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The goal of the article is to present the multilingualism in the countries emerged from former Portuguese colonies in Africa where, alongside the official Portuguese, more or less numerous native African languages are to be found together with various mixed languages. All of the analysed countries are bi- or multilingual, in each the status of Portuguese is different, and so are the number and the...
The goal of the paper is to characterize four units with a dominating appellative function: Uwaga! (‘Warning!’ / ‘Attention!’), Start! (‘Start!’), Stop! (‘Stop!’), and Dalej! (‘Carry on!’). Their nature is performative; they are excluded from the reach of negation; they cannot be presented in reported speech. The author indicates the syntactic independence of these units and their deep rooting in...
The paper describes the symbolic unit [ktoś1] dotknął [kogoś2/czegoś] in the cognitive perspective. The starting point for a semantic-cognitive analysis in the present sketch are uses of the phrase excerpted from texts from various registers of contemporary Polish. Importantly, the author describes both concretizations and metaphorical extensions of the prototypical occurrence of the analysed unit...
The author discusses non-literary sources for the history of Polish vocabulary from the period from the 16th to the 18th century. They are not always taken into account by the editors of the newest historical dictionaries, despite the fact that they contain a wealth of interesting vocabulary from various areas of everyday life of peasants and townsmen, from the history of law and judicature, trade,...
The author elaborates the thesis that pronouns, as a “pars orationis”, function as a universal system of reference in their respective linguistic code. She gives a short review of three pronominal subsystems in Polish from the point of view of their referential function: (a) definite pronouns, i.e. the basic means of referential identification; including personal, possessive and demonstrative pronouns,...
The interest in problems relating to the languages of migrant societies (called heritage languages in the literature) has been steadily growing among linguists and language teachers worldwide, including in Poland, and promoting the rise of new research directions (Heritage Language Acquisition, Heritage Language Learning). The present considerations systematize and review. The paper aims to present...
The lexicography of the Slavonic nations, especially the branch of nest lexicography, has seen an impetuous development since the sixties, producing at least fifty publications, but it remains effectively unknown to French lexicography. Updated terminology, the symbols of successive parts of speech in the word-formative chain from the centre of the nest to the specific derivative, remain an achievement...
The article discusses the status of the string liczyć się z każdym groszem ‘to spend money carefully, to count every penny’, lit. ‘to reckon with every penny’. The authors quote numerous instances from the Polish corpus, and claim that the formal and functional features of this expression indicate that its status is different from what can be gathered from dictionaries of Polish where it is treated...
The paper presents Professor Marian Kucała (1927–2014), a dialectologist and historian of the Polish language, affiliated throughout his entire life with the Institute of the Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow. It presents his biography and a short discussion of his most important scientific achievements, while most space is devoted to a recollection of his activity in the...
The paper presents Marian Kucała’s dialectological work in the chronological order. Particular attention has been given to his greatest dialectological achievement, the Porównawczy słownik trzech wsi małopolskich (1957; ‘A comparative dictionary of three villages in Lesser Poland’), emphasizing its superior cognitive and methodological qualities. While discussing Kucała’s various articles, we indicate...
Our goal is to follow and analyse the development of mathematical linguistics in Russia and in the USSR. The first application of mathematical methods, primarily statistical, occurred in Russia already in mid-19th century; however a true bloom of mathematical linguistics happens in mid-20th century, owing to the initiation of intensive research into machine translation. Both the rapid development...
The author considers the impact of postmodernism on contemporary humanities, and in particular on theoretical linguistics. The main thesis of the paper can be formulated as follows: postmodernism contributes to the increase of such tendencies in linguistics as: blurring of the subject of research, disregard for the ‘directives of language’, i.e. disuse of the conventional scientific language, violations...
The paper discusses two possible interpretations of the (East Germanic?) runic inscription found in Rozwadów, Poland (KJ35), which reads ]krlus. Two alternatives are proposed: (1) [i]k (e)r(u)ls, and (2) [i]k (e)rlas, both with the meaning ‘I belong to the Heruli’. The first alternative assumes that the rune kaunan is a remainder of the first person personal pronoun ik ‘I’ known from Gothic, whereas...
The paper presents the lexical family with the root nud-/nędz-. The material, containing as many as 52 word forms, excerpted from all of the available lexicographical sources of historical vocabulary, has been presented in the form of a word-formative nest. The goal of the analysis was to reveal the internal structure of motivational relations between the centre of the nest, Proto-Slavonic nuditi,...
The paper discusses the issue of the use of lexicographic works in the process of linguistic interpretation, which causes multiple problems in the judicial practice. Omitting positive examples, we show judgements in which the decision can be considered argumentatively unsatisfactory in the area of linguistic interpretation. We hope that the presented material will help linguists and authors of Polish...
The paper attempts to answer the question whether, in the case of rapid changes such as we currently observe in Polish, a linguist is able to determine if these changes are systemic, i.e. permanent, or remain at the stage of innovation, i.e. are temporary – and hence, whether he or she can declare a change in the linguistic standard and set to looking for its cause. The focus of the article is on...
The paper presents the phenomenon of Surzhyk as a specific mixed sociolect in Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism. The first part describes the process of the rise of Surzhyk as a result of the expansion of Russian on Ukrainian, and the difficulties one encounters when classifying the term within the theory of language contact. The second part focuses on the current social attitude toward the phenomenon,...
The paper is devoted to the functioning of the proverb diabeł tkwi w szczegółach in multi-genre texts of contemporary Polish. The author discusses the rhetoric potential of the phrase, used when there are problems with the realization of some undertaking. Senders like to use it in the beginning (in the title) and at the end of the text. The persuasive efficiency of an utterance containing the discussed...
The paper is a recollection of Professor Marian Kucała (died 2014), a dialectologist and historian of language. Particular emphasis is put on his contribution to historical lexicography and the fields of language learning and teaching (language culture in the broad sense).
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