The article presents a disastrous in the consequences earthquake between Sicily and Calabria described by different travelers of Grand Tour after 1783 and analyses the style and method of commenting these historical, tragic events. Several Polish intellectuals and politicians, disappointed in t he situation in the country had chosen the Southern Italy (Sicily, Calabria) and Malta as Destination of their travel. Who arrived there after the terrible earthquake and observed in Messina and/or Reggio Calabria the ruins of these important towns leaved very emotional description in their travel reports. The purpose of the article is to compare different human reactions as well as different ways of describing, from many points of view, the situations they found and observed.
The present study is the first attempt at examining the perception and evaluation of 10 internationally known political and religious leaders’ English pronunciation. 40 Polish students’ assessed their speech samples in terms of the degree of foreign accentedness, comprehensibility and acceptability. We examine whether the following factors affect the assessors’ judgements: their personal attitude to the speakers, the students’ level of English proficiency and the genetic proximity between between the speakers’ and the listeners’ L1s combined with the raters’ familiarity with foreign accents of English. It is demonstrated that the listeners’ attitude to the speakers has no impact on the ratings of the samples’ comprehensibility and accentedness, but plays an important role in their evaluations of acceptability. The participants’ level of English proficiency is crucial for their assessment of comprehensibility, but not accentedness and acceptability. Finally, the genetic proximity between the involved languages and the listeners’ familiarity with varieties of foreign-accented English are shown to be relevant for all the presented accent jugdements.
The aim of this article is to present the fantastic literature of J.-P. Bours, one of the least known representatives of the Belgian uncanny. His oeuvre is remarkably rich: Bours practices all the sub-genres of the fantastic and remains a master of the short form. In this article, I analyze the distinct characteristic of this fantastic literature: ambiguity. In order to produce this effect, the writer uses a vast array of techniques (like the unsaid and ellipsis), as shown in La Mort du juste.
Our purpose in this paper is to show how the output of academic student-writers demonstrates the different ways in which they react to the discipline’s discoursal demands and how that, in turn, forms their writer identity. We also argue that the current Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory fails to adequately integrate notions of second language (L2) academic writer identity and the social contexts in which L2 writers produce their texts.
This study discusses the cross-cultural re-conceptualization of the slogan ‘I’m lovin’ it’, popularized in Poland by a global fast-food restaurant chain, which occurs in the inter-linguistic transfer between English and Polish. The analytical framework for the study is provided by Cultural Linguistics and the Re-conceptualization and Approximation Theory. The analysis is based on proposals submitted by 45 translators asked to come up with a Polish equivalent of the slogan. The results indicate that because the semantic networks for the meaning of love do not overlap between English and Polish perfectly, attempts at the cross-cultural transfer of the slogan can be approached only as more or less accurate approximations of the original meaning constructed according to culture-specific norms, expectations, and attitudes.
The essay argues that Paul Kingsnorth’s novel The Wake is written in the spirit of the eighteenth-century pastoral tradition. The medievalist trope of primitivism is used in reference to the Anglo-Saxon culture and language. What characterizes the medievalism of the novel is presentism. Buccmaster represents both the Wild Man and the Noble Savage type. In the pastoral manner, Kingsnorth writes in the spirit of anthropocentrism and focuses on the social classes in the early medieval world that he “greens” in the novel.
Eye tracker makes it possible to see where and how the person is looking. During the analysis of previously collected eye-tracking data my attention was drawn to two school students whose English language communicative skills were on different levels and that is why I assumed they should work with the English textbook material in a different way. The aim of the article is to show not noticed at the first sight differences in their way of working with the English textbook material.
The aim of this paper is to describe selected syntactic phenomena concerning non-finiteness and to show the most frequent types of the non-finite subordinate clauses in the historical German language of the 17th century. The use of the non-finite constructions appears to be especially frequent in Early New High German. Also today, non-finite clauses can be observed. However, their role in the modern discourse is different to that of the diachronic constructions.
In the magazine Unser Danzig published by ex-citizens of Gdańsk in the years of 1949–2008, one must pay attention not only to politically-engaged texts, but also to obituaries which present lives of the deceased and missing their lost fatherland. The aim of these obituaries is not only to inform about someone’s death, but also to acccept the regional origin of the deceased, which is presented by linguistic and paralinguistic means.
The aim of the paper is to discuss the existing CLIL models with respect to how they are used by teachers in Polish lower–secondary education. Throughout the paper a general situation in the system of education concerning bilingual classrooms is depicted with the focus on four CLIL models traditionall used in contemporary schools. The overall objective is to analyse the popularity of languages employed as the medium of instruction in bilingual provision, the subjects whose content is imparted through the medium of a foreign language as well as the four major curricular models themselves developed and implemented for the needs of bilingual programmes in the Poland.
The article presents the analysis of the rules of punctuation concentrated on the use of a comma in Spanish language. Nevertheless, in the introduction the author cite several exemples to show the differences and similarities between the use of a comma in Spanish, Polish, Russian, Czech, French, English and German languages in order to emphasize the conventional nature of the comma. The main part of the work presents the use of a comma in Spanish in five syntactic contexts. The article ends with conclusions that reveal the obligatory, distinctive and optional nature of the comma in the Spanish orthography.
The article shows, on the example of the accounts of the journey of John James Blunt and Auguste de Forbin, how the folk religiosity of Sicilians, especially patron saints, was perceived. The analysis of the texts showed that the newcomers who come into contact with the Sicilian culture notice that patron saints are a very characteristic phenomenon for this area and play an important role in social and political life.
This paper investigates the phenomenon of language transfer at the initial state of third language acquisition by adult Polish learners of English (L2) and German (L3). First, the controversy between two conflicting theories of language acquisition, behaviorism and nativism, is discussed with regard to cross-linguistic interactions. Second, some influential models of third language acquisition are presented. The participants’ written production data from 122 essays was analyzed and interpreted in terms of language transfer. Evidence for both L1 and L2 transfer could be found. The results show, however, that the influence of L2 is more robust and primarily affects the lexicon. Finally, the present paper emphasizes the fact that language transfer should not be perceived as a source of errors, but rather as an inevitable result of the third language acquisition process.
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