SummaryIn the mid-19th century Vuk Stefanović Karadžić collected folk tales in the broader South-Slavic region and published them in a collection titled Serbian Folk Tales. Folk fairy tales make the major part of the collection. In this paper, the authors determine the folk fairy tale structure according to the methodology proposed by Vladimir Propp in the Morphology of the Folktale. The aim of the paper is to investigate, whether these fairy tales can be fully described using Propp’s Morphology. Propp’s model of the meta-folk fairy tale was developed inductively based on a rich, comprehensive, yet limited, corpus of Russian folk fairy tales, which opens up space for further testing of the proposed model.The hypothesis was set that the analyzed folk fairy tales completely conform to the plot structure of the meta-folk fairy tale with a maximum of 31 functions as proposed by Propp. The hypothesis is grounded in: 1. the time when the folktales were collected (mid-19th century, the same time as the Russian collection analyzed by Propp) and 2. the similarity of the South Slavic peoples with the peoples of the Slavic East.However, after categorial and structural analyses of the corpus were performed, it was clear that the hypothesis could not be accepted in its entirety. In the analyzed folk fairy tales, no new functions were found as compared to the 31 functions identified by Propp, but some of these functions were altered as compared to those to be expected in folk tales. This alteration occurred not only regarding the changed order of functions, assimilation and cases of dual morphological meanings of functions, but also in terms of the fantastic category of the marvelous, which is the core feature of the fairy tale genre, whose nature was changed. The study identified the rationalization of some magical motifs, which partially mitigates the quality of the miraculous in the fairy tale and found out that, in some cases, the marvelous was mitigated and “shifted” towards the (merely) fantastic. This was achieved by introducing oniric elements. One of the important conclusions of our study of the fairy tale is that these fairy tales, although labeled as folk tales, feature significant authorial intervention.

Commodification of women in a society can be reflected in its language and its conceptual metaphors. Thus, conceptualising women as possessions in the western Balkans has engendered the conceptual metaphor WOMAN IS A CAR, which the present research has shown to be widely-spread and commonly used among the speakers of BCMS (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian). The study has been carried out on excerpts from online discourse, mostly fora and readers’ comments on news portals, whereby the authors have extrapolated the extensions (i.e. the submetaphors of the most general metaphor studied – WOMAN IS A CAR). Bearing in mind that conceptual metaphors form mental frames in the minds of individuals which are difficult to dispel and which operate at subconscious levels, the implication is that the significant presence of the metaphor WOMAN IS A CAR in BCMS suggests that its speakers see women as objects to be disposed of by their owners (men); that is, that women continue to occupy a lower position in the societies of the western Balkans. Metaphors such as this one support and perpetuate such social relationships, which is why it is of great significance to uncover their underlying discourse mechanisms.

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.

After the war in ex-Yugoslavia subsided in the mid-90s, another war – this time a virtual one – broke out: the war of Balkan apologies. It refers to a decade-long series of apologies for participation in the conflict and the crimes committed during the war, as well as demanding the other parties to counter-apologise. The paper analyses all 19 apologies delivered by the top-ranking statesmen for their country’s/nation’s role in the conflict, which were delivered between 2000 and 2010. Their content is critically examined and wider social and political context is taken into account. The analysis points to the strengths and weaknesses of the apologies issued and dwells on their functions and the factors that have shaped them. The conclusion is that although the apologies are lacking in a number of ways, both contents-wise and regarding the manner they were delivered in, they might have been beneficial and could have had a role in reconciliating the ghosts of the past, present and future.

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.