kubrick’s most profitable film to date, returning $17.5 million on a $2-million investment and ranking eighth in box-office returns for 1971 (77). 26 See File 1762–76, Box 76/16. 79LItERAtURE no matter if it is the erotic icon of a passive and innocent female victim suffering at the hands of a savage male monster, or if the horror appears instead in women’s clothes, with a pale beauty, it usually entails a deviance from the social and moral norms that are accepted by society. That is why horror fiction has sometimes been placed at the centre of polemics and subjected to various types of censorship. The transgressive nature of horror fiction, and the controversies it often generates, are an important part of its attraction and one of the reasons why such works have long been so appealing and popular. 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Part III EngLISH LAnguAgE AnD LITERATuRE TEACHIng 85ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg Ivana Cindrić, Snježana Pavić University of Zagreb, croatia Snježana Pavić Popovača Primary School, croatia 2017, vol. 14 (2), 85-102(122) revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope doi: 10.4312/elope.14.2.85-102 UDc: 37.091.279.7:811.111'373.3(497.5) Tendencies and Characteristics of Feedback given by Primary English Language Teachers in Croatia ABStRAct Feedback is a constituent part of three assessment approaches: assessment for/as/of learning. Feedback about students’ learning and performance differs in the three approaches with respect to manner and purpose. Feedback associated with assessment of learning is representative of the traditional way of teaching, its role reduced to mere reporting of a score or grade. However, in the context of assessment for learning and assessment as learning, feedback plays a more significant role. It implies having a clear understanding of how, when and why feedback is given in addition to involving students in giving feedback. This preliminary research on a sample of primary school English language teachers in croatia focuses on tendencies in giving feedback and some general characteristics of feedback given to students within the assessment for learning approach. teachers’ estimates of their competence in providing feedback and their needs in this particular area of assessment are revealed. The results will pinpoint areas which require further research for the purpose of more closely adhering to the principles of assessment for learning and assessment as learning in English language teaching. Keywords: assessment approaches; assessment for learning; feedback; formative assessment Smernice in značilnosti dajanja povratnih informacij pri pouku angleščine v osnovni šoli POvZEtEK Povratne informacije so sestavni del treh ocenjevalnih pristopov: ocenjevanje za učenje/kot učenje/ učenja. Podajanje povratnih informacij o učenju in uspešnosti se v teh pristopih razlikuje glede načina in namena. Povratne informacije v okviru ocenjevanja učenja so značilne za tradicionalni način učenja; njihova vloga je zmanjšana zgolj na točkovanje in ocene. Nasprotno pa je vloga povratnih informacij v ocenjevanju za učenje in ocenjevanju kot učenju mnogo bolj pomembna. Povezana je z jasnim razumevanjem, kako, kdaj in zakaj so povratne informacije podane, hkrati pa so v podajanje povratnih informacij vključeni tudi študenti. v predhodni raziskavi, v kateri je sodelovalo nekaj osnovnošolskih učiteljev angleščine na Hrvaškem, smo ugotavljali smernice in splošne značilnosti pri podajanju povratnih informacij v okviru pristopa ocenjevanja za učenje. Učitelji so ocenjevali svoje kompetence pri podajanju povratnih informacij in predstavili svoje potrebe pri tej vrsti ocenjevanja. Rezultati so pokazali področja, kjer je potrebno nadaljnje raziskovanje za zagotovitev boljšega upoštevanja načel ocenjevanja za učenje in ocenjevanja kot učenja pri pouku angleškega jezika. Ključne besede: ocenjevalni pristopi; ocenjevanje za učenje; povratne informacije; formativno ocenjevanje 86 Ivana cindrić, Snježana Pavić Tendencies and Characteristics of Feedback Given by Primary English Language Teachers in Croatia Tendencies and Characteristics of Feedback given by Primary English Language Teachers in Croatia 1 Introduction In 2016, in croatia, a team of experts created and proposed the document Framework for the Assessment of Learning Processes and Outcomes [Draft] (2016) (later in text Framework for Assessment). The document, among other issues related to assessment, presented the three approaches to assessment and particularly the importance and purpose of feedback in the two approaches, assessment for and assessment as learning. Furthermore, the Framework for Assessment refers to feedback as gathered information used to guide learning and improve learning and teaching. Therefore, the two assessment approaches, assessment for and assessment as learning, have a very important formative purpose. The purpose of the third approach, assessment of learning is summative – it evaluates the acquisition of educational outcomes after a particular period. Within the latter approach, feedback serves as guidance for further learning/teaching, as opposed to the purpose of feedback in the former assessment approaches, where it is directed towards the process of learning and teaching at present. In light of the proposed Framework for Assessment, the aim of this research is to establish the level and characteristics of feedback prevailing among English language teachers in a primary school in croatia, particularly with regard to the assessment for learning approach. It is expected that the findings will also reveal teachers’ competences in providing such feedback and establish needs in that particular area of assessment. In that respect, the findings may contribute to improving formative classroom assessment practices and to providing information relevant for teacher trainers and institutions responsible for providing teachers with opportunities for effective professional development. 2 The Formative Role of Feedback within the Assess- ment for Learning Approach The term ‘formative assessment’ became popular in the 1990s, when there was concern that students were over-assessed and too much testing was being carried out (Bennett 2011). This way of assessing, judging learning by generating and reporting scores and grades, was referred to as ‘assessment for testing’, or the term used today, ‘assessment of learning.’ In a booklet entitled Inside the Black Box (1998), Paul Black and Dylan William conclude, among other things, that the function of grading is overemphasised, while the function of learning is neglected. They thus suggest including feedback into teaching practice, which will serve to guide students and lead them to progress in learning. Sadler (1998, 120) accepts the definition of feedback as information about how successfully something has been or is being done, but warns that few physical, intellectual or social skills can be satisfactorily acquired simply by being told about them. He emphasizes the effect rather than informational content of feedback: “Feedback is information about the gap between the actual level and the reference level of a system parameter which is used to alter the gap in some way” (Ramaprasad 1983, 4, cited in Sadler 1998, 120). Emphasis on feedback as a method for improving learning and experiencing achievement led to different interventions in teaching. For instance, in the American educational system, the quality of feedback which teachers offer their students took on a more dominant role with the initial implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education 2001). Over 87ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg the years, however, the Act was reviewed and evolved to the present-day Every Student Succeeds Act (U.S. Department of Education 2015), which is characterised by being open to other forms of assessment instead of a snapshot test score, and examining student growth in order to determine how well students are doing and the progress they have made. Formative assessment thus became a more efficient tool for improving not only student achievement, but also teaching practice (Dunn and Mulvenon 2009, 3). This is because the goal of formative assessment is also to provide teachers with immediate feedback, so they can adjust their instruction (MacDonald et al. 2015, xviii). teachers can thus determine what to do next instructionally, i.e., what strategies and methods to apply to improve their teaching in order for students to improve their learning. In croatia, feedback in teaching is mentioned in the document Croatian National Educational Standard (Ministry of Science, Education and Sports 2005) and the Teaching Curriculum for Primary School (Ministry of Science, Education and Sports 2006). These documents refer to feedback in the context of constructive information on the summative assessment of students and their progress, development and behaviour in a way that “students and parents/guardians understand the need for educational intervention and ways of further development and progress.” Although there is mention of teaching that is interactive, problem oriented and constructivist, the joint work of students and teachers and joint assessment of achievement, the use of constructive feedback and its application in formative assessment is not explained. Only in the document Framework for Assessment (Draft) (Ministry of Science, Education and Sports 2016) are the concepts of feedback and formative assessment defined. This document states that feedback to students based on the two approaches to assessment, for learning and as learning, does not result in a grade, but in an exchange of information on learning and the results of learning. Feedback is a means of recognizing where students are at in their learning with respect to the set outcomes, and the effectiveness of the application of certain learning strategies. In short, feedback within assessment for learning is a constituent part of the teaching process that is usually given by the teacher while teaching in the form of information on the ways in which a student has acquired and interpreted the focal learning material. Feedback in this approach is the channel which teachers and students adopt in the attempt to answer three questions, Where am I going? (What are the goals?), How am I doing? (What progress is being made towards the goal?), and What next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) (Hattie and timperley (2007, 86). From a temporal perspective, these can be expressed as the present, linked with assessment of student learning up to now, and activities that will be undertaken for the purpose of improvement from now on. 3 About Levels, Timing and Effect of Feedback Hattie and timperley (2007, 90), define four levels of feedback as follows: feedback about the task – Ft (whether the task was completed, whether the answer was correct or incorrect); feedback about processing of the task – FP (involves construction of meaning, relates to strategies for error detection); feedback about self‑regulation – FR (which affects self-efficacy, provides insight into one’s knowledge, implies autonomy, self-direction, self-control and self-discipline, all directed to better understanding or completion of a task); and feedback about the self as a person – FS (the level of feedback directed towards the student as a person). The authors claim that the last level, feedback about the self as a person, characterised by feedback in the form of “You’re an excellent student” or “That is an intelligent answer, great!” is the least efficient in terms of referring to the task itself. Still, it should be kept in mind that feedback in the form of praise can have a positive effect on 88 Ivana cindrić, Snježana Pavić Tendencies and Characteristics of Feedback Given by Primary English Language Teachers in Croatia learning, but only under the condition that it leads to changes in student effort, involvement in learning or the feeling of efficiency with respect to learning or the strategies used for understanding a