Speech is almost never delivered in ideal quiet conditions. On the contrary, the acoustic signal reaching a listener's ears is degraded by background noise and reverberations. The current study investigates the perception of the voicing contrast of initial stops in English by Polish non-native listeners. Previous research showed that Polish learners do not match native speakers of English in production and perception of English voiced and voiceless stops, which results from different phonetic implementations of voicing in the two languages. In the current study, two groups of Polish listeners recognised voicing of English initial stops in one-syllable words both in quiet and in six-talker babble. The results revealed different patterns of recognition for the two conditions. The place of articulation interacted significantly with voicing both in quiet and in noise, however results obtained suggest that performance in noise did not simply reflect the performance in quiet.
The focus of the paper is the historical comparison of E fist and P pięść from the perspective of diachronic phonology. The paper specifically addresses the issue of the phonological development of this pair of cognates. The main aim is to explain the relatedness and differentiations of the modern reflexes of the original Proto-Indo-European roots and to account for their different phonological developments in both languages with a view to understanding the connection between the contemporary cognates. These aims are realised by means of searching for sound changes that explain the discrepancy in the phonological shapes of modern cognates and collecting other pairs of cognates that demonstrate the effect of theses sound changes. As the result of the historical and comparative analysis, it is argued that some of the Proto-Germanic reconstructions are more likely than others and in conclusion the most probable development of the two cognates is outlined in the chronological order. It is remarkable that the cognates of the compounds pięść / fist are to be found almost exclusively in Slavic and Germanic and the effect of their development resembles blending.
Descriptions have been the object of attention of many philosophers. The goal of this article is to inquire into the meaning of those descriptions which, due to the peculiar character of the objects of description, have been interpreted in different ways, and to investigate in which sense one is able to speak of the existence (or non-existence) of an object of description. The various sorts of descriptions are inquired; the ques-tion which entities exist and which do not is dealt with, and, in relation to this, how ‘meaning’ is to be understood.
The present paper describes an investigation into the use of dictionaries and the results of a survey which was carried out among 202 Polish university students of German as a foreign language. The main aims are, on the one hand, to find out the level of dictionary awareness and dictionary culture and, on the other hand, to investigate if students know the monolingual learner’s dictionaries of German and are able to use them effectively.
The present article is concerned with word formation and word formation exercises. In its theoretical part the article shows the role of word formation in foreign language teaching and learning as well as the state of the art in the research on word formation as a teaching resource. The article further presents the results of an empirical research into the evaluation of word formation practice exercises by learners of German as a foreign language.
The subject of the present study is the persuasive function of irony in a special type of media discourse called socio-political editorial. The use of irony enables the journalist to establish the axiological domain of editorial in order to reinforce the information content and manipulate the readers’ opinions. Therefore, the main aim of the paper is to describe the problem of language manipulation in verbal irony considered by the author as one of semantico-rhetorical means of evaluation. The analyzed articles were culled from selected web pages of French journals and magazines (2005-2008) treating about two types of social reforms and the urban violence in French suburbs.
The article aims to discuss the levels of application, efficiency, as well as potential dangers and methods of avoiding them which can be encountered while applying metaphors in formulating a business strategy. The theory underlying the research is the Conceptual Theory of Metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and the analysis was based on an article presenting a new business strategy – the Blue Ocean Strategy devised by Kim and Mauborgne (2005a).
This paper considers two Polish translations of Pamela Travers’ Mary Poppins. I shall analyse the translation procedures applied by the translator Irena Tuwim to render culturally marked words and expressions, the difficulties she encountered during her work, and modifications that occur in the target text. Besides, there are also some discrepancies in two Polish editions which I shall compare.
The purpose of the present article is an analysis of the possible applications of translation to psycholinguistic research. It is argued that it offers valuable insights into foreign language processing, especially comprehension, the mental representation of words, the interaction of different kinds of information and, last but not least, affective states. However, the use of translation also has some limitations which should be taken into account and, if necessary, it should be combined with other research tools.
