The Stereotype of Time in the Discourse of Displaced Persons from Kosovo and Metohija

The Institute for Balkans Studies has recently released a study of Svetlana Ćirković which is based on the audio-material collected for the project Research into Slavic Vernaculars in Kosovo and Metohija carried out jointly in 2003–2003 by two research institutes of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Institute for the Serbian Language and the Institute for Balkan Studies. Meticulous analysis of the linguistic material has confirmed the initial hypothesis, i.e. the assumption that the displaced persons from Kosovo and Metohija share a distinctive space-time coordinate system within which the war of 1999 functions as zero point. The war of 1999 is a temporal boundary in relation to which the past, present and future are defined. The study applies a plurality of analytical methods: the linguistic corpus extracted for the study is analysed from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, but the examples themselves have required the use of the formal linguistic approach, conversation analysis and discourse analysis, as well as various approaches to taxis constructions.