The aim of this paper is to investigate how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects domestic investment in the Republic of Croatia. More precisely, the general purpose of this study is to determine the impact of net inflow of foreign capital on domestic investment in order to gain a clearer picture about the sensitivity and efficiency of domestic investment. After parsing domestic investment and FDI in Croatia, according to Croatian Bureau of Statistics and the Croatian National Bank, a historical overview of their movement from 1995 to 2014 was analyzed. In the following an overview and comparison of studies from around the world which deal with similar topic was made. In the empirical part; domestic gross fixed capital formation, changes in domestic stocks, net FDI and GDP growth rate was used as variables. Quarterly time series data ranging from the Q1 2001 to Q4 2014 were processed with the subset VAR (vector autoregressive) econometric model. The results shows that FDI have negative influence on domestic investment in the Republic of Croatia with time lag.Keywords: foreign direct investment; gross investment; crowding out/in effect; subset VAR; investment efficiency (137 -160)

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Form our experience as a university professor, many language classrooms are not attentive to pronunciation and it is often neglected. The two major factors contributing to this situation are teachers’ inability to teach their students proper pronunciation (pronunciation does not exist in or is a minor part of school curricula or teachers themselves are unable to produce native or native-like pronunciation) and the linguistic barrier posed by the native language. For instance, students sometimes feel great discomfort if they have to express themselves in a foreign language. In case of Montenegro, certain English phonemes such as /θ/, classified as a voiceless dental fricative and /ð/, classified as a voiced dental fricative, when used in our language, represent the way a person with a speech sound disorder would speak. On the more positive note, our students, more and more, travel to different countries, which improves their ability to speak a foreign language fluently and attain a native-like accent. In this paper, we will deal with certain misconceptions about pronunciation and then our attention will turn to elements affecting the way pronunciation is learnt. Towards the end of our paper, we will consider what language learners need in terms of improving their pronunciation. This is of vital importance since pronunciation may be a great contributing factor, leading to an improved L2 perception.

In this paper, we will present our three-month-long study aimed at investigating the concept of relational language and mitigating devices and how such mitigating devices are used within the context of two-way mediated shop conversations. We will also see how relational language and mitigating devices help speakers establish and maintain good relationship. Our study results show that this relationship is maintained by the avoidance or reduction of unwelcome effects a speech act may have on others within a communication context. The communication context of this paper and the pertaining study are related to the recordings of agent-customer communications in English language. We will show some of the most representative examples found in our corpus and, through those examples, we will be able to see how agents of one telecommunication company in Montenegro1 use different mitigating devices in order to sell a product or a service, entice a customer, or resolve a potentially face-threatening, problematic or volatile situation.

In this paper, we will identify and discuss the notion of relational language. We will be able to see how high frequency chunks and words in the spoken corpora are tasked with pragmatic functions dealing with the speakerlistener relationship and the management of, in our case, two-way mediated shop conversations, specifically in terms of maintaining good relations. These frequent lexical items point to the extent to which speakers interact with each other on the interactive plane. The abovementioned notions will be applied to the analysis of the corpus, which consists of transcribed recordings of agentcustomer communications in English language. Those communications are related to different services owned by a telecommunication company present in Montenegro.