task (ibid.). According to gass and Selinker (2001), motivation is a social psychological factor and predictor of success in second language learning. Since there are various types of feedback that motivate language learning, feedback can be a means for motivating students’ learning of a foreign language (Petchprasert 2012, 1113). Therefore, it is necessary to differentiate between feedback as praise, which is directed to the student and diverts from the task (as it gives insufficient information on the value of learning and achievement), from feedback directed towards effort, self-regulation, involvement or processes related with the task and achievement (FR), e.g., “You used appropriate phrases, and the sentences are grammatically correct.” (ibid). The timing of feedback, more precisely, the efficiency of giving immediate or delayed feedback, has also been subject of numerous studies. giving immediate or delayed feedback can be efficient depending on the level of feedback in question. For instance, clariana, Wagner and Roher Murphy (2000) established that immediate feedback is more efficient when it provides feedback about the task (Ft), while delayed feedback is more efficient when it refers to the process of task completion (FP). In her book on effective feedback, Brookhart (2008) offers teachers some general advice on timing feedback, such as “put yourself in the student’s shoes,” i.e., they should ask themselves When would students like to hear some feedback?. The answer suggested by the author is While they are still thinking about the task and I can step in. The timing of feedback also needs to adhere to the principles of practicality in the teaching and learning process. Fluckiger et al. (2010, 140) offer strategies (shared revisions of student-generated questions and statements, using collaborative technology, mid-term conferencing, and so on) which give feedback sufficient time for revisions to occur, providing scaffolding for learners, inform instruction, and most importantly, involve students as partners in assessment. With respect to the effects of feedback on learning, along with motivational feedback, there is feedback of a corrective nature, referred to as negative feedback. There are two types of corrective feedback: explicit or direct, and implicit or indirect feedback. varnosfadrani and Basturkmen (2009; cited in Petchprasert 2012, 1115) define explicit feedback as “the process of giving direct forms of feedback.” In a writing task, for example, explicit or direct feedback would comprise marking and correcting errors, or as Bitchener and Ferris (2013) propose correcting grammar/ errors, (the wrong word is crossed out and the right word is given). In a written script, forms of indirect feedback can be symbols or codes for correcting. In spoken tasks, direct feedback would imply interrupting and correcting students, while implicit feedback would be defined as identifying the type of error without correcting it (Bitchener et al. 2005; cited in Petchprasert 2012). various strategies can be applied in a spoken context, such as asking for clarification by repeating the student’s sentence with a rising intonation (She goed shopping yesterday?) or indicating the type of mistake (irregular verb) and giving the student sufficient time for correction. In their seminal work, Lyster and Ranta (1997, 44) developed a model of error treatment sequence and identified six different types of feedback in communicatively oriented classrooms: explicit correction, recasts, clarification requests, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation and repetition. They also identified ‘uptake’, i.e., students’ utterances immediately following teacher’s feedback as uptake that results in repair of the error or uptake that results in an utterance that still needs repair. Their findings show that the feedback–uptake sequence engages students more actively when there is negotiation of form (not provided by recasts and explicit correction) and that students’ turn in error treatment (through peer or self-repair or in need of repair) does not break the communicative flow. However, the authors caution that for such a negotiated form 89ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg to take place, learners should possess an adequate proficiency in the L2. There are many second language acquisition theories relating to corrective feedback and its implications for learning, and they are far from being unanimous in their conclusions. According to El tatawy’s (2002) review of the related literature, they extend from nativist theories advocated by chomsky (1975) and Krashen (1982), where negative evidence has a minute effect on language acquisition, to advocates of the noticing hypothesis, who argue that a degree of noticing must occur in SLA for input to become intake in L2 learning (Schmidt 1990, 1995; Schmidt and Frota 1986). This view is challenged by gass (1988, 1990), who claims that without direct or frequent corrective feedback in the input, which would permit learners to detect discrepancies between their learner language and the target language, fossilization might occur, in other words, mere presentation of comprehensible input does not lead to intake and output Long’s ‘interaction hypothesis’ (e.g., 1983) states that providing learners with both positive and negative evidence facilitates language acquisition, i.e., interaction that includes implicit corrective feedback is facilitative of L2 development. Furthermore, in content-based and communicative language classes, students show major improvements in accuracy if communication tasks are accompanied by negative feedback and other types of focus on form (e.g., Lightbown and Spada 1990; Doughty and varela 1998; Doughty and Williams 1998).1 Kuo (2003, 10) claims that a primary task for language teachers is to “discern the optimal tension between positive and negative feedback,” striking a balance that offers enough encouragement to motivate the learner, but not so much that errors are overlooked. giving feedback is an important link in determining the students’ quality of work and in assessing their performance and achievement. With this research, we wanted to gain insights into the characteristics of feedback that primary school English language teachers tend to give their students. Furthermore, the opinions of teachers as to how their students experience feedback, and as to whether they are competent in providing feedback, will shed light on the needs that teachers may have in this area of assessment. 4 Methodology 4.1 Research Aims considering that the documents Croatian National Educational Standard (2005), Teaching Curriculum for Primary School (2006) and Framework for Assessment (Draft) (2016) encourage the use of formative assessment, the aim of this research was to gain insights into the level and nature of feedback prevailing among English language teachers in primary school in croatia. More precisely, we sought answers to the following research questions: 1. When and how frequently do English language teachers in primary school provide feedback? 2. What is the nature of the feedback they provide, and which strategies do teachers use in giving feedback? 3. How, according to teachers’ opinions, does feedback affect their students? 4. Do teachers find themselves competent in providing feedback to students? 1 For a more comprehensive review of the literature related to the theories and research behind corrective feedback, see El tatawy, 2002, “corrective feedback in second language acquisition”. Working Papers in Applied Linguistics & TESOL 2 (2). columbia University. 90 Ivana cindrić, Snježana Pavić Tendencies and Characteristics of Feedback Given by Primary English Language Teachers in Croatia The research conducted was of a preliminary nature aimed at assessing the current situation regarding tendencies in giving feedback by primary English language teachers. The results should reveal teacher awareness of their use of feedback in teaching, areas that are possibly mismatched in terms of task and feedback, i.e., providing feedback that adheres to the principles of assessment for learning. The results should encourage further research that will more precisely detect issues related to assessment and feedback in teaching practice. 4.2 Sample of Participants The sample of participants included English language teachers in the city of Zagreb and surrounding counties who teach English in primary school (grades 1–8). A total of 161 English language teachers responded to the survey. The teachers were not selected according to specific criteria, and therefore the sample is random. 4.3 Instrument and Data collection The research was conducted using the survey method, where the instrument was an anonymous questionnaire for English language teachers in primary school. The questionnaire contained 20 items in the form of closed-ended questions and Likert-type scale questions (1 – strongly agree, 2 – agree, 3 – neither agree nor disagree, 4 – disagree, 5 – strongly disagree). The questions were grouped into five categories: A – frequency and time of feedback, B – feedback content, c – strategies used in giving feedback, D – effect of feedback on students, E – assessment of teacher’s competence in providing feedback and need for further training. The survey was conducted from September to October 2016 in an online environment, where the participants selected their answer by clicking one of the provided options. Data were analysed using the SPSS statistical program and the descriptive analysis method. 5 Results and Discussion 5.1 Frequency and time of giving Feedback The first statement in the questionnaire asked teachers to estimate in general the frequency of providing feedback to students by selecting one of four options (always, sometimes, rarely, never). According to their answers, 83.9% of the participants always provide feedback to students about their performance, while the remaining 16.1% give feedback occasionally. considering the timing of feedback about student performance, i.e., whether it is immediate or delayed, table 1 shows that 61.5% (99) of teachers give immediate feedback, i.e., right after the student’s performance, while 38.5% (62) provide such feedback sometimes. Half of the participants in the sample, 50.9% (82), sometimes give delayed feedback, while 29.2% (47) offer such feedback rarely, and 13% (22) never do so. A rather small percentage of the participants 5.6% always give delayed feedback. Immediate feedback, also known as “on-the-spot” correction is efficient and even desired when solving “easy tasks” which do not require cognitive processing about the task itself. It is often used in oral tasks where recall of information and accuracy is called for. According to Brookhart (2008), immediate feedback is useful when factual knowledge is desired. If students are engaged in thinking about a task and working on it, feedback should be given without much delay so as to answer their How am I doing? questions and direct them to Where am I going? Delayed 91ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg feedback, on the other hand, is useful with tasks that are focused on thinking and processing. If feedback refers to a written task, the student should be given such feedback in the next lesson. table 1. Frequency of providing immediate and delayed feedback to student performance. Immediate feedback Delayed feedback f % f % Never 22 13.7 Rarely 47 29.2 Sometimes 62 38.5 82 50.9 Always 99 61.5 9 5.6 *No answer 1 total 161 100 161 100 The choice of feedback type depends largely on the type of task the students are working on. considering that the sample of participants in this study comprises English teachers in primary education, where emphasis is placed on oral communicative skills, delayed feedback should be somewhat more frequent. Providing immediate feedback in communicative situations whose aim is to develop fluency can lead to weaker performance or slower acquisition of the language. Furthermore, as immediate feedback is more frequent among this sample of participants, we can conclude that teachers tend to use tasks which ask for factual knowledge, or to apply what Jones and William (2008, 6) term as initiation-response-feedback (IRF, elaborated by Sinclair and coulthard 1975), which is characteristic of the early stages of pattern practice where predictable answers are required (e.g., vocabulary sets). However, for the purpose of initiating meaningful communication, such ritualised and rather limiting classroom interactions should be reduced. to address this issue, Harmer (2015, 157) suggests gentle correction during oral tasks which imply working on fluency as an intervention that encourages better communication. Awareness of when to provide feedback can be summarised as follows – immediate feedback is useful when referring to factual knowledge (correct/incorrect), while slightly delayed feedback is more appropriate with tasks that ask for thinking and processing. Feedback should not be delayed when it can prompt a student to better achievement. Finally, feedback, as with any other aspect of assessment, must meet the principle of practicality. 