9
FOREWORD
This special issue of Linguistica is dedicated to the late Professor Rastislav Šuštaršič, 
who spent most of his career in the English Department at the Faculty of Arts, Univer-
sity of Ljubljana, researching and teaching English phonetics and phonology. Rastko 
was an inspired teacher, trusted colleague, and dear friend. His loss was felt by many – 
the guest editors of this volume were deeply moved by the response to the call for 
papers published for this issue. This is also reflected in the number and variety of the 
contributions that were submitted in his memory. 
The special issue opens with a section on Professor Šuštaršič’s life and work, as 
presented by Smiljana Komar (“Professor Rastislav Šuštaršič (24 October 1953 – 
2 March 2014”)), Vesna Požgaj Hadži and Tatjana Balažic Bulc (“Rastislav Šuštaršič 
and Current Issues of Standard Slovene Language”), and Kristina Pegan Vičič (“Ras-
tislav Šuštaršič: Bibliography”). The introductory section is followed by a selection of 
twenty-three articles that, in various ways, mirror Professor Šuštaršič’s academic inter-
ests. They encompass works on segmental phonetics, prosody, teaching of pronuncia-
tion, phonology, dialectal variation, lexicography, and speech audiometry. The papers 
in the volume are arranged in alphabetical order by author, although they could also be 
grouped by their content. 
Five authors present their work on segmental phonetics. Biljana Čubrović writes 
about “The Acoustic Characteristics of Non-native American English Vowels” in native 
speakers of Serbian who live in the United States. Damir Horga (“The Influence of the 
Assimilation Operator, Speech Rate and Linguistic Boundary on the Production of /z/ 
in Croatian”) analyses the coarticulation of Croatian /z/ with /s/, /z/, /š/ and /ž/ in con-
nected text. Smiljana Komar’s “The Relationship between the Perception and Production 
of Four General British Vowels by Slovene University Students of English” presents 
a production study examining the influence of orthography and phonemic transcription 
on the production of GB vowels. A treatise on the bath words is presented by Inger M. 
Mees and Christina Høøck Osorno in their contribution “The Complexity of bath Words 
in Cardiff English” – the authors examine this issue in terms of the speakers’ social class 
and age/time differentiation. Finally, Brian Mott contributes a discussion on the different 
approaches to defining the syllable (“Approaches to the Syllable: An Assessment”).
Prosody and prosody-related phenomena are the focus of six articles. In the article “Un-
ruly Intonation” by Michael Ashby and Patricia Ashby, the value of the rules concerning 
intonation for English learners is re-examined. Damjan Huber explores the characteristics 
of sentence stress in the speech of politicians (“Sentence Stress in Slovene Media Speech”). 
In the article titled “Prosody and Paralanguage in Speech and the Social Media: The Vocal 
and Graphic Realisation of Affective Meaning,” Alan James uses corpora to present how 
prosodic and paralinguistic features are mirrored in the ‘graphic’ modality of text messag-
ing and microblogging. A contrastive analysis of English and Slovenian adjectives is tack-
led by Monika Kavalir, who investigates the differences in the prosody of adjectival struc-
tures (“Prosody and Absolute vs. Relative Uses of English and Slovene Adjectives”). How 
prosody can become a significant part of the paralinguistic information in conversation is 
Linguistica_2017_FINAL.indd   9 12.3.2018   13:08:18
10
explored by Barbara Pihler Ciglič in her article “The Role of Prosody in the Expression of 
Irony in Spanish.” Another facet of prosody is addressed by Andrej Stopar, who in his arti-
cle “The Prosody of Focus: Non-Contrastive, Contrastive and Verum Focus in Slovenian, 
English and Russian” discusses the intonation contours of different types of focus.
The seven contributions on the value of teaching pronunciation include the work by 
Gwen Brekelmans, who, in her article “The Value of Phonetics and Pronunciation Teach-
ing for Advanced Learners of English,” looks into English pronunciation stability and the 
problematic pronunciation features for Dutch learners. Eva Estebas-Vilaplana contributed 
the article “The Teaching and Learning of L2 English Intonation in a Distance Education 
Environment: TL_ToBI vs. the Traditional Models,” in which she presents how using 
an adapted version of ToBI can be beneficial in a distance learning context. Nataša Hirci 
embarks on a quest to identify Slovenian trainee translators’ views on the pronunciation of 
English, in an article titled “Investigating Trainee Translators’ Views on the Pronunciation 
of English: A Slovene Perspective.” Various aspects of pronunciation teaching in an L2 
classroom are also addressed in the article “Teaching pronunciation in Spanish/FL A1–B2 
Textbooks” by Marjana Šifrar Kalan, who analyses a set of pronunciation tasks in Spanish 
textbooks. The suitability of similar tasks in French textbooks is examined by Meta Lah 
in her contribution “‘You Have a Bit of an Accent’ – Teaching Pronunciation to Slove-
nian Learners of French as a Foreign Language.” The teaching of pronunciation is also 
the focus of the contribution co-authored by Blažka Müller Pograjc and Jasmina Markič, 
“Nasal Vowels and Diphthongs in European Portuguese: A Problem for Slovene Speak-
ers,” in which the authors reveal how L1/L2 differences can affect the production of nasal 
vowels. The importance of long-term, systematic and intensive phonological competence 
development programmes is also highlighted in Anja Zorman’s contribution “Phonologi-
cal Competence Development in Italian as Second/Foreign Language.”
The topics covered by the remaining five articles in the special issue are varied. Jasmi-
na Markič contributes the text “Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Colombian Span-
ish,” which presents some phonetic and phonological characteristics of Colombian Span-
ish. Tatjana Marvin, Jure Derganc and Saba Battelino present a treatment of the Freiburg 
word test for Slovenian used in speech audiometry (“Adapting the Freiburg Monosyllabic 
Word Test for Slovenian”). Katarina Podbevšek’s “The Expressive Potential in a Dramat-
ic Text: Brecht’s A Respectable Wedding” discusses the expression of speech intention in 
plays. Sonia Vaupot’s contribution “Phonetic and Phonological Characteristics of French 
Spoken in Europe and Quebec” highlights some features of French in Quebec. Finally, in 
their article “A Brief Historical Overview of Pronunciations of  English in Dictionaries” 
Jack Windsor Lewis and Inger M. Mees present on overview of the evolution of pronun-
ciation in British English dictionaries.
The guest editors would like to thank the authors for their contributions and the re-
viewers for their dedicated help in reviewing and improving the papers. We would also 
like to express our gratitude to the journal editor, the publisher and the proof-readers 
for their help and patience.
Smiljana Komar and Andrej Stopar
Guest Editors of Linguistica 57
Linguistica_2017_FINAL.indd   10 12.3.2018   13:08:18