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The author cites five different etymological hypotheses for the general Slavic word jęczmień ‘barley’. Three refer to the features of the ear: its boniness, its shape during the time when the seeds ripen, and its adhesiveness; the other two adduce the sound that this cereal makes during the time of ripening, and its alleged taste. The paper aims to verify the cited hypotheses using the linguistic-cultural...
Currently the head of the Great PAN Dictionary of Polish, the author presents his observations on past and present difficulties of lexicographical work. In his view, lexicography is an activity that both uses and publicizes the achievements of scientific linguistics, and therefore, its development is tightly bound to the current state of research on contemporary language. The progress of these studies...
The article presents a classification of Polish nominal word formations with a particular regard to derivatives with a categorial pragmatic (expressive) element. It discusses some of the existing proposals of classification, and suggests the author’s own. The highest floor of the classification contains: I. nominations (mutations) and II. renominations; the latter being divided into 1. transpositions,...
The article discusses the problem of given names of Jews who lived in Bydgoszcz between 1920 and 1939. The diaspora counted at most two thousand (about 1,5% of the total population) and, apart from Poznań, it was the largest concentration of Jews in the Poznań voivodeship. The data was extracted from a list of contribution payers of the Jewish religious community from 1939. The current paper continues...
A contrastive analysis of the phonology and phonetics of the native and a foreign tongue cannot foresee all pronunciation errors in the foreign language; their character needs to be established experimentally. The goal of this paper is to determine whether subjects can spontaneously acquire the pronunciation of selected sounds of Spanish, and whether the form of the stimulus (written vs. oral) influences...
The author refers to selected syntheses and detailed analyses from among the many achievements of word-formation studies in the last fifty years, to briefly discuss the ways in which textual derivatives (belonging to parole) have been described. Particular attention is paid to M. Honowska’s views on the pragmatics of word-formative action. The timeliness of her thought is evident in the perspective...
The paper presents a formal account of sentences with a numeral-nominal subject and an adjectival complement, such as Tych pięciu facetów zostało zabitych ‘These five guys were killed’. The agreements in such sentences are highly idiosyncratic. To cope with them in the framework of a certain formal grammar of Polish, a number of extra means are proposed: special “numeral” realization of the nominal...
Linguistic mythological heritage preserved in S.B. Linde’s Słownik języka polskiego ‘Polish dictionary’, comprises mainly one-word mythologisms, i.e. mythologically-motivated lexemes. The subject of my query are those Polish mythologisms, and that are lexicographically marked in Linde’s dictionary (are entries or subentries). The paper discusses the problem of mythological sources and that of textual...
The paper examines the convention of formulating the inflectional information, especially pertaining to grammatical cases, in Trzaska, Evert, and Michalski’s Dictionary of Polish that was edited in the interwar period by T. Lehr-Spławiński. The author attempts to determine what factors informed the use of a lexicographically innovative solution that nonetheless did not upset the linguistic tradition,...
The paper presents syntactic analyses of Polish sentences containing the Latin construction of infinitive with accusative. All the sentences are from a single Old Polish monument, Rozmyślania dominikańskie, a Biblical-apocryphal narration of the Passion of Jesus. The author wonders what more than ten ACI constructions found in Rozmyślania can tell us about the character and the type of sources, and...
The article refers to Anna Wierzbicka’s diagnosis about the existence of culture’s key words, and in particular – her opinion that the word душа ‘soul’ is the key of the Russian culture which explains the specificity of the Russian ethnopsychological model of the human being. Through a semantic and pragmatic analysis of contemporary and former Polish and Ruthenian lexis, idioms, and forms of the linguistic...
The goal of the paper is to present culturemes, a concept used in cultural studies, glottodidactics, translation studies, and ethnolinguistics. As is the case with many terms in humanities, also cultureme has several understandings. In the ethnolinguistic perspective, culturemes are related to Anna Wierzbicka’s key words, Walery Pisarek’s flag words, and Michael Fleischer’s collective symbols. Polish...
The paper is an analysis of a mediaeval grammatical commentary on translation of prayers into Polish (from the manuscript BJ 1297). The author discusses the various problems that the writer engages in the context of the preserved copies of basic prayers. The paper reveals the unusual linguistic awareness of the writer who uses the grammatical system of Latin, with which he is acquainted, to build...
The paper makes a clear distinction between cognitive bilingualism and knowledge of two languages. The first term is embedded in the context of education, it can be measured and its development can be followed; the second is understood as mastering, but only partially, of one or both languages. Moreover, the article identifies subjective and objective factors that influence the perception of bilingualism...
There is lack of agreement among world researchers in regards to the extent of differences between the phonological development of monolingual and bilingual children. While some research provides evidence for the lack of significant differences, other studies indicate that bilingual children make phonological errors which might be considered atypical of their monolingual counterparts. If indeed bilingual...
Structures with prepositional expressions constitute a large collection of Old Polish constructions that underwent multiple linguistic processes. As the starting point of my considerations, I assume that prepositions are not functional syntactic units. A syntactic unit, i.e. an element, is a prepositional expression, i.e. a preposition together with the nomen in the appropriate case. Prepositional...
The paper describes adverbial numeral expressions used to quantify events, to indicate their specific number, that can be found in the largest text of Polish Middle Ages, i.e. in Rozmyślanie przemyskie. Based on the traditional division of numerals, the article identifies multiplicative, ordinal, and manifold numerals, and indicates their function in specific contexts. The analyzed text, even though...
The author provides an answer to the question why Old Polish texts, especially mediaeval ones, constitute a separate subject of study. Primarily, he draws attention to the kinds of problems connected with the reading of those texts (e.g. identification of functional expressions), and with the various manifestations of multilayeredness. How to study such texts? The author suggests that the existing...
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