5.2 Feedback content Within this category, the teachers were offered two opposing statements immediately following one another in order to analyse them against each other. The first statement referred to the frequency of providing feedback of a summative character (e.g., good, very good, not correct). According to Wong and Waring (2009), if uttered in a falling intonation such feedback does not invite communication with the teacher, as this intonation indicates an end to any conversation, after which students, in general, will not have the need to say anything. As can be seen in table 2, 47% (76) of the teachers said that their feedback is somewhat characterised by such statements, ‘very little’ was selected by 23% (37), while around 11% (18) of the teachers stated that that this is not characteristic of their feedback. However, 18% (29) of the teachers stated that their feedback is characterised by this to a great extent. 92 Ivana cindrić, Snježana Pavić Tendencies and Characteristics of Feedback Given by Primary English Language Teachers in Croatia The next item in the survey referred to the frequency of giving targeted feedback (targeted praise), or according to Scrivener’s (2012) term “work-specific praise,” which does not end in a falling intonation (e.g., “great choice of vocabulary in your composition. You only need to check the use of articles with proper nouns.”). According to the results (see table 2), 52.8% (85) of teachers often use such feedback, indicating what is good or could be improved in the students’ work. This is also somewhat characteristic of the feedback given by 41.6% (67) of participants, with 5% (8) of the teachers saying that they use this approach very little. to conclude, the teachers’ responses show that feedback which is more detailed, and of a formative nature, is more commonly used by our participants. table 2. teacher estimates of the frequency of giving summative and formative feedback. Summative Formative f % f % Not at all 18 11.2 1 0.6 very little 37 23 8 5 Somewhat 76 47.2 67 41.6 to a great extent 29 18 85 52.8 No answer 1 .6 total 161 100 161 100 Providing feedback of a formative character requires meticulous work and can initially be rather time-consuming. The teacher must consider the content of the feedback in terms of whether it is productive, clear and useful. The benefit of feedback is in guiding student progress and development, while at the same time improving the teaching process. Instead of feedback such as “well done” or “you can change that,” which can be vague for students, more precise feedback such as “try to change the word order in the sentence,” “use a synonym,” or “check the punctuation,” can be more effective, i.e., a combination of the two levels of feedback, FP with regard to the processing of a task, and FR directed at better understanding of a task. Furthermore, effective feedback information can be set in the form of reflection questions for students, such as “Can you use a different word to present your idea more clearly?”, “How can you divide this sentence into two or three shorter ones?”, “Can you rearrange the paragraphs for better text flow?”, or “Can you use adverbs to describe how people worked?” At the same time, asking such questions must be aligned with the level of student ability. Reflection questions imply a degree of student responsibility for their own learning, with the aim of increasing the ownership of learning, responsibility, and motivation. In defence of summative feedback, it should be noted that summative assessment can be used for a formative purpose. In other words, feedback provided by a test or examination can be formulated in such a way that it can provide guidance for future learning (feeds forward), and consequently future results in learning. test results can be discussed, and students can use them as a source for determining new learning goals or for planning future learning. to the extent that it is possible, information gathered through assessment of learning should be used by the teacher for formative purposes, and to potentially increase student motivation for learning. It is clear though that feedback from assessment of learning will not be as influential for student learning as feedback based on the two other approaches – assessment as learning and assessment for learning. 93ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg Nevertheless, evidence of student achievement gathered through assessment of learning can also serve as relevant information within the system of ensuring quality education at the level of particular schools, or the entire system of education (Framework for Assessment 2016). 5.3 Feedback Strategies When asked to decide whether they give individual, group feedback or both, the great majority of participants (81.4%; 131) answered that they use both types (table 3). Almost 15% (24) of the participants reported that they give only individual feedback, while just 3.7% (6) stated that they give only group feedback. It can thus be said that the teachers included in the survey seem to balance between giving individual and group feedback, and see the benefits of both types. table 3. teacher reports on giving individual and group feedback f % Individual feedback 24 14.9 group / class feedback 6 3.7 Both individual and group feedback 131 81.4 total 161 100 From a student’s point of view, individual feedback is perceived as a message that “the teacher values my learning” (Brookhart 2008). It is also more effective when directed toward specific aspects of student performance or work. group feedback is efficient when errors can be compiled, as they are common to a certain number of students in a class. However, frequent group feedback is often a strategy that is used when faced with time constraints or having too many students in a class. Although the teachers in our sample use both individual and group feedback, we find it useful to note some issues teachers have with respect to giving adequate individual feedback to their students. Here we provide an excerpt from a teacher’s report on this issue: I feel guilty for not giving much individual feedback to my students. So why can’t I? My excuse is that it is extremely time consuming to think of feedback to write at the end of the students’ written tasks. I don’t want to use just stock phrases, but thinking of different feedback for 30–40 students in 3–5 different courses during one teaching module just feels beyond me. So normally I only resort to it if there is a clear and exceptional case (e.g. somebody has a clearly noticeable problem, or they have improved considerably). I try to alleviate this lack of feedback to some extent by giving oral feedback when handing the written tasks back, though I only have time to do it for some. Students are more or less OK with this (perhaps because they don’t know any better!), since they get the grade and can ask if they want more feedback, but it does make me feel inadequate. (A professor in a centre for foreign languages, from an online E-teacher Scholarship Program Discussion Board 2011 http://umbc.uoregon.edu/eteacher/) One possible solution to this problem is giving individual feedback to a number of students relating to one task, followed by a different group and different task, and so on. Between such individual feedback, group feedback can also be given. In this way, the teacher alternates giving informative feedback to a group of students for each task (Pavić 2013). Moreover, a teacher’s feedback can have 94 Ivana cindrić, Snježana Pavić Tendencies and Characteristics of Feedback Given by Primary English Language Teachers in Croatia more meaning if heard in its entirety, regardless of whether it is directed to an individual or group. In addition to word choice, time, content, and the amount of feedback, there are also strategic guidelines that teachers can follow (ibid.). There are situations when a teacher estimates whether a student is ready to receive feedback and times when the teacher can ask “Would you like to hear my review of your work?” or “could you use some feedback at this point?” The following information relates to the amount of feedback, which is also a relevant characteristic. In the literature there is the notion of the “goldilocks principle,” or not too much and not too little, and it is not necessary to comment every error. table 4 shows the teachers’ degree of agreement with the statement It is necessary to comment on all of the student’s errors. While the majority (65.2%; 105) do not agree or strongly disagree (9.3%; 15) with the statement, almost 12% (19) of the teachers agree or strongly agree. A smaller percentage (13.7%; 22) did not express an opinion towards the statement. In examining the participants’ answers in this research, we can conclude that the majority adhere to the principle of moderation depending on the task and level of feedback. Still, there is a tendency among teachers, particularly when dealing with written tasks, that they should inform students (highlight or underline) of everything that is not correct in the text, or correct students’ oral responses. Error correction is a common concern among teachers. According to Mackey, Park and tagarelli (2016, 501) after decades of research practitioners would agree that correcting all errors is not useful, realistic or possible, but that appropriate corrective feedback is likely to facilitate L2 developmental processes. Learners, it has been established, actually appreciate and welcome corrective feedback, both direct and indirect– however, the type of feedback, and when and how it is given, may determine its usefulness and uptake. Further research, which would include learners’ opinions, could show students’ preferences in terms of the amount of error correction in both oral and written tasks and its effects on their learning and motivation. A more detailed study of practices among induction and experienced teachers could also reveal tendencies in providing corrective feedback to students. table 4. teachers’ estimates of the need to correct all errors. (It is necessary to comment on / correct all of the student’s errors). f % Strongly disagree 15 9.3 Disagree 105 65.2 Neutral 22 13.7 Agree 16 9.9 Strongly agree 3 1.9 closely related to error correction are notions of positive and negative feedback. Nordal (2014) established that the terms negative evidence, negative feedback, error correction, and corrective feedback have essentially been used to describe the same phenomena by SLA researchers. In the current research, teachers were asked to give their opinions on the effectiveness of positive and negative feedback. The results show that overall the teachers are not in favour of giving positive feedback. As seen in table 5, almost half the participants, 49.4%, do not agree with the statement that only positive feedback is effective. Only 18% of participants completely agree with the statement, while 30% could determine whether positive feedback is effective or not. 95ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg