Brno Studies in English

Types and functions of reporting verbs in English and Czech-medium master's thesis literature review sections

Martina Jarkovská, Petra Jarkovská — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This study examines the types and functions of reporting verbs (RVs) in L2 undergraduate academic writing and elucidates first language (L1) academic proficiency's impact on verb choice. The data were collected from literature review sections of English and Czech-medium master's theses authored by economics students whose first language is Czech. The study combined corpus-based and contrastive approaches. RVs were classified based on their discourse functions, and tense and voice grammatical categories were identified. Findings indicate that a weaker academic proficiency in the native language may lead to a reduced capacity to utilize rhetorical devices and express one's stance effectively in L2 English learner writing. Limited academic proficiency in L2 English-medium theses was suggested by a restricted vocabulary of RVs and inconsistent use of grammatical patterns. Both L2 English and L1 Czech-medium theses displayed a notable tendency to use non-committal verbs, avoiding making strong textual judgments.

Personality traits and the use of assertive and directive illocutionary acts during English task-based interaction

Shelby Miller — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This study investigates how individual personality traits (PTs), measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), influence the production of assertive and directive illocutionary acts (IAs) in American English using speech act theory. Personality traits shape language use, yet analyses often focus on lexical or semantic features, which decontextualize language from pragmatic meaning. To address this gap, 32 native English speakers were recorded solving a Tetris-like puzzle in pairs and then completed an MBTI assessment. Their speech was analyzed for assertive and directive IAs. Results show significant associations between traits and IA production: judging types frequently produced stating IAs; extraverts more often produced requests for information IAs; and extraversion, sensing, and feeling traits correlated with informing IAs. These findings offer new insight into how personality shapes pragmatic use in American English, contributing to a broader understanding of variation among native English speakers' communicative practices.

From "baby tuckoo" to "eternal imagination" : a portrait of Stephen Dedalus through corpus stylistics

Mahmoud Reza Ghorban Sabbagh, Morteza Yazdanjoo — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This interdisciplinary study draws on digital humanities to address the understudied interplay between the discursive creation of fictional character and quantitative stylistic devices in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It specifically utilizes Michaela Mahlberg's contribution to the field of corpus stylistics to pinpoint the role of textual patterns in mirroring Stephen Dedalus' dynamic identity throughout the novel. In the first step, Paul Rayson's webbased Wmatrix is used to identify the novel's "key semantic domains" based on the written sub-corpus of the British National Corpus (BNC) which provides a roadmap for examining their materialization throughout the novel. In the second step, the novel itself is treated as a reference corpus on the basis of which each chapter's key semantic domains are pinpointed. This study posits that in each chapter of the novel Joyce employs an idiosyncratic use of language, which renders it an exemplar Bildungsroman, both structurally and stylistically.

Synchronization in English-to-Persian dubbing : assessing the dubbing quality of the film The Green Mile

Saleh Sanatifar, Parvin Javedsokhan — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The success of dubbed films depends on the quality of synchronization to a great extent. Failure to meet synchronization may lead target viewers to dislike or reject the dubbed product for being unnatural or unfaithful. Thus, dubbing translators often face the challenge of achieving synchronization. This becomes even more challenging in audiovisual translation, particularly when the source and target languages are categorically and structurally different. A case in point is the English and Persian language pair. Using Chaume's (2008) synchronization framework and Chaume's (2007) dubbing quality standards, this article intends to assess the synchronization quality and techniques used by the dubbing translators to tackle this challenge in the Persian dubs of the English-language film The Green Mile. The findings indicated that the selected film had acceptable synchronization, and the dubbing translators performed well. The findings further reveal that to achieve lip-sync, the dubbing translators use repetition, word order shift, and substitution techniques more frequently, and to achieve isochrony, they use reduction.

Rewriting Joyce's Dubliners for the 21st century : Michèle Forbes' "Clay" and Paul Murray's "A Painful Case"

Petr Anténe — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This article compares two of James Joyce's stories from Dubliners (1914), "Clay" and "A Painful Case," with their rewritings by Michèle Forbes and Paul Murray in Dubliners 100: Fifteen New Stories Inspired by the Original (2014). Besides setting the rewritings in contemporary Dublin, Forbes and Murray change the gender of some characters. While in Joyce's "Clay," the protagonist is an unmarried middle-aged woman, Forbes' version features an overweight single young man. In Murray's "A Painful Case," the gender of the protagonist, James Duffy, stays the same as in Joyce; however, instead of Duffy's close relationship with a married woman, the story focuses on his friendship with a monk who is revealed to be a closeted gay. In turn, Forbes' and Murray's rewritings update the portrayal of diverse members of Irish society – solitary women and men of various ages, while including more explicitly than Joyce those of homosexual orientation.

