SILESIAN UNIVERSITY IN OPAVA FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE INSTITUTE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES SILESIAN STUDIES IN ENGLISH 2015 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 4th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES 14th – 15th September 2015 EDITED BY MARIE CRHOVÁ AND MICHAELA WEISS OPAVA 2016 PUBLISHER Silesian University in Opava Faculty of Philosophy and Science Institute of Foreign Languages Masarykova tř. 37 746 01 Opava REVIEWERS Doc. PhDr. Naděžda Kudrnáčová, CSc., Masaryk University, Brno Doc. Soňa Šnircová, Ph.D., Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice Mgr. Iveta Jusová, Ph.D., Carleton College, Minnesota EDITORS Mgr. Marie Crhová, Ph.D. PhDr. Michaela Weiss, Ph.D. CONFERENCE ORGANIZORS Mgr. Markéta Johnová, Ph.D. Mgr. Lucie Kučerová, Ph.D. PhDr. Veronika Portešová, Ph.D. FIRST EDITION Arrangement copyright © Marie Crhová, Michaela Weiss, 2016 Papers copyright © Martin Adam, Diana Adamová, Petr Anténe, Zuzana Buráková, Iwona Filipczak, Radek Glabazňa, Andrea Hoffmannová, Kateřina Hotová, Markéta Johnová, Pavel Kolář, Stanislav Kolář, Jana Kořínková, Lucie Kučerová, Gabriela Křepelková, René Kron, David Livingstone, Ilka Mindt, Ivona Mišterová, Jozef Pecina, Václav Řeřicha, Jan Suk, Alena Sukeníková All rights revert to the authors upon publication. ISBN 978-80-7510-204-1 CONTENTS Editors’ Note ..................................................................................................... 5 Marie Crhová and Michaela Weiss I. LINGUISTICS A Case Study in Verbs Operating in the Presentation and/or Quality Scale Respectively: Buzz and Seize .......................................................... …7 Martin Adam Small Words, Big Issues: Empatic Connotations of Selected Adverbs When Translating from Czech to English ………………………………..19 Václav Řeřicha, David Livingstone Czech-English Lexicography: A Short Account of Trends and Reliability Across Centuries ................................................................ 29 Pavel Kolář The diachronic development of 'COME TO V' ......................................... 38 Ilka Mindt Gendered Talk: Colour Lexicon on Interior Design Blogs ...................... 60 Markéta Johnová Construction of Humor in American Late Night Talk Show .................. 68 Lucie Kučerová French in English – A Brief History ............................................................ 80 René Kron Personal Pronouns in the Writing of Advanced Students of English......92 Jana Kořínková II. LITERATURE Academic Life as an Oxymoron: A Jewish American’s Way out of Harvard in Michael Blumenthal’s Weinstock Among the Dying ……… 101 Petr Anténe Arseholes of the Pedestrian Sublime: Forced Entertainment’s The Coming Storm after Deleuze & Guattari ............................................ 110 Jan Suk True Blood and Taboo – What would Freud Say? ................................. 121 Diana Adamová Politics of Hybridity in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown ............. 129 Radek Glabazňa Traveling to Europe to (Re)Discover Jewish Identity ............................ 140 Stanislav Kolář Say as You Think and Speak it from Your Souls: The Czech Academy Edition, its Proponents and Critics ....................................... 151 Ivona Mišterová “Hozir Put Daddy in the Meat Grinder”: EC’s Horror Comics in the Early 1950s ....................................................................................... 166 Jozef Pecina Obscure Characters in Cormac McCarthy’s .......................................... 173 Zuzana Buráková Of Worms and Insects – Metaphors of the HUman Condition in Selected John Updike’s Novels ........................................................... 182 Iwona Filipczak Female Characters in Hisaye Yamamoto’s Fiction ................................. 196 Kateřina Hotová The Postcolonial Caribbean Experience in the Novel Lucy ................... 204 Gabriela Křepelková Female Characters of Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns and Sarah Delijani’s Children of Jacarda Tree and Their Fight for Freedom...... 213 Andrea Hoffmannová Harley Quinn in Contemporary Superhero Comics: Feminist and Reader-Response Criticism of the New 52 ............................................... 