This paper discusses the etymology of the Russian word пантера ‘panther’ and its other variants in Old Russian and Russian. The Greek word πάνθηρis a direct or indirect source of all of the investigated forms, but several other languages (Old Church Slavonic, German, French) are involved in the borrowing process as media. The solutions proposed in the article are based on extended method inventory, which includes both traditional methods of historical linguistics and some new proposals connected with extralinguistic factors (Wörter und Sachen method).

This study examines the idiolect of Сашко – a hyper-multilingual global nomad whose language repertoire draws on forty languages, ten of which he speaks with native or native-like proficiency. By analyzing grammatical and lexical features typifying Сашко’s translanguaging practices (code-switches, code-borrowings, and code-mixes), as documented in the corpus of reflexive notes that span the last twenty-five years, the author designs Сашко’s translanguaged grammar. Instead of being a passive additive pluralization of separated, autonomous, and static monolects, Сашко’s grammar emerges as a deeply orchestrated, unitary, and dynamic strategy. From Сашко’s perspective, this grammar constitutes a tool to express his rebellious and defiant identity; a tool that – while aiming to combat Western mono-culturalisms, compartmented multilingualisms, and nationalisms – ultimately leads to Сашко’s linguistic and cultural homelessness. This paper – the last in a series of three articles – is dedicated to Сашко’s mixed languages and translanguaged grammar typifying Сашко-lect in its integrity.

Use of the demonstrative pronoun ese “that, that man” in familiar North American Spanish speech is traced to Andalusian Spanish and the influence of Caló, the cryptolect of the Iberian Roma. In early para-Romani, the inherited four-term deictic system (situational/contextual, general/specific) yields to the very differently organized Romance three-part paradigm (este, ese, aquel), as, concurrently, Caló locative adverbs often replace personal pronouns. Yet, even after the wholesale replacement of Caló demonstratives by Spanish forms, the function of an earlier deictic vocative phrasing is maintained in ese, to be understood as you, right there, my conversational partner.

This paper addresses the issue of focus dissipation as a narrative and mimetic technique based on ludic transformations of Figure/Ground correlation in literary text. Such transformations are triggered by text-driven attentional shifts that violate, shatter, or split the integrity of focal elements in literary texture, thus generating a range of verbal and/or multimodal stylistic effects. Woolf’s “Blue & Green” (1921) suggests a sample of condensed mimetic and diegetic manifestations of focusing/refocusing/defocusing, which heightens textual ambiguity caused by temporal, spatial, epistemic, colour, and substance oscillations. The split of initially focal elements into a set of microfoci, accompanied by the interaction of sensory (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and kinesthetic) modes, gives rise to what is known as verbal holography in literary mimesis. The motion of foci, highlighted by the wave-like chains of short nominative sentences and excessive syntactic parallelism, creates a narrative construal of dynamism vs. stability as an iconic trigger of the readers’ emotional response.