This study sheds light on the vocabulary complexity of various physics genres and how it affects reading and listening comprehension of the science of physics. We analysed the vocabulary frequency profile of seven physics genres: research articles, textbooks, lectures, magazines, popular books, TV documentaries and TED talks, to determine the presence of general-purpose, academic and technical vocabulary in them, as well as their vocabulary level and variation. The main research question was whether the vocabulary level of these genres could pose an impediment to typical native and non-native speakers of English in terms of their reading/listening comprehension, and, in general, how accessible these genres are vocabulary-wise. The results suggest that typical native speakers will struggle reading physics research and magazine articles, whereas typical non-native speakers will not read/listen to any of the genres at an optimal level, but will be able to read/listen to four of them at an acceptable level.

The paper explores the lexical profile of graduation theses written by the students at the University of Montenegro and compares it against that of BA theses authored by native speakers of American English. We study their lexical level (LFP method), lexical variation (sTTR method), and share of academic vocabulary according to the New Academic Word List (Browne, Culligan and Philliphs). We depart from the assumption that L2 academic writing is less complex vocabulary-wise and aim to determine how different it is and where the lexical differences may lie, so that pedagogical recommendations can be made. The results show that the Montenegrin theses are readable at 4,000 words, which means that B2 learners (according to CEFR) can read them at a reasonable level. In contrast, the theses written by native speakers can be read at 7,000 words, i.e. only by those commanding good C levels. As this is in line with our expectations, we conclude that the Montenegrin theses display a sufficient vocabulary size. Since the students still underuse academic vocabulary, we recommend that more emphasis should be placed on it in the course of their studies.

In this paper, we examine the lexical profile of literary academic articles with a view to determining how they differ from research articles in other disciplines and how the vocabulary level and complexity affect reading comprehension, particularly for non-native speakers of English. For this purpose, a corpus of 110 literary articles from reputable journals was compiled and compared against two corpora featuring the same number of articles: one consisting of research articles from Science, Technology and Medicine (STM), and the other comprising research articles from social sciences and other humanities. The results reveal that the lexical profile of literary academic papers is, as expected, more similar to social sciences and other humanities than to the STM field when it comes to the coverage of general-purpose vocabulary, vocabulary level and vocabulary diversity. Despite the lexical similarities to social sciences and other humanities, the vocabulary of literary academic papers is somewhat more complex and diverse than that found in them. The largest differences were noted with respect to the level of academic vocabulary, whose use is much sparser in literary studies than in all other fields. The pedagogical implications include advocating for refraining from reading literary academic articles earlier than postgraduate studies for non-native-speakers of English (with some exceptions), as their vocabulary level will generally be insufficient for those purposes. We also point to the limited value of teaching academic vocabulary to students of literary studies.

Summary Antonomasia implies two opposing semantic mechanisms: the replacement of a proper name by an appellative, epithet or periphrasis (e. g. the Iron Lady standing for Margaret Thatcher), or the attribution of a proper name to an appellative or a set of certain personality traits (e. g. a Penelope standing for a faithful, devoted wife). The aim of this paper is to show that studying antonomasia as a figure of speech driven by a cognitive metonymic and metaphoric mechanism can contribute to revealing how women are conceptualised and consequently talked about. We do so by analysing figurative antonomasia in a dataset of 307 examples extracted from Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian (BCMS) webpages, although the findings are generisable to other languages as well. We show that antonomasia is frequently based on entrenched stereotypes about women and that in the collective consciousness of the BCMS speakers women are often conceptualised as (sexual) objects, typically valued by aesthetic criteria, as well as in relation to their possession of certain stereotypical female traits (self-sacrifice or subordination to others, excessive emotion but also cruelty, manipulativeness, showiness, talkativeness, etc.). In addition, the analysis also revealed that a woman is principally identified through her relations with other beings (as a mother, sister, wife or lover). Our study thus confirms that studying antonomasia within gender and language studies is a goal well worth pursuing.

This paper studies how readers respond to a counterfactual request inviting them to imagine themselves in the shoes of an immigrant in a corpus of online reader comments to a Yahoo article on Latino immigration. We initially considered 7,000 comments and for our corpus and analysis selected those in which the commenters perform a deictic shift, i.e. assume the deictic center of the immigrant using the first-person pronoun I and the adjective my, which totalled to 452 comments. The discourse of the comments, however, turned out to be very moralizing – i.e. while managing to assume the spatial and the temporal position of the immigrants, they refused to share the same moral grounds as them, which resulted in a series of I would… and I would never… propositions, which frame the commenters as vastly morally superior to the immigrants. The commenters occupy the legality, good parenting, patriotism and gratitude moral high grounds and often revert to moral grandstanding.