Furthermore, more than half the participants (67.7%) agree with the statement that negative feedback, i.e., information of corrective characteristics, is also effective, and a very small number (3.1%) disagree with this notion. Again, as with the previous statement, there are some participants (26.7%) who could not express agreement nor disagreement with the statement. table 5. teachers’ opinions on the effectiveness of positive and negative feedback. Strongly disagree Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly agree Only positive feedback is effective 3.1% 48.4% 30.4% 17.4% 0.6% Negative feedback is also effective 3.1% 26.7% 67.7% 2.5% It can be said that in general the participants do not feel that giving only positive feedback is effective. However, there is a significant number of participants (30.4% and 26.7%) who could not express agreement nor disagreement with these statements. We conclude that there is a degree of uncertainty and insecurity related to this issue, and possibly vagueness with regard to what is implied by positive and negative feedback. As such, we offer explanations of negative or corrective feedback and the form that it may take in a classroom (introduced above in About levels, timing and effect of feedback). In writing tasks, explicit feedback can be used in marking errors, which implies that that the students cannot correct themselves. A very common example in teaching English is with collocations or sentence structures. Written corrective feedback is direct when we cross out the error and provide the correction explicitly near or above the error, or when we insert the correct word, morpheme, or phrase (Bitchener and Ferris 2012, 65). Indirect correction is made when the error is only marked (circled or underlined), or the number of errors is recorded in the margin at the end of a given line. coding can also be considered as indirect correction (Nagode, Pižorn, and Juriševič 2014). Jones and William (2008,14) offer a suggestion that instead of marking every error, the teacher can place a dot in the margin reflecting an error which students then have to identify and correct. Recently, metalinguistic corrections of students’ work have become more common, along with a grammatical rule or example of correct usage and an additional oral explanation (Nagode, Pižorn, and Juriševič 2014). According to Lyster and Ranta (1997, 46–48), the types of corrective feedback in oral tasks can take on the following forms: explicit correction, recasting, clarification requests, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, repetition, and multiple feedback. In their research, recasting was most widely used in the language classroom. However, although corrective feedback provides negative evidence by signalling that a learner’s utterance contained an error, it can also provide positive evidence if the feedback contains the target form (as seen in recasting) (Mackey, Park and tagarelli 2016, 500). to differentiate positive feedback from praise, Reigel (2005) offers an expanded definition of oral positive feedback which not only has a metalinguistic component (praise) taking the form of evaluative feedback such as “fine,” “good,” and “excellent” (vigil and Oller, 1976), but also a linguistic component (affirmation) and a paralinguistic one (laughter). The latter refers to “Normal conversational responses that one gives in face-to-face situations. Such responses as uh huh or head nodding convey agreement or that the message has been received and is understood 96 Ivana cindrić, Snježana Pavić Tendencies and Characteristics of Feedback Given by Primary English Language Teachers in Croatia … can be seen as forms of feedback” (Seliger and Long 1983, 258), while the former include a “personal response” (Imai 1989, 17) – a mechanism of interpersonal communication that includes a speaker and hearer, as manifested by affirmation. Reigel (2005) proposes that teachers issue more affirmation to students, i.e., affirmation of correct utterances. Regardless of whether feedback is of a positive or negative nature, it should be specific, transparent and effective, meaning it should include instructions as to what to improve and how to do so. Indicating that something is “good” or “bad” without some affirmation and the paralinguistic aspect is neither corrective nor motivational feedback. One can easily imagine a student reflecting on such feedback by asking “What exactly should I do better next time?” Students cannot know what is “good” or “not so good” in their work if this approach is used, and yet according to our research more than 18% of teachers give such feedback. The results of our research show that more than half the participants in our sample (60%) maintain that students should have opportunities to improve their work after feedback and prior to marking (scoring or grading). Still, there are teachers, although a small percentage (2%), who do not agree with this approach and those who have no opinion on it (25%). According to Black et al. (2004), students react better to assessments if marks are not involved. More precisely, students are prone to ignore comments after being marked. The results of this survey show that teachers are aware of the effect of feedback and are willing to improve their practices, assuming that English language teachers may be inclined to changing their routines and not marking papers immediately but only after giving feedback (oral or written,) which demands further work by the student (and consequently the teacher as well). This is also in agreement with the principles of formative assessment, where, in terms of written work, the exposure of students to the experience of writing is considered a creative process. In that case, we could give feedback which will help students produce a better product – “numerical marks or grades do not inform a student in terms of how to improve their work, and that implies a lost opportunity for progress” (ibid). Students learn while working and after getting feedback. If, on the other hand, the teachers mark work without the students being able make any further corrections, perhaps the teachers can provide the students with the opportunity to do better at another time. This view of assessment is elaborated by vizek-vidović et al. (2003, 442) in their book Educational Psychology. The authors state that “When it comes to motivation, a good score comes like reinforcement for students. If a student is assigned a bad grade, he/she should be given an opportunity to improve his/her grade. Such an opportunity and feedback on how much they have learned, motivates them to learn more in order to be more successful next time.” This research also uncovered teachers’ opinions relating to peer assessment, an essential part of assessment as learning, i.e., the formative approach to assessment. According to MacDonald et al. (2015, 42), formative feedback can come from many sources, the most common being teachers, peers and students themselves through self-reflection and self-assessment. The results of the current study’s survey show that 68.3% of the teachers agree and 13.66% strongly agree that if given guidance then students could give effective feedback to peers. A smaller percentage of teachers remained neutral on this issue (15.53%), while only 2.48% disagreed with the statement that peer feedback is useful for student learning. It is thus evident that teachers realize the potential of involving students in giving feedback, i.e., peer assessment prior to giving a summative evaluation. The more experience students have in assessing their own or peers’ learning and achievement, the more they will be able to regulate their own learning based on 97ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg the information they have generated in the self-assessment process. Initially, the teacher models feedback offering support for independent learning and understanding and in applying strategies that will promote progress in learning. Later, students gradually create their own feedback according to the teacher’s guidelines. 5.4 How Does Feedback Affect My Students? If given in a way that students recognize as effective in terms of invoking change and progress, feedback is effective and motivating. According to the results of this research, more than half of the participants 53.4% (86) find that students sometimes experience anxiety when receiving feedback, while 31.1% (50) consider this to be a frequent occurrence. However, for 15.5% (25) of the participants this is never the case. Around a quarter of the participants (26.7%; 43) find that feedback always has a motivational influence on students, with most of the respondents (71.4%, 115) claiming this is frequently the case. A small number of the participants said that feedback has no motivational influence on their students. Furthermore, most of the participants feel that feedback does not encourage peer competition, but often encourages students to improve themselves. According to the results, the English language teachers surveyed in this work agree that feedback improves learning. That is in agreement with research (gass and Selinker 2001) which says that motivation, as a social psychological factor, is a predictor of success in foreign language learning. Furthermore, according to Čačinovič vogrinčič (2008, as cited in Nagode, Pižorn, and Juriševič 2014), the rules of supportive and positive communication can and should be generally applied when working with people, and hence also in the teacher-student relationship. It is only communication of this kind that leads to a supportive, cooperative, equal, and at the same time very active student/teacher relationship. The teacher’s positive approach is also most important in the case of giving (written) corrective feedback, regardless of the approach applied. We can perhaps ascribe rather the frequent presence of anxiety in receiving feedback to teacher-student communication that lacks some of the characteristics of supportive positive communication. Or perhaps we can take this a step further. If feedback is frequently of a corrective and summative nature, and students do not have the opportunity to improve their performance after receiving it (the results show that 25% of the teachers are not sure whether or not such opportunities should be given), then it is not surprising that students experience anxiety when receiving feedback. However, here we must take into consideration that the teachers’ answers to this set of questions express their opinions, implying that further research should include also student’s responses, as this would provide a more objective view of the effects of feedback in a language classroom. table 6. teacher opinions on how feedback affects their students Anxiety % (f ) Motivation % (f ) Encourages peer competition % (f ) Encourages personal improvement % (f ) Improves learning % (f ) Never 15.5% (25) 6% (1) 59.01% (95) 1.86% (3) .62% (1) Sometimes 53.4% (86) 1.2% (2) 31.68% (51) 10.56% (17) 1.86% (3) Frequently 31.1% (50) 71.4% (115) 4.35% (7) 70.81% (114) 72.05% (116) Always 26.7% (43) 4.79% (8) 13.15% (26) 25.47% (41) 98 Ivana cindrić, Snježana Pavić Tendencies and Characteristics of Feedback Given by Primary English Language Teachers in Croatia 5.5 Assessment of teacher competence and Need for Improvement The results in table 7 show that 90.7% of the participants expressed concern regarding their competence in giving feedback to students. Only 10% of the teachers assessed themselves as relatively competent in providing effective and useful feedback, and more than half (67.1%) reported that this is an area in which they could use more training and professional development. table 7. teachers’ estimates on their competence in providing feedback and need for further professional development. YES nO competence in giving feedback to students 9.3% 90.7% Need for professional development 67.1% 32.3% The participants’ responses show that English language teachers are open and willing to improve their effectiveness in providing feedback. What is more, they also express a need for further learning and training in the area of assessment. This finding is consistent with the results of a previously conducted research in croatia in 2010 (cindrić) where 74 primary school English language teachers reported having received no or limited formal education in the area of assessment or self-assessment during their pre-service teacher training. What is more, the participants, regardless of work experience, also reported having had few opportunities for in- service training and professional development in this area (ibid). The need for improvement in assessment practices and feedback resurfaces in the present study, urging for measures to be taken. Since 2005, the Faculty of teacher Education, University of Zagreb has been offering a course English Language Teaching Methodology: Assessment within the Programme for the Undergraduate and graduate Study of Primary teaching and the English Language (2005), introducing topics of assessment to pre-service teachers. In-service training offered by the teacher training agency occasionally focuses on assessment issues; however, these attempts only partially remedy concerns teachers have relating to assessment. What is lacking is a comprehensive assessment system and a developed assessment policy for primary schools aligned with the curriculum at the state level. Once the curriculum and complementary assessment framework are in place, coordination with pre-service teacher training institutions and the teacher-training agency can be established in order to offer more  structured, applicable, and progressively more challenging continuing professional development. That would be a start for effectively meeting foreign language teachers’ recurring needs in the area of assessment and feedback. 