Even though a verb can assign a variety of thematic roles to the subject, the most typical role for a subject is that of an agent or that of an experiencer for verbs of perception and mental inference. In this paper, we describe constructions where verbs that typically select agent or experiencer subjects occur with subjects expressing thematic roles typical of adverbials: instrument, time or place. We refer to those subjects as permissive subjects. On the other hand, it is argued that in South Slavic languages, non-agents (and non-experiencers) do not show such a strong tendency to occur in the subject position. We performed a translation task to answer the following research question: What range of structures occur in Bosnian translation equivalents of the following English constructions with permissive subjects: Period sees, Money buys, Object seats number, Object sleeps number, Book/ Album/Record sells copies? The quantitative analysis showed that some of the most frequent translation strategies include the following: middle constructions, passive constructions and constructions where the English permissive subject becomes an adverbial in the Bosnian translation equivalent. Moreover, translation equivalents where the English permissive subject is translated as a Bosnian non-agentive/ permissive subject are rather frequent too. Nevertheless, our qualitative analysis shows that the choice of a translation equivalent for the target construction depends on the English target construction itself. For example, in the case of some combinations, we show a correlation between the thematic meaning of a particular permissive subject in English and the choice of a translation equivalent.

Book Review: Bakšić, Sabina, Bulić, Halid, 2019. Pragmatika. Sarajevo: Bookline.

Abstract The aim of this paper is to view double negation in the light of its semantic and pragmatic meaning. While double negation in logic gives a positive value, in natural languages, besides having positive entailment, it can have a range of different implicatures and functions. Thus, depending on different discoursal factors, double negation can be used for different motives, e.g. the speaker is not sure whether a certain proposition is true or is sure that it is not true, to name just one. The analysis is carried out on the database consisting of the reports, interviews and articles of the High Representative and his associates in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period from 1995 to 2001.

Teaching English as a foreign language at university level is quite a different challenge compared to teaching high school or young non-native learners. This is due to the fact that university students are expected to acquire specific grammar terminology in order to master the grammar system of the target language. At the English Department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, during the first three (undergraduate) years of study the students are introduced to several grammar courses, focusing on the analysis of English grammar through descriptive explanations given in English. The courses serve as a basis which is expected to improve both grammar and translation competence of the students. This paper examines to what extent the acquired descriptive knowledge of morphosyntactic properties of English is helpful in terms of translation of those Bosnian sentences whose proper translation into English requires the knowledge of contrastive rules. The research has been designed as a combination of action research and a quasi-experimental pre-test (delayed) post-test control-treatment group. As the research findings have revealed, teaching grammar to non-native learners of English without input as to the contrastive differences between the source and the target language results in erroneous translation, which is a consequence of negative transfer from the source into the target language. On the other hand, grammar teaching supported by the presentation of relevant contrastive rules has proved to be an efficient learning technique in terms of reducing errors and improving both grammar and translation competence of non-native learners. Keywords: verb phrase, erroneous translation, transfer, contrastive analysis, pretesting, post-testing, treatment