engleski

Exonyms as items of LSP terminology and as a teaching challenge

The authors address the issue of the status and relevance of exonyms within standard English, Italian and Croatian. Specifically, they view these lexical units as integral parts of the respective professional terminologies pertinent to the field of international relations, one of the subdisciplines of political science. Furthermore, they point out that beyond the realm of global politics and diplomacy, the terminology in question is fundamental for a whole array of professional sectors – either those that directly involve intercultural mediation and/or communication or those whose activities merely occur at an international level. The authors propose the classifications of exonyms in English, Italian and Croatian, namely the demonyms used to denote internationally recognised nations – either nouns or adjectives. The classifications of this group of exonyms in the three languages are based on morphological and language teaching criteria. On the basis of the theoretical conclusions, the insights gained in the process of classification as well as the language teaching notions regarding learners’ communicative motivation, and with a view to gaining fellow LSP practitioners’ early critical feedback, the authors present an outline for a forthcoming empirical research project that will be conducted at the University of Zagreb. The sample will include students who have reached level B2 in Italian (students of the fourth and fifth years of Italian at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences) and in English (first-year students of Political Science at the Faculty of Political Science). The starting point of this research is supposed to be the verification of their command of the forms of exonyms in their mother tongue, i.e., Croatian., while the main research focus will be on the question of how to facilitate the process of learning this terminology, which is rarely taught in a systematic way, despite its considerable importance in an increasingly globalised world. Eventually, with this project, the authors aim to provide a teaching model for this domain of terminology, applicable to the respective LSP fields in other languages.

Croatian, classification, English, exonyms, Italian, terminology

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