Abstract The paper aims to evaluate the role of language in a specific socio-political context. It offers a critical approach and evaluation of the political statements of the European Union representatives regarding the process of the accession of Bosnia and Hercegovina to the European Union. The focus of the linguistic investigation is on the identification of language structures that participate in the development of communicative models that enable the establishment of power relations between participating entities. The linguistic data is obtained through systemic functional grammar and evaluated using critical discourse analysis.

The paper discusses the relationship between assessment in teaching English as a foreign language and students’ competencies. The data collected by this research show that, in recent times, teachers and students are becoming aware that learning based only on the acquisition of facts will not adequately respond to the challenges they will face in the future. An environment in which the learning outcomes are transparently and directly linked to the students’ competencies enables them to take responsibility for their progress, not only during the official period of schooling but also during lifelong learning, which is very important. With this approach, learning outcomes and their connection with the necessary competencies to achieve learning outcomes become the basis for redefining qualifications and curricula in general and professional education. The transparent connection of learning outcomes and necessary competencies to achieve learning outcomes, as well as the shift of focus from teachers to students, enables students to find their way of improving competencies and taking responsibility for their learning. Learning outcomes are best understood by viewing them as a series of valuable processes and opportunities that can be applied in different ways in different areas of teaching and learning. The emphasis is on defining the learning outcomes so that we use the students’ experience and pay less attention to the content of the subjects of a specific curriculum. The data from this research indicate that learning outcomes impact assessment if they are adequately linked to competencies. Students can monitor their progress and take responsibility for it. The primary outcome of this research is that assessment aligned with progress in students’ competencies and their connection to learning outcomes will certainly improve learning.

The use of common people and objects as persuasive tools is an advertising strategy focuses on the assumption that common man can easily be identified with the masses i.e. target group for an advertiser. The ads feature people who appear to be average and typical ant thus lead the reader to believe that the product is for everyone (Howe and Edelstein 2000: 24). As Goddard (2005: 81-82) points out, ‘symbolic representation can be a powerful source of meaning in texts of all kinds. Symbols are much more about associations of ideas than about any literal or straightforward equation, and much more about group convention than about individual personalized meaning’. Accordingly, the semiotic analysis in this paper contains what Barthes (1977: 33) explained as follows: ‘…if the image contains signs, we can be sure that in advertising these signs are full, formed with a view to the optimum reading: the advertising image is frank or at least emphatic’. Keywords: semiotics, images, ads, common people, denotation, connotation.

In the context of English as a global language, and Netspeak as a new electronic medium of communication, the present paper examines the linguistic properties and distinctive features of online communication in postponed time, bearing in mind that synchronicity is one of the dimensions upon which electronic communication can be categorised. This corpus-based study, for which data were collected from several Internet sites, places particular focus on the features of English used in asynchronous settings. The analysis, based on the model proposed by David Crystal (2001), portrays a number of highly distinctive features of Netspeak, proving an immense impact of thethis type of commucniation in terms of graphology (emoticons, punctuation) and the lexicon (blending, compounding), these being areas where it is relatively easy to introduce both innovation (nonce formation and other ludic Netspeak extensions) and deviation (abbreviations, acronyms). Keywords: Netspeak, Internet, asynchronus settings, distinctive linguistic features, synchronicity

Within the discourse analysis, semiotics identifies how signs are used to represent something. In the discourse of advertising it can be a wish, a need, a desire or a worry to be solved, for instance. In this sense, the paper deals with the switch from denotative to connotative meanings of contemporary ads. The approach is based on the assumption that communication is achieved via decoding and encoding messages. The connotative meaning represents the overall message about the meaning of the product which the ad is creating by the use of the image (e.g. the photographed model). The ad functions by showing us a sign with easily readable mythic meaning (e.g. the photographed model is a sign for feminine beauty) as well as by placing this sign next to another, potentially ambiguous, sign (e.g. the name of the perfume) (Barthes 1972).

Key words: pragmatics, print ad, culture ABSTRACT The advertising itself is said to be a sort of persuasive discourse. Namely, it is ‘‘to a large extent a discourse of highly meaningful word-puns, hard-hitting slogans or other textual devices characteristic of a maximum economy of expression’’ (Cap 2002: 41). According to Angela Goddard (2005: 71), ‘‘advertisers often rely on the fact that readers approach texts in an active way, being prepared to work to decode messages’’. Therefore, the message ought to be colorful and memorable. One of the main features of advertising is the abundance of phraseological units that should be familiar to the majority of readers within a chosen target group. To put it simply, the wording of an advertisement must fulfill the basic aim: to become an effective tool which will make a potential customer pursue an action i.e. buy a product or at least to ‘‘develop some kind of favorable mental state towards an action i.e. admit possibility of buying a product at a later date’’ (Cap 2002: 42). The paper deals with the discourse of print advertising, focusing on the stylistic potential of phraseological unit as a lexicalized bilexemic or polylexemic word group, which has relative syntactic and semantic stability, may be idiomatized, may carry connotations and may have an emphatic function in a text.

The language of print advertising abounds with pragmatically-motivated phraseological units (PUs) such as: idioms, metaphors, slogans, proverbs, etc. In order to draw the reader’s attention, advertisers exploit the pragmatic potential of PUs. The paper explores the various interpretations of meaning as well as the use of idiom modifications (as a group of PUs) in the advertising discourse, primarily via pragmatic devices such as presuppositions and implicatures.