This multi-part study continues an inquiry earlier initiated in these pages into words listed in Oxford English dictionary as still without satisfactory etymologies. Loans from a variety of source languages are reviewed, accompanied by commentary on earlier lexicographical praxis as it relates to various popular registers of English.

It would not be an easy task to find a Slavic linguist who had never heard about the Ottoman Turkish influence upon Balkan Slavic. Nevertheless, this author argues that caution should be exercised with the term which is inconsistent with the Turkological understanding of “Ottoman”. In the final part of the paper some terminological suggestions are made.

The influence of English on German has resulted in not only the direct importation of a vast number of English loanwords but also their hybridization with native German elements. The most common types of language hybrids, or loanblends, using Haugen’s (1950) terminology, in German include blended compounds containing one element from the source language and another from the receptor language (e.g. Businessbereich ‘business sector’ and Krafttraining ‘strength training’) in addition to blended derivations where autochthonous derivational affixes are attached to English stems (e.g. sportlich ‘sporty’ and rumsurfen ‘to surf around’). This paper contributes to the investigation of how, and to what extent, English elements become morphologically embedded into German by analyzing the English-German hybrid formations from a corpus of everyday spoken German (42,429 types and 1,280,773 tokens) and the texts appearing in the Spiegel newsmagazine from the year 2000 (287,301 types and 5,202,583 tokens). General findings indicate that the most common form of hybridization is the compounding of English specifiers with German heads and much less the attachment of German morphemes (both derivational affixes and semi-affixes) to English stems in both spoken and written texts. These forms of hybridization demonstrate both the productive word formation processes of German as well as its contact-induced lexical enrichment beyond the mere direct borrowing of loanwords. However, when analyzed separately, the most frequently-occurring specifiers and heads were anglicisms. A slight preference for German affixation (affixes and semi-affixes) was found in the spoken corpus with the Spiegel corpus containing more English semi-affixes.

In the analysis of language contact and borrowing, the category of internationalism denotes lexical items that are formally and semantically similar across unrelated languages, mainly of neo-classical origin. Internationalisms are characteristically unmarked for a specific national provenance, like the pair En electricity / It elettricità. On the other hand, many similar examples, such as En romantic and It romantico, are the result of borrowings from English into Italian, a fact that can be established only on historical grounds, because the word itself does not reveal any trace of foreignness to the lay Italian speaker, being Italian a Latin-based language. In this paper, the lexical category of internationalism will be defined and set apart from other outcomes of language contact, like direct and indirect Anglicisms, Anglo-Latinisms, and other forms of linguistic kinship between these two, partly unrelated, European languages. Linguistic factors such as etymology, route of transmission, and non-linguistic ones such as historical events and motivation for borrowing (Wexler 1969) are used for this analysis, which will be applied to relevant examples of Italian vocabulary.

This article is intended to explore the linguistic means of anglicization in Cuban Spanish. Thus, a corpus-driven database or glossary of this variant of Spanish has been elaborated to examine these English-induced units quantitatively and qualitatively, entailing a morpho-syntactic and semantic analysis of the anglicization process. This research study is based on two major stages: data collection and data processing of the lemmas compiled. The resulting glossary of this part of the study is used to unravel the semantic traits of the English-induced units, chiefly related to the processes of polysemy and calquing. A compilation of these Cuban-Spanish anglicisms leads to a better understanding of meaning extension and lexical creativity, in keeping with the historical socioeconomic conditions of the island. The collection of colloquialisms, vulgarisms or obsolete words corroborates the diastratic and diaphasic evolution of lemmas, and unveils some distinctive word-building patterns.

The article examines psychological and pedagogical contexts of the birth and the development of formative evaluation in second and foreign language teaching and learning. Research on its educational value, meta-analyses and case studies conducted in a number of school systems under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are presented with examples of ways in which research informed the educational policy of various countries and impacted on school evaluation strategies. Attention is given to challenges and controversies faced by schools in the process of implementing formative evaluation and/or integrating it with summative approaches. Implications are also sought for pre- and in-service teacher education.

Bearing in mind the importance of attitude in sociolinguistic research and its huge theoretical potential for accounting for various language behaviours, it is surprising to see numerous misconceptions concerning this construct and its conceptualization as well as criticism as to its role in predicting and explaining speech behaviour (cf., for instance, Cargile, Giles 1997: 195; Edwards 1999: 109; Ladegaard 2000: 229–230; Garrett 2001: 630; Soukup 2012; Taylor, Marsden 2014). The author claims that attitude research can still prove very insightful and helpful in sociolinguistic theory building, but to do so, one needs to reconceptualize attitude along the reasoned action approach on the foundations of which the theory of planned behaviour rests. The theory posits that attitude is one of the three general predictors having a sufficient explanatory and predictive power in the case of most human behaviours. The major goal of the present article is to report on a study attempting to apply the theory of planned behaviour to explain why students of English being given an alternative to choose either an English or American accent as a target model to learn opt for one and not the other. The second goal of the article is to discuss the role of language attitudes in determining students’ decisions. Part 1 of the article includes a brief theoretical introduction as well as a detailed description of two pilot studies which served to prepare the research instrument for the main investigation.