225 Alena Sukeníková Contributors ………………………………………………………………..237 EDITORS’ NOTE Marie Crhová and Michaela Weiss The volume Silesian Studies in English 2015 presents selected papers from the 4th International Conference of English and American Studies Silesian Studies in English – SILSE 2015, which took place on 13th – 14th September 2015 at the Institute of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Philosophy and Science, Silesian University in Opava, the Czech Republic. As was the case with the preceding SILSE conferences, there was no prescribed theme of the contributions. Scholars were invited to present their latest research in the fields of Linguistics and Literature without being limited to a specific topic. The present volume thus reflects the current research trends in Central Europe, namely Germany, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. Following the structure of the conference, the current volume has been divided into two sections with 8 papers in the Linguistics section and 13 in the Literature section. The Chicago Manual of Style was chosen as the reference style for the proceedings; papers on linguistics use the author-date system, whilst the literary papers use footnotes. When it comes to electronic sources, the access dates are not provided, as all the links were checked by the editors to be fully functional at the time of publishing. To provide fast and easy aceess to the volume, it will be produced not only in print but also in PDF form on the Institute of Foreign Languages webpage. Similarly to previous years, the volume does not include all papers presented at the conference. While some participants did not meet the deadlines for submitting their contributions, others did not reach the required quality standard and their contributions were not accepted for publishing. All the papers published are full-length research articles. We would like to express our thanks to the Institute of Foreign Languages the reviewers, the organizers, and the participants, who created an excellent atmosphere and made the conference a memorable and successful event. I. LINGUISTICS A CASE STUDY IN VERBS OPERATING IN THE PRESENTATION AND/OR QUALITY SCALE RESPECTIVELY: BUZZ AND SEIZE Martin Adam ABSTRACT: The present, corpus-based paper sets out to explore the cardinal role of the English transitional verb within the sentence perspective. In the framework of Firbasian theory of FSP, sentences implement either Presentation or Quality Scale; many transitional verbs generally appear to be capable of acting within both the scales. The paper, being a pilot study of intended research, strives to examine the syntactic and semantic qualities of the verbs buzz and seize, and to show under what conditions they tend to operate in one of the dynamic semantic scales. Model sentences, extracted from the British National Corpus through Sketch Engine concordance, will be contrasted and discussed in terms of their presentational/qualitative features. KEYWORDS: FSP, scale, presentation, quality, verb, Sketch Engine, BNC 1. INTRODUCTION Recent research into FSP (viz. Dušková 2015, 256-68; Chamonikolasová et al. 2015; Adam 2013; 2014) has indicated that the syntactic-semantic characteristics of the English transitional verb plays a crucial role within the overall sentence perspective. In the framework of Firbasian theory of FSP, sentences implement either Presentation or Quality Scale (Firbas 1992, 66-9); it follows that – under favourable conditions – most verbs generally appear to be capable of acting within both the dynamic semantic scales. It has become clear, however, that certain verbs tend to operate in one of the scales, mainly thanks to their syntactic and semantic properties – e.g., the verb qualities related to (in)transitivity, complementation etc. (e.g., Adam 2011; 2013). The current research findings have shown that the most promising step at this point will be a case analysis of individual verbs that appeared in both the scales within the corpora that were under discussion in previous studies (see esp. Adam 2013). It is believed that examining their syntactic-semantic properties one by one may shed light not only on potential common denominators but also functional differences. 2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS The present corpus-based paper offers a pilot case study of intended large-scale research that sets off to examine the syntactic and semantic qualities of the verbs buzz and seize, and to show under what conditions they tend to operate in one of the dynamic semantic scales. Model sentences, extracted from British National 7 Corpus (henceforward BNC)1 through SKETCH ENGINE concordance, will be contrasted and discussed in terms of their presentational / qualitative features. It should be noted at this point that so far FSP studies devoted to the nature of the English transitional verb typically seem to have been preoccupied with the investigation of verbs operating within Presentation and Quality Scales separately; if the FSP tendencies of the verbs were studied in a common context, it happened in connection to borderline cases and the questions of interpretative potentiality (Adam 2013, 105-109; 2014). Therefore, the verbs selected for the sake of this study represent such items that appeared in both the scales in the previously investigated corpora, and, at the same time, each of them manifested a traceable inclination to occur predominantly