The rural social divide in Edwardian detective fiction

Paul Melia — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

When the Victorian era became the twentieth century, a process of transformation was evident in the popular genre of detective fiction, especially in the depiction of different social classes. Essentially, one view is of the upper classes and their lifestyle as a prerequisite for the preservation of what was most valuable in Britain, while the rest of the population, lesser in various ways, show the deference due to their betters. In contrast, other writers, to a greater or lesser extent, portray the aristocracy and landed gentry as corrupted and their less fortunate neighbours as victims. For all the writers, their stories set in the countryside present a world where alternative paradigms and social mobility are unreal expectations. Although these aspects are of considerable relevance to an understanding of the era, from my reading, critics routinely choose either to barely acknowledge or wholly ignore depictions of social class in crime fiction from this era, accepted as so natural an aspect it is unworthy of analysis.

Biblical allegory and the criticism of Britain's WWI politicians and elderly civilians in Siegfried Sassoon's 'Ancient History'

Goran Petrović — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This article examines Siegfried Sassoon's poem "Ancient History" by approaching it as an allegorical anti-war poem loosely based on the story of Cain and Abel from the Old Testament. The article explores the ironical and critical potential of this poem, analyzing the way in which it presents the grief felt by a father who has lost both of his sons. Adam, the grieving father, is a metaphor for WWI politicians and elderly civilians, while the dead Cain and Abel are metaphors for WWI young soldiers. The poem is considered in the context of Sassoon's declaration against the war of July 1917, and this, anti-war approach to this poem makes it somewhat original as, in scholarship, "Ancient History" has so far mainly been seen as an allegory for Sassoon's internal struggle between his soldierly and his poetic spirit. Among other things, this article also stresses that "Ancient History" defied the atmosphere of enthusiasm for the war, prevalent in Britain at the time, by means of the same tool that was used by the propagandists to nourish it – namely, religion.

Profiling contemporary TV crime drama's special agents : the Byronic detective in NCIS and Criminal Minds

Sara Pini — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This essay examines the main special agents of two contemporary TV crime dramas, NCIS (2003–ongoing) and Criminal Minds (2005–ongoing), claiming that they can be considered re-elaborations of the Byronic hero. In these TV series, the traditional literary figure combines traits of the classic Holmes-style detective and the hard-boiled private eye; thus, the resulting character is defined by using the neologism 'Byronic detective'. To contextualize Byronic detectives, the essay provides a discussion on the main characteristics of the Byronic hero and his enduring remodeling as well as an outline of the inherent mobility of crime fiction as a genre, which well matches the ongoing vitality of the Byronic icon. Special attention is given to the return of emotions in recent crime fiction because these are a core feature of Byronic detectives, given that they tend to sacrifice family relationships to do their job at their best.

Function of storytelling acts in Virginia Woolf's The Waves

Naghmeh Varghaiyan — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This paper explores the politics of storytelling in Virginia Woolf's The Waves to show how stories and acts of storytelling push back against the characters' absurd and receding sense of annihilation. Storytelling in The Waves is presented as a unifying narrative element as well as a meaning-giving tool. Despite their vanishing sense of identity and disintegrating relationships, the six narrator-characters in The Waves desire to maintain their connection to their environment through the narrativization act of their experiences. Storytelling, in particular, helps Bernard to battle the annihilating force of death. His acts of storytelling not only foster a sense of connection among individuals and with their environment but also safeguard the preservation of their identities. By narrating everyday moments early on and recalling memories later, Bernard attempts to impose a cohesive structure on his identity, despite its inherent fragmentation and instability.

[Seoane, Elena; Sanchez, M. G.; Loureiro-Porto, Lucía; Suárez-Gómez, Cristina (eds). Gibraltarians and their language: 22 linguistic biographies]

Isabel Alonso-Breto — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Reviewed work:

Seoane, Elena; Sanchez, M. G.; Loureiro-Porto, Lucía; Suárez-Gómez, Cristina (eds). Gibraltarians and their language: 22 linguistic biographies. Vigo: Universidade de Vigo, Servizo de Publicacións, 2024. 182 pp. Miscelánea: Serie de Textos Misceláneos. ISBN 978-84-1188-012-1.

[Watkins, Stephen. Shakespeare and the Restoration repertory]

Filip Krajník — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Reviewed work:

Watkins, Stephen. Shakespeare and the Restoration Repertory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 93 pp. ISBN 978-1-009-32413-7 (print), ISBN 978-1-009-32412-0 (ebook).