6 Conclusion The research conducted on a sample of 161 primary school English language teachers revealed general information on the feedback used in foreign language teaching, and more specifically on the related tendencies, characteristics and needs. Based on the participants’ responses to the survey, we were able to answer the first research question, and thus established that the English language teachers in this sample frequently give feedback to their students. Moreover, they generally describe their feedback as immediate. This indicates that feedback is given for examining or checking at the level of remembering, or if referring to level of feedback – at the task level (Ft). Although initial foreign language teaching relies on students’ ability to recognize, show, identify, name, list, and so on, it is also necessary to gradually include communicative 99ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg language tasks that ask for understanding, comprehension, analysis, and application, since communicative competence is emphasised in language teaching. Such tasks do not necessarily demand immediate feedback, but delayed feedback or intervention from the teacher. In the research conducted in this study, only half of participants give delayed feedback regularly, while others give it occasionally or never. Here we point to research by Yoshida (2010), which shows that learners tend to prefer receiving feedback such as clarifications or elicitations in order to work out the correct answers themselves, rather than receiving the correct forms immediately after their erroneous utterances. Therefore, with respect to this research, we can say that the results do not necessarily speak about whether teachers give appropriate feedback, but instead indicate that the tasks that encourage thinking and processing are somewhat less represented in their teaching than tasks at the level of remembering. The results indicate that more training should be given to teachers at both pre-service and in-service levels with respect to aligning task and assessment, i.e., feedback in foreign language teaching. Feedback in the form of a short answer (“good,” “bad,” “very good”) uttered in a falling intonation is used by the participants sometimes or rarely, indicating that teachers are aware of the rather negative and vague effects of such feedback. The answer to the second research question indicated that targeted feedback of a formative character is much more frequent in the sample. However, the research revealed an area where teachers expressed insecurity, i.e., they could not provide an answer as to whether positive and negative feedback is useful for students. In that respect, it is necessary to clarify what the two notions imply, and when and how they can be implemented in order to be most effective. Almost all the participants offer both group and individual feedback. They also estimated that feedback mostly has a motivational effect on their students. However, what is of concern and must be addressed is that the teachers observe anxiety among students when they receive feedback, and not only occasionally, but frequently. This can perhaps be linked with the answer to the second research question, which showed that students receive mostly corrective, immediate feedback, or that they do not have time to follow up on the feedback. Another aspect which should be looked at in more detail is teacher-student rapport when feedback is given and received, which if not positively uttered can cause anxiety for students. The English language teachers in this sample seem to be aware of the usefulness of feedback, and show an awareness of the need to include peer feedback into the assessment process, but are also cautious about this issue, as seen in those participants who did not have a clear opinion, indicating insecurity or perhaps lack of experience in carrying out peer assessment. Lastly, almost all of participants expressed the need to improve their competence in giving feedback. We conclude that more training, information, and opportunities for applying formative assessment in classroom practices are necessary. That implies introducing and practicing the principle of formative assessment in pre-service teacher education and targeted professional development that closely follows changes in the curriculum. This research showed that English language teachers have recognised the responsibility they have in carrying out effective assessment, including feedback not only in the assessment of learning approach, as is often the case, but in the other two approaches as well. It also revealed areas where teachers are lacking in confidence or otherwise insecure (corrective feedback, peer feedback, and communicating feedback to students). 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Yoshida, Reiko. 2010. “teachers’ choice and Learners’ Preference of corrective Feedback types.” Language Awareness 17 (1): 78–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/la429.0. 103ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg Pre-Service Teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning: A Study of Three Different Teacher Training Study Programmes in Slovenia ABStRAct It has been determined that beliefs about language learning are significant for the learning and teaching process, and that learners may differ in their beliefs towards learning a new language. Similarly, student-teachers of different subjects may differ in their beliefs about language learning. The main aim of this study was thus to investigate pre-service preschool teachers’, primary school teachers’, and special education teachers’ beliefs about foreign language learning in Slovenia. Three different areas were researched more closely: beliefs about foreign language aptitude, beliefs about the nature of learning and beliefs about foreign language motivations and expectations. The BALLI questionnaire was used to gather data, with responses provided by170 first-year students. The results show that despite attending different teacher training study programmes, students do not differ significantly in their beliefs about language learning; however, in comparison to other studies, the results imply that learners from different cultures see language learning differently. Keywords: language-learning beliefs; pre-service teacher training; primary school teachers; pre- school teachers; special education teachers Prepričanja bodočih učiteljev o učenju tujih jezikov: študija treh različnih študijskih programov za izobraževanje učiteljev v Sloveniji POvZEtEK Ugotovljeno je bilo, da so prepričanja o učenju jezikov odločilnega pomena za učenje in poučevanje in da se učenci lahko razlikujejo v svojih prepričanjih o učenju novega jezika. Podobno se lahko študenti z različnih pedagoških študijskih programov razlikujejo v svojih prepričanjih o učenju jezikov. glavni cilj te študije je bil raziskati prepričanja študentov predšolske vzgoje, razrednega pouka in specialno rehabilitacijske pedagogike o učenju tujih jezikov v Sloveniji. tri področja so bila natančneje raziskana, to so: prepričanja študentov o tujejezikovni učljivosti, naravi učenja ter motivacijah za učenje tujega jezika in pričakovanjih, ki iz tega izhajajo. v študiji je bil uporabljen vprašalnik BALLI. v raziskavi je sodelovalo 170 študentov prvega letnika. Rezultati kažejo, da se kljub obiskovanju različnih študijskih programov prepričanja študentov o učenju tujih jezikov statistično pomembno ne razlikujejo; a v primerjavi z drugimi študijami nakazujejo, da učeči se iz različnih kultur različno zaznavajo učenje tujih jezikov. Ključne besede: prepričanja o učenju (tujih) jezikov; izobraževanje prihodnjih učiteljev; (prihodnji) vzgojitelji; učitelji razrednega pouka; specialno rehabilitacijski pedagogi Darija Skubic, Mateja Dagarin Fojkar University of Ljubljana, Slovenia 2017, vol. 14 (2), 103-116(122) revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope doi: 10.4312/elope.14.2.103-116 UDc: 81'243:37.091.3(497.4) 104 Darija Skubic, Mateja Dagarin Fojkar Pre‑Service Teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning: A Study of Three Different ... Pre-Service Teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning: A Study of Three Different ... Teacher Training Study Programmes in Slovenia 1 Introduction Learner characteristics or individual characteristics, such as intelligence, language aptitude, motivation, and so on, play a significant role in language learning (Dörnyei 2003). Richardson (1996, 103) defined beliefs as “psychologically held understandings, premises, or propositions about the world that are felt to be true.” Wesely (2012) argued that this definition covers a wide range of beliefs, including those about the target community, language, and culture, in addition to those about the learning situation. gardner’s work on motivation (1985) and his development of the Attitude/Motivation test Battery (AMtB) has widely influenced the research on learner attitudes and beliefs about foreign language (henceforth: FL) learning. Wesely (2012) showed that beliefs about yourself as a learner, and attitudes to the language-learning process and speakers of a target language, affect the success of foreign language learning. Similarly, cochran, Mccallum, and Bell (2010) confirmed that attitudes about foreign language learning influence learning success, since positive attitudes increase foreign language exposure and the likelihood of engaging with opportunities to upgrade one’s knowledge, while negative attitudes can hinder learning achievements. Horwitz (1988) was amongst the pioneering researchers to investigate learner beliefs in more detail; she developed a detailed research instrument called BALLI (Beliefs About Language- Learning Inventory), which assesses learner beliefs in five major areas, i.e., learner beliefs about foreign language aptitude, the difficulty of language learning, the nature of language learning, learning and communication strategies, and motivation and expectations. The BALLI instrument has received some criticism, especially regarding its validity, because it was designed by language teachers and not learners themselves, as well as because of its division into different areas (Kuntz 1996); however, many researchers have evaluated this tool (among them truitt 1995; Peacock 2001; Nikitina