The purpose of the following study is to examine how the two modes of interpreting, simultaneous and consecutive, influence the choice and rendition of personal reference cohesive markers. Taking into account the inherent constraints, these two types of interpreting can be expected to be heavily marked by mode-specific shifts in cohesion. It has been hypothesised that the rendition of cohesive devices in simultaneous interpreting would differ from its realisation in the consecutive mode given the range of inherent constraints.
This paper aims at investigating whether the linguistic strategies and features generally attributed to academic discourse are reflected in the texts of online academic job postings, and if so, to what degree such elements make academic job ads different from their corporate counterparts. This corpus-based study focuses on job advertisements understood as samples of written academic and corporate discourses. The function that academic job postings perform for academic communities may be considered parallel to the role that recruitment ads announcing business-related positions play in corporate communities. This functional homogeneity is reflected in numerous similarities between the textual strategies used in both sub-corpora. The more ‘academic’ character of academic job postings manifests itself primarily through a higher degree of grammatical formality, and limited use of the personal voice and explicit persuasion.
The present contribution is concerned with the expression of emotions in a foreign language. It seeks to investigate what factors among gender, educational level, exposure to a foreign language and culture, L2 use, length of stay in a foreign country, or self-perceived L2 proficiency might influence the choice of a foreign language for emotional expression. The statistical analysis of 102 Polish-English bilinguals and Polish L2 users of English responses to an online questionnaire measuring expression of emotions in a foreign language reviled that the L2 use, self-perceived L2 proficiency and frequent contact with the L2 were linked to the expression of emotions in a foreign language. The results of this study show the complexity of the relationship between language, culture and emotions, suggesting that the exposure to a foreign language and its culture might be the key factor facilitating the choice of a non-native language while talking about emotions.
The article aims to discuss foreign language writing anxiety and present the results of the study which was to investigate whether writing apprehension can be observed among advanced adult learners of English. Analysing anxiety from a three dimensional perspective proposed by Lang (1971) the study revealed that advanced adult students most intensely experience cognitive anxiety whose most prevailing symptoms are panic, worry and elements of test anxiety. Somatic anxiety has also been observed in this group of participants with heart pounding, freezing up, mind going blank and jumbled thoughts as the most common symptoms. Finally, the research revealed that avoidance behaviour appears infrequently among advanced writers. The research results have been used as the basis for formulating pedagogical implications on how to reduce students’ writing apprehension.
The aim of the present study, set in the Polish-English context, is to discuss to what extent, if any, L1 competence (semantic, phraseological and grammatical) is influenced by the language contact, understood here as the (advanced) knowledge of L2, i.e. English. The research is based on the questionnaire consisting of 23 short excerpts taken from newspaper articles or texts published on the Internet, adapted by the author of the article. The texts in the questionnaire contain various kinds of borrowings and calques from English, such as semantic loans, loan translations (new phrases, collocations or idiomatic expressions) and grammatical constructions modelled on English. The questionnaire was given to two groups of informants: the main group (i.e. the bilingual one), consisting of 4th year students of English at the University of Silesia enrolled in the teaching programme, and the control group, consisting of students of various fields (excluding English or Polish studies) who declared limited knowledge of English. The respondents from both groups were given the questionnaire and their task was to read the sentences carefully and then to decide whether some words or phrases seemed incorrect or unnatural in a given context. The study has corroborated the view that language contact has some repercussions at the individual level: the knowledge of L2 may and does influence L1 competence. Not all the areas (semantic, phraseological and grammatical), however, are affected to an equal extent.
The paper constitutes an attempt to define the role of soft skills in the process of FL learning. The data derive from the questionnaire distributed among the English philology students, and reveal the subjects’ attitudes to the qualities under investigation, as well as their strengths and weaknesses within the competences given. Having identified the students’ needs, the author of the project suggests ways of developing and promoting soft skills when shaping FL competence.
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