Over the past few decades the interest in communication apprehension has increased among researchers and teachers in the field of second/foreign language acquisition (SLA/FLA).The present paper is set between the macro perspective of the social-psychological period -by giving a general view of communication apprehension (CA) -and the situation-specific period -by taking into consideration the immediate educational context.The paper focuses on the phenomenon of communication apprehension among the Croatian university level students in a foreign language classroom setting.In particular, it investigates if there is a difference in the total level of communication apprehension between undergraduate and graduate students of English Language and Literature.Furthermore, it explores whether there is a relationship between different aspects of communication apprehension and the total level of communication apprehension and which background factor is the best predictor of communication apprehension among the students.The first part of the paper brings a theoretical background of the main concepts in this research, whereas the second part of the paper reports on the research itself.Two sets of instruments, questionnaires completed by the students and in-depth interviews conducted among the teachers, were used for the purpose of this study.The results show that the year of study is not a significant predictor of the communication apprehension level which students experience.Among all variables included in the analysis, the only significant predictors of communication apprehension are evaluations.

Over the past few decades the interest in communication apprehension has increased among researchers and teachers in the field of second/foreign language acquisition (SLA/FLA).The present paper is set between the macro perspective of the social-psychological period - by giving a general view of communication apprehension (CA) - and the situation-specific period - by taking into consideration the immediate educational context.The paper focuses on the phenomenon of communication apprehension among the Croatian university level students in a foreign language classroom setting.In particular, it investigates if there is a difference in the total level of communication apprehension between undergraduate and graduate students of English Language and Literature.Furthermore, it explores whether there is a relationship between different aspects of communication apprehension and the total level of communication apprehension and which background factor is the best predictor of communication apprehension among the students.The first part of the paper brings a theoretical background of the main concepts in this research, whereas the second part of the paper reports on the research itself.Two sets of instruments, questionnaires completed by the students and in-depth interviews conducted among the teachers, were used for the purpose of this study.The results show that the year of study is not a significant predictor of the communication apprehension level which students experience.Among all variables included in the analysis, the only significant predictors of communication apprehension are evaluations.

No abstract

In English and in many other European languages, Croatian included, it is quite common to use colour terms as an indicator of different emotions. When we talk about colour and humans, we areactually referring to the colour of their skin, more precisely their face.The main goal of this study is to investigate the correlation between the primary colour terms in collocational units and their corresponding emotions in English and Croatian. Since most of the current research on emotion concepts has focused on English, we would like to provide further evidence from Croatian expressions of emotions. A cross-linguistic corpus-based analysis of the two language corpora (the British National Corpus and the Croatian National Corpus) in the first part of the paper should offer a better insight into the salience of basic emotion categories in reference to basic colour categories. The second part of the paper investigates the motivation behind some of the linguistic expressions within the framework of cognitive linguistics. Despite the obvious cross-linguistic differences as to the system of preference by which each language links colours and emotions, some systematic patterns, due to their motivational force, are likely to appear in both languages under study.

In the paper we analyse humorous modified proverbs in light of the theory of conceptual integration. Unlike traditional proverbs, which teach us something and elucidate some aspects of human life, modified proverbs are here primarily to entertain us. The theory of conceptual integration is particularly suitable for the interpretation of modified proverbs since they present novel structures that are not part of our mental lexicon and which we need to interpret online in dynamic meaning construction. Our examples of humorous modified proverbs show that although jokes are verbalised in the form of proverbs, the humour is derived from the same mechanisms that are employed in other types of verbal humour: puns, play on words, metonymies, elements of surprise, exploitation of taboos, etc. The evidence for this is found in the fact that those modified proverbs that employ only some of these elements, or do not employ any of them, are found to be less humorous or not humorous at all.