and Furuoka 2006), and concluded that it is suitable for assessing learner beliefs. The instrument has been used in research studies in different countries, and the results of such works show that learner beliefs are context-specific. For example, Yavuz (2015), who explored the beliefs of turkish students of English, determined that there is still a significant number of students who think the grammar translation method is the most appropriate one for teaching languages, and that the use of the students’ mother tongue is most appropriate in early foreign language teaching. Sadeghi and Abdi (2015) collected data using the BALLI questionnaire and determined that Iranian intermediate and upper-intermediate students might have some beliefs that negatively affect their language learning (e.g., thinking that they should not be allowed to make mistakes at the beginning stages of learning). As stated by Richards and Lockhart (1994), beliefs can influence language learners’ motivation to learn, their expectations about learning and the strategies they choose when learning, but they are also important for future language teachers, because their beliefs have a significant impact on their classroom practice and teaching methodology. Peacock (2001) thus argued that future teachers should attempt to eliminate any 105ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg detrimental beliefs before they start to teach a foreign language, as if not then many learners could be negatively affected by these ideas. When teachers can identify their detrimental beliefs, then it is easier to reflect on and change at least some of them over a longer period of instruction. Özmen (2012) reported that some of the focal students’ beliefs changed during his four-year study, and he ascribed this to the students’ engagement in the teaching practicum, which had the greatest impact on the evolution of their beliefs, particularly during the last two years of the study. Similarly, Skela, Sešek and Zavašnik (2008) confirmed in their study that school based teaching practice is of key importance in shaping the future teachers of a foreign language. grijalva and Barajas’s longitudinal research (2013) showed that 40% of pre-service English language teachers’ beliefs changed over the period studied, whereas 60% remained the same. They assumed that these changes were due to the teaching practice courses, in which students experienced and reflected on teaching. However, some researchers, e.g., Peacock (2001) and tillema and Knoll (1997), have argued that most of students’ beliefs about learning stay unchanged throughout the training. Mattheoudakis (2007) noted that there is not enough information about the content of the programmes presented in the related studies, and that the quality of these programmes may vary significantly. teachers’ beliefs strongly influence their teaching behaviour, and guide teachers in the adoption of the strategies they apply to cope with the daily challenges of teaching, as well as influencing their teacher consciousness and teaching attitudes, methods and policies (Xu 2012). teachers should therefore be aware of their own beliefs, explore them and see how they shape their own ways of teaching. The three study groups chosen for the present research are going to work with pre-school and primary school children, when the children are still developing their knowledge of the world, social skills and beliefs about learning, and their teaching will therefore play an influential role in their lives. Furthermore, pre-school and primary school student-teachers might also become future teachers of English to young learners, and in this way influence children’s beliefs about foreign language learning in more depth. 2 The Study It has been determined that beliefs about language learning are important for the learning and teaching process, and that learners and teachers may have different attitudes towards learning a new language. Similarly, student-teachers of different subjects may differ in their beliefs about language learning. The main aim of this study was thus to investigate pre-service preschool teachers’, primary school teachers’, and special education teachers’ beliefs about foreign language learning in Slovenia. 2.1 Research Questions The research questions of this study were as follows: 1. What are students’ beliefs about foreign language aptitude? 2. Are the beliefs about foreign language aptitude different among students of preschool education, students of primary school education and students of special education? 3. What are students’ beliefs about the nature of language learning? 4. Are the beliefs about the nature of language learning different when comparing students of preschool education, students of primary school education, and students of special education? 106 Darija Skubic, Mateja Dagarin Fojkar Pre‑Service Teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning: A Study of Three Different ... 5. What are students’ beliefs about the motivations and expectations for foreign language learning? 6. Are the beliefs about motivations and expectations for foreign language learning different when observing students of preschool education, students of primary school education, and students of special education? 2.2 Research Instrument A slightly adapted BALLI questionnaire (Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory, Horwitz 1988) was used to collect data in this study. This had a Likert-scale format and learners were asked to choose among strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, and strongly disagree options for 32 items. One item (item 4) had the following options: very easy, easy, medium, difficult, very difficult; and there was one question (item 15) with closed response alternatives. The questionnaire was divided into the following five areas: foreign language aptitude (9 items), the difficulty of language learning (5 items), the nature of language learning (6 items), learning and communication strategies (8 items), and motivation and expectations (6 items). The questionnaire items were found to be highly reliable (cronbach’s α = .795). 2.3 Respondents and Data collection A total of 170 students participated in the study. Since we wanted to investigate whether students’ beliefs vary with the programme of study, we included students from Year 1 of preschool education, primary school education, and special education. The students were approximately 19 years old. The study included 57 (33.5%) students of preschool education, 82 (48.2%) students of primary school education and 31 (18.2%) students of special education. By the time of the study, they had completed approximately 1,000 hours of first foreign language learning, and many of them about 420 hours of second foreign language learning. The students were all studying at the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia in 2017. 2.4 Data Analysis After verifying that the data were free from errors, matrix analyses were conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics software. The data were controlled according to the assumptions of a normal distribution and homogeneity of variance. In view of the research questions, mainly descriptive (absolute frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation) procedures and statistical tests (one- way analysis of variance, post-hoc comparison − Hochberg’s gt2 test and games-Howell test) were applied. Partial eta-squared was calculated as a measure of effect size. 3 Results The results are presented in five sections according to the main research areas. The sections show the pre-service preschool teachers’, primary school teachers’, and special education teachers’ beliefs about foreign language aptitude (first section), difficulty of language learning (second section), nature of language learning (third section), learning and communication strategies (fourth section), and motivations and expectations (fifth section). 107ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg table 1. Descriptive statistics for foreign language aptitude. Item description Subject 51 4 3 2 1 M SD 1.2It is easier for children than adults to learn an FL. A3 41 11 3 0 2 4.56 .887 B 56 20 5 1 0 4.60 .664 c 20 9 2 0 0 4.58 .620 2. Some people have a special ability for learning FLs. A 32 24 0 1 0 4.53 .601 B 49 27 5 1 0 4.51 .671 c 17 12 2 0 0 4.48 .626 6. People from my country are good at learning FLs. A 1 19 29 6 2 3.19 .789 B 5 34 37 6 0 3.46 .723 c 3 21 6 1 0 3.84 .638 10. It is easier for someone who already speaks an FL to learn another one. A 8 15 23 10 1 3.33 .988 B 5 27 33 13 4 3.20 .949 c 2 11 12 6 0 3.29 .864 11. People who are good at maths or science are not good at learning FLs. A 3 4 9 19 22 2.07 1.147 B 3 8 14 24 33 2.07 1.142 c 0 1 5 15 10 1.90 .790 16. I have a special ability for learning FLs. A 3 10 17 18 9 2.65 1.110 B 1 9 33 26 13 2.50 .933 c 0 5 13 12 1 2.71 .783 19. Women are better than men at learning languages. A 0 0 19 12 26 1.88 .888 B 0 3 13 27 39 1.76 .854 c 0 1 7 9 14 1.84 .898 31. People who speak more than one language are very intelligent. A 3 26 18 8 2 3.35 .916 B 7 29 37 6 3 3.38 .884 c 0 12 14 5 0 3.23 .717 34. Everyone can learn to speak an FL. A 23 19 12 3 0 4.09 .912 B 39 25 9 8 1 4.13 1.039 c 8 16 7 0 0 4.03 .706 1 2 3 table 1 presents the pre-service preschool teachers’, primary school teachers’ and special education teachers’ beliefs about FL aptitude. The highest level of agreement is demonstrated with regard to the first item, with 68.82% of all respondents completely agreeing with the first statement on the relative ease of FL learning in childhood (M = 4.58). Further analysis showed that there is a statistically significant difference in the beliefs of students with regard to item 6, F (2, 176) = 7.888, p = .001, η2 = .086 for group A, group B, and group c, respectively. The effect size is medium. Post-hoc analyses using Hochberg’s gt2 test indicated that students in group c (M = 3.84, SD = .64) agreed with the item more than those in group B (M= 3.46, SD = .72) (p = .047) or group A (M = 3.19, SD = .79) (p < .001), with these latter two groups not differing significantly in this regard (p = .097). 1 5 = strongly agree, 4 = agree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 2 = disagree, 1 = strongly disagree 2 The items are numbered in the same manner as in the Horwitz BALLI questionnaire (1988) 3 A = students of preschool education, B = students of primary teacher education, c = students of special education 108 Darija Skubic, Mateja Dagarin Fojkar Pre‑Service Teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning: A Study of Three Different ... Similarly, more than one half of the respondents (57.64%) completely agreed with the second item, that some people have a special ability for learning FLs, and none of them (0.0%) completely disagreed with this statement. More than half of the respondents (56.07%) neither agreed nor disagreed regarding whether it is easier for someone who already speaks an FL to learn another one (M = 3.28). A total of 38.23% of all respondents completely disagreed with the statement that people who are good at maths or science are not good at learning FLs (item No. 11), with 34.11% disagreeing with the item (M = 2.04). The item about having a special ability for learning FLs gained a very low level of agreement (item No. 16), with 0.002% of all respondents completely agreeing with the statement and 0.02% agreeing, whereas the item that claimed women are better than men at learning languages (item No. 19) gained the lowest level of agreement, with none of the respondents (0.0%) completely agreeing with the item and almost half (46.47%) completely disagreeing with it (M = 1.81). A total of 40.58% of all the respondents neither agreed nor disagreed with the statement that people who speak more than one language are very intelligent (item No. 31), while only 2.94% of all respondents completely disagreed with this. Moreover, none of the students of special education disagreed with this item. Regarding the idea that everyone can learn to speak an FL (item No. 34); 41.17% of all respondents completely agreed, and only one person (0.58%) completely disagreed with this claim. table 2. Descriptive statistics for difficulty of language learning. Item description Subject 5 4 3 2 1 M SD 3. Some languages are easier than others. A 34 22 1 0 0 4.58 .533 B 42 32 7 0 1 4.39 .750 c 21 7 3 0 0 4.58 .672 4. The English language is4 A 1 12 31 12 1 3.00 .756 B 3 16 51 9 3 3.09 .773 c 0 10 16 5 0 3.16 .688 15. If someone spent one hour a day learning a language, how long would it take them to speak the language very well?5 A 6 31 17 1 2 3.67 .831 B 11 32 27 9 3 3.48 .984 c 5 17 8 1 0 3.84 .735 26. It is easier to speak than understand a foreign language. A 1 3 9 29 15 2.05 .895 B 0 5 11 34 32 1.87 .872 c 1 2 6 18 4 2.29 .902 35. It is easier to read and write English than to speak and understand it. A 4 8 17 19 9 2.63 1.128 B 6 10 23 29 14 2.57 1.133 c 0 3 15 11 2 2.61 .761 45 4 For item 4: 5 = very easy, 4 = easy, 3 = medium, 2 = difficult, 1 = very difficult 5 For item 15: 5 = less than a year, 4 = between 1 and 2 years, 3 = between 2 and 5 years, 4 = between 5 and 10 years, 5 = you cannot learn a language with one hour a day 109ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg table 2 presents the pre-service preschool teachers’, primary school teachers’ and special education teachers’ beliefs about the difficulty of language learning. More than half of all the respondents (57.06%) completely agreed with the statement that some languages are easier than others (item No. 3). Similarly, more than half (57.64%) stated that the English language is neither easy nor difficult to learn (item No .4); 47.05% agreed that if someone spent one hour a day learning a language, then it would take her/him between one and two years to speak the language very well (item No. 15); 47.64% of all respondents disagreed that it is easier to speak than understand a foreign language (item No. 26). Only 5.88% of all respondents completely disagreed that it is easier to read and write English than to speak and understand it (item No. 35). The highest level of agreement was for the third item (M = 4.49, S = .67), while item No. 26 gained the lowest level of agreement (M = 2.01, S = .89). table 3. Descriptive statistics for the nature of language learning. Item description Subject 5 4 3 2 1 M SD 8. It is necessary to learn about English-speaking cultures to speak English. A 1 13 25 13 5 2.86 .934 B 6 16 27 29 4 2.89 1.018 c 1 4 16 6 4 2.74 .965 12. It is best to learn English in an English- speaking country. A 28 18 8 1 2 4.21 .995 B 44 26 12 0 0 4.39 .733 c 12 15 2 2 0 4.19 .833 17. The most important part of learning a foreign language is learning new words. A 8 23 21 5 0 3.60 .842 B 11 29 29 10 3 3.43 .994 c 0 13 16 1 1 3.32 .702 24. The most important part of learning a foreign language is learning grammar. A 5 17 19 14 2 3.16 1.014 B 1 21 32 22 6 2.87 .926 c 0 6 16 7 2 2.84 .820 28. Learning a foreign language is different than learning other academic subjects. A 11 24 18 4 0 3.74 .856 B 31 42 9 0 0 4.27 .649 c 8 20 3 0 0 4.16 .583 29. The most important part of learning English is learning how to translate from my own language. A 7 14 29 4 3 3.32 .967 B 7 10 39 21 5 2.91 .984 c 0 4 14 12 1 2.68 .748 table 3 presents the pre-service preschool teachers’, primary school teachers’ and special education teachers’ beliefs about the nature of language learning. The highest level of agreement is demonstrated with regard to item No. 24 (M = 4.29, SD = .94), while item No. 8 gained the lowest level of agreement (M = 2.85, SD = .98). Only 4.70% of all respondents completely agreed that it is necessary to learn about English-speaking cultures to speak English (item No. 8), whereas almost half (49.41%) completely agreed that it is best to learn English in an English- speaking country (item No. 12); 38.82% of all respondents could not decide whether the most important part of learning a foreign language is learning new words (item No. 17); similarly, 110 Darija Skubic, Mateja Dagarin Fojkar Pre‑Service Teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning: A Study of Three Different ... 39.41% of all respondents could not decide whether the most important part of learning a foreign language is learning grammar (item No. 24). Half of the respondents (50.58%) agreed that learning a foreign language is different than learning other academic subjects (item No. 28). Further analysis showed that there is a statistically significant difference in the beliefs of students for item No. 28, with F (2, 176) = 9.597, p = .000, η2 = .103 for group A, group B, and group c, respectively, and the effect size is medium. Post-hoc analyses using the games-Howell test indicated that students in group c (M = 4.16, SD = .58) agreed with the item to a greater degree of statistical significance (p = .020) than the students in group A (M = 3.74, SD = .85). Statistical significance (p < .001) was also found in the responses to this item for group A (M = 3.74, SD = .85) and group B (M = 4.27, SD = .64), while the students in group B and group c did not differ significantly in this regard (p = .678). Almost half of the respondents could not decide whether the most important part of learning English is learning how to translate from their own language (item No. 29). Further analysis showed that there is a statistically significant difference in the beliefs of students for item No. 29, with F (2, 176) = 5.379, p = .005, η2 = .061 for group A, group B, and group c, respectively. The effect size is medium. Post-hoc analyses using the games-Howell test indicated that the students in group c (M = 2.68, SD = .75) agreed with the item (p = .008) more than those in group A (M = 3.32, SD = .97). Statistical significance (p < .042) was also found in the responses to this item for group A (M = 3.32, SD = .97) and group B (M = 2.91, SD = .98). However, the students in group B and group c did not differ significantly in this regard (p = .547). table 4. Descriptive statistics for learning and communication strategies. Item description Subject 5 4 3 2 1 M SD 7. It is important to speak English with excellent pronunciation. A 9 23 19 6 0 3.61 .881 B 20 35 17 9 1 3.78 .982 c 3 19 7 2 0 3.74 .729 9. You should not say anything in English until you can say it correctly. A 0 2 8 25 22 1.82 .805 B 1 2 2 27 50 1.50 .774 c 0 0 2 12 17 1.52 .626 13. I enjoy practicing English with the native English speakers I meet. A 14 14 15 11 3 3.44 1.210 B 24 25 22 9 2 3.73 1.078 c 8 12 9 2 0 3.84 .898 14. It is OK to guess if you don’t know a word in English. A 3 14 27 12 1 3.11 .859 B 7 20 38 12 5 3.15 .983 c 6 5 16 4 0 3.42 .958 18. It is important to repeat and practice a lot. A 33 17 6 1 0 4.44 .756 B 46 29 6 1 0 4.46 .688 c 10 18 3 0 0 4.23 .617 21. I feel shy when speaking English with other people. A 1 20 8 15 13 2.67 1.230 B 8 18 18 26 12 2.80 1.222 c 4 5 7 11 4 2.81 1.250 111ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg 23. If beginning students are allowed to make mistakes in English, it will be difficult for them to speak correctly later on. A 4 15 18 15 5 2.96 1.085 B 4 8 23 28 19 2.39 1.097 c 1 5 7 13 5 2.48 1.061 27. It is important to practice with tapes or cDs. A 14 25 14 4 0 3.86 .875 B 29 41 11 1 0 4.20 .710 c 3 21 6 1 0 3.84 .638 table 4 presents the pre-service preschool teachers’, primary school teachers’ and special education teachers’ beliefs about learning and communication strategies. The highest level of agreement was demonstrated with regard to item No. 18 (M = 4.41, SD = .70), while item No. 9 gained the lowest level of agreement (M = 1.61, SD = .77). Only one of the respondents (0.58%) completely disagreed with the statement that it is important to speak English with excellent pronunciation (item No. 7), whereas more than half (52.35%) completely disagreed that you should not say anything in English until you can say it correctly (item No. 9). Further analysis showed that there is a statistically significant difference in the beliefs of the students in group A, group B, and group c regarding item No. 9, F (2, 176) = 3.365, p = .037, η2 = .039. The effect size is small. Post-hoc analyses using the Hochberg’s gt2 test indicated that students in group c (M = 1.52, SD = .63) and group A (M = 1.82, SD = .81) (p = .197) did not differ significantly in agreeing with item No. 9, while statistical significance (p = .042) was found between the responses of the students in group B (M = 1.50, SD = .77) and group A (M = 1.82, SD = .81). A total of 2.94% of all respondents completely disagreed with item No. 13 (I enjoy practicing English with the native English speakers I meet.); similarly, 3.52% of all respondents completely disagreed with item No. 14 (It is OK to guess if you don’t know a word in English.); however, almost half (47.64%) of the respondents could decide regarding this item. In contrast, more than half the respondents (52.35%) completely agreed that it is important to repeat and practice a lot (item No. 18). Only 7.64% of the respondents completely agreed with item No. 21 (I feel shy speaking English with other people); similarly, only 5.29% of completely agreed with item No. 23 (If beginning students are allowed to make mistakes in English, it will be difficult for them to speak correctly later on.). None of the respondents (0.0%) disagreed that it is important to practice with tapes or cDs (item No. 27). Further analysis showed that there is a statistically significant difference in the beliefs of the students in group A, group B, and group c regarding item No. 27, F (2, 176) = 4.350, p = .014, η2 = .050. The effect size is small. Post-hoc analyses using the Hochberg’s gt2 test indicated that the students in group A (M = 2.96, SD = .81) agreed with the item (p = 0.033) more than those in group B (M = 2.39, SD = 1.09). The students in group c and group B did not differ significantly (p = .079) in this regard, nor did those in group c and group A (p = .999). table 5 presents the pre-service preschool teachers’, primary school teachers’ and special education teachers’ beliefs about motivations and expectations. The highest level of agreement is demonstrated with regard to item No. 32 (M = 4.62, SD = .63), while item No. 25 gained the lowest level of agreement (M = 3.56, SD = 1.02). 112 Darija Skubic, Mateja Dagarin Fojkar Pre‑Service Teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning: A Study of Three Different ... table 5. Descriptive statistics for motivations and expectations. Item description Subject 5 4 3 2 1 M SD 5. I believe I will learn to speak English very well. A 10 25 16 4 2 3.65 .973 B 11 47 22 2 0 3.82 .687 c 3 14 12 2 0 3.58 .765 20. People in my country feel it is important to speak English. A 14 22 16 2 3 3.74 1.044 B 25 35 17 5 0 3.98 .875 c 10 17 3 1 0 4.16 .735 25. I would like to learn English so that I can get to know native English speakers better. A 12 19 18 6 2 3.58 1.051 B 16 28 24 14 0 3.56 .995 c 5 14 7 3 2 3.55 1.091 30. If I learn to speak English very well, I will have better job opportunities. A 33 19 3 2 0 4.46 .758 B 58 21 2 1 0 4.66 .593 c 13 12 5 1 0 4.19 .833 32. I want to learn to speak English very well. A 35 15 7 0 0 4.49 .710 B 60 18 4 0 0 4.68 .564 c 24 4 3 0 0 4.68 .653 33. I would like to have English-speaking friends. A 33 11 9 4 0 4.28 .978 B 33 27 18 4 0 4.09 .905 c 13 12 3 3 0 4.13 .957 A total of 51.76% of all respondents agrees with item No. 5 (I believe I will learn to speak English very well.) Only 1.76% of all respondents completely disagree with item No. 20 (People in my country feel it is important to speak English.); similarly, only 2.35% of all respondents completely disagree with item No. 25 (I would like to learn English so that I can get to know native English speakers better.). None of the respondents (0.0%) completely disagrees that if she/he learns to speak English very well, she/he will have better job opportunities (item No. 30); 85% of all respondents completely agree that they want to speak English very well (item No. 32). None of the respondents (0.0%) completely disagree with item No. 33 (I would like to have English-speaking friends.). Further analysis showed that there is a statistically significant difference in the beliefs of students with regard to item No. 30, F (2, 176) = 5.206, p = .006, η2 = .059 for group A, group B, and group c. The effect size is small. Post-hoc analyses using the Hochberg’s gt2 test indicated that the students in group c (M = 4.19, SD = 0.83) agreed with the item (p = .018) more than those in group B (M = 4.66, SD = 0.59). The students in group A and group c (p = .319), and group B and group c (p = .214), did not differ significantly with regard to this item. 4 Discussion The present research demonstrates that Slovenian students of preschool education, students of primary school education, and students of special education mostly do not differ in their beliefs about FL aptitude. This can be attributed to their comparable cultural, social and school 113ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg backgrounds. A total of 68.82% of all the students completely agreed that it is easier for children than adults to learn an FL. Post-hoc analysis using the Hochberg’s gt2 test indicated that special education students (M = 3.84, SD = .64) agreed with the item more than primary education (M= 3.46, SD = .72) (p = .047) and preschool education students (M = 3.19, SD = .79) (p < .001) do, with the latter two groups not differing significantly on this item (p = .097). comparing the beliefs of the Slovenian students to those of students from other cultures, some significant differences can be observed. For example, 44% of the Slovenian students who took part in the survey strongly agreed or agreed that people who speak more than one language are very intelligent, compared to 76% of Iranian students (Sadeghi and Abdi 2015) and 64% of first-year students from Hong Kong (Peacock 2001). Interestingly, only 18% of experienced teachers in Peacock’s study (ibid.) had the same belief. These results might be of concern, as the student-teachers may blame a lack of intelligence for poor success in their learners when starting classroom work in a few years’ time. Regarding the nature of learning, 49% of the students in the present study strongly agreed or agreed that learning new words is the most important part of language learning, whereas as many as 82% of the Iranian students thought so (Sadeghi and Abdi 2015). Similarly, only 29% of this study’s Slovenian students strongly agreed or agreed with the statement that grammar is the most important part of language learning, whereas 60% of Iranian students (Sadeghi and Abdi 2015) and 52% of Hong Kong students believed so (Peacock 2001). The reason for this might be found in the traditionally grammar-focused ways of teaching that Asian students are still exposed to, whereas in Slovenian schools the prevailing approach to teaching an FL is the communicative one. If the student-teachers believe grammar is the most crucial part of learning, they may over- emphasise its role in their future teaching. As far as learning and communicative strategies are concerned, 64% of the Slovenian students strongly agreed or agreed that it is important to speak English with excellent pronunciation, compared to 90% of the Iranian students and 40% of the students from Hong Kong in Peacock (2001). These results might be connected to the different educational and FL contexts in the three countries. Nowadays, when there are so many varieties of international English, it is difficult to identify what “excellent” means in this context, although the key ingredient of a good pronunciation model should be intelligibility, especially since learners are more likely to communicate with other non-native speakers than with native speakers of English (see also Jenkins 2002). Half of the respondents (50.58%) agreed that learning a foreign language is different than learning other academic subjects (item No. 28). Post-hoc analyses using the games-Howell test indicated that special education students (M = 4.16, SD = .58) had greater agreement with this item (p = .020) than the preschool education students (M = 3.74, SD = .85). Statistical significance (p < .001) is also found between the responses of the preschool students (M = 3.74, SD = .85) and primary education students (M = 4.27, SD = .64). Moreover, the primary education students and special education students did not differ significantly in this regard (p = .678). Looking at other cultures, as many as 71% of the students from Hong Kong agreed with this item (Peacock 2001). Scholars have argued that L2 learning differs from learning other school subjects, because it is more “socially and culturally bound” (Dörnyei 2003, 4). Furthermore, you can learn a language across different dimensions and you can adapt it according to your own needs. The knowledge elements of a language are interconnected, and the knowledge one gains is broadened rather than built upon. However, there are certain elements of language learning that are very similar to learning other academic subjects. 114 Darija Skubic, Mateja Dagarin Fojkar Pre‑Service Teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning: A Study of Three Different ... More than half the respondents (52.35%) completely disagreed with item No. 9, stating that you should not say anything in English until you can say it correctly, in comparison with 73% of Iranian learners who strongly agreed or agreed with this statement (Sadeghi and Abdi 2015). Again, this can be attributed to the different ways of teaching the learners in these two countries have been exposed to. Statistical significance (p = .042) is found between the responses from the between primary education students (M = 1.50, SD = .77) and preschool education students (M = 1.82, SD = .81) for this item. Regarding students’ beliefs about motivations and expectations, 91% of all the respondents completely agreed or agreed with the item stating that if they learn to speak English very well, they will have better job opportunities. Post-hoc analyses using the Hochberg’s gt2 test indicated that special education students (M = 4.19, SD = 0.83) agreed with the item (p = .018) more than the primary education students (M = 4.66, SD = 0.59). The result is interesting, since primary school teachers are the ones who will most likely teach English, while the special education students will most likely not have to do this. If the primary school students decide to study English as well as other subjects (which they have an opportunity to do), their chances of getting a job at primary school are much higher. The results here can also be compared to those of other studies, e.g., 90% of the Iranian students believed that speaking English fluently will bring them better job opportunities (Sadeghi and Abdi 2015), and 90% of those from Hong Kong felt the same (Peacock 2001). Interestingly, regardless of their cultural backgrounds, the students in all three studies seem to agree that knowledge of English will help them in their careers. 5 Conclusion The present study attempted to identify the language-learning beliefs of Slovenian student- teachers, with those from three different study programmes being surveyed: preschool students, primary education students, and special education students. The results were presented in three sections according to the main research areas: language-learning aptitude, nature of language learning, and students’ motivations and expectations for language learning. Despite their different study programmes, the students did not differ significantly in their beliefs. This might stem from their similar cultural backgrounds and the corresponding teaching approaches of their primary and secondary foreign language educations, especially since the comparison that was made with students from other cultural backgrounds showed some differences in their beliefs. Since the students examined in the current work had only just started their studies, their beliefs might change over the course of these, as has been shown in previous research (e.g., Özmen 2012; grijalva and Barajas 2013), most likely through their teaching practice, school observations and self-reflection. It would also be worthwhile to compare their responses to those of experienced teachers. Moreover, the results of the present study might help language teachers to overcome some of the learners’ negative beliefs that have been highlighted in this work’s results, and to discuss the nature of foreign language learning more regularly and effectively with their learners. This is imperative, because the student-teachers included in the present study will be working with children, when they are still developing their self-esteem, learning strategies and beliefs about learning, and thus these future teachers will play a significant role in the children’s development. Furthermore, pre-school and primary school student-teachers have the possibility of becoming teachers of English to young learners, and will thus influence the children’s beliefs about foreign language learning through their own teaching attitudes and selections of FL teaching methods. 115ENgLISH LANgUAgE AND LItERAtURE tEAcHINg References cochran, Jeff L., R. 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List of Contributors 119 Lahoucine Aammari University of Sultan Moulay Slimane Bd Ibn Khaldoun, Beni-Mellal 23000, Morocco aammariilcs@hotmail.com Emmanuel Idowu Adeniyi Federal University Oye-Ekiti Oye-Are Road, Oye-Ekiti, Nigeria ayomercy2011@gmail.com Ivana Cindrić University of Zagreb, Faculty of teacher Education Savska cesta 77, 10000 Zagreb, croatia ivana.cindric@ufzg.hr Mateja Dagarin Fojkar University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Education Kardeljeva ploščad 16, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia mateja.dagarin@pef.uni-lj.si Ivo Fabijanić University of Zadar Obala kralja Petra Krešimira Iv/2, 23000 Zadar, croatia ivo.fabijanic@unizd.hr Marko Hladnik Utrecht University trans 10, 3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands mhladnik@gmail.com Alberto Lázaro University of Alcalá c/ trinidad 3, 28801 Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain alberto.lazaro@uah.es Snježana Pavić Popovača Primary School vinogradska ul. 15, 44317 Popovača, croatia snjezanapa@gmail.com Darija Skubic University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Education Kardeljeva ploščad 16, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia darija.skubic@pef.uni-lj.si LIST OF COnTRIBuTORS guIDELInES FOR COnTRIBuTORS ELOPE English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries ELOPE publishes original research articles, studies and essays that address matters pertaining to the English language, literature, teaching and translation. 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ELOPE Vol. 14, no. 2 (2017) Journal Editors Smiljana Komar, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Mojca Krevel, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Editorial Board Lisa Botshon, University of Maine at Augusta, United States of America; Michael Devine, Acadia University, canada; Dušan gabrovšek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; Michelle gadpaille, University of Maribor, Slovenia; Meta grosman, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; Adolphe Haberer, University of Lyon, France; Allan James, University of Klagenfurt, Austria; victor Kennedy, University of Maribor, Slovenia; Bernhard Kettemann, University of graz, Austria; J. Lachlan Mackenzie, vU University Amsterdam, Netherlands; tomaž Onič, University of Maribor, Slovenia; Roger D. 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The publication is free of charge. universal Decimal Classification (uDC) Kristina Pegan vičič Journal Design gašper Mrak Cover Marjan Pogačnik: Zimsko cvetje, 1994 7.6 x 10.0 cm; colour etching, deep relief Owner: National gallery, Ljubljana, Photo: Bojan Salaj, National gallery, Ljubljana Printed by Birografika Bori number of Copies 140 doi:10.4312/elope.14.2 Online ISSN: 2386-0316 Print ISSN: 1581-8918 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.