The paper deals with a little-known translation of the Vulgate Psalter which was published anonymously in 1700 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye by the printer of the exiled court of King James VII of Scotland and II of England. The paper argues in favour of the originality of the translation in the face of the claim expressed in the literature that it represents a revision of an earlier English rendition made from the Vulgate published in 1610 as part of the Douay-Rheims Bible. The adduced data draw from history, life writing studies and linguistics, thereby offering multidisciplinary evidence in favour of the originality of the rendition.
The paper discusses the results of a study into almost 2000 corrections found in the Old English gloss to the fi rst 50 Psalms of the Eadwine Psalter, a post-Conquest manuscript produced in mid-twelfth century. It contains the three Latin versions of the Psalter translated by St. Jerome, each accompanied by a gloss: the Gallicanum – Latin, the Romanum – Old English, and the Hebraicum – Anglo-Norman. The exact purpose behind the production of this psalter, its role, as well as the reason for introducing extensive corrections to the Old English gloss remain unknown. By making the corrections the focal point of the study, the present paper builds a case for identifying Thomas Becket (or his associates) as the patron of the Eadwine Psalter, which seems to provide comprehensive answers to some baffl ing questions concerning this manuscript.
Despite the growing interest in traditional cuisine, to the present author’s knowledge no linguistic analysis of Polish culinary recipes has been conducted so far. Even though numerous studies of recipes written in other languages, such as English, have been published, the structure and typology of early Polish recipes have, as yet, been ignored. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the earliest known Polish collection Compendium Ferculorum, and collate these fi ndings with what is known about this text type from other languages. Such an analysis will show whether the earliest Polish instructions, which appeared relatively late, i.e. in the 17th century, follow the pattern which is typical of the period or rather that of an earlier stage in the evolution of the recipe, as was the case with the earliest American recipes (Dylewski 2016).
The paper deals with the problem of defi nite article in the Gothic Bible. More specifically, it concentrates on the differences and similarities of use between the target language, i.e. Gothic, and the source language, i.e. Greek, with special attention being paid to the case of the article – nominative, genitive, dative or accusative. It is part of a larger endeavor aiming at the analysis of the whole Gothic Bible in this respect. This time the Gospel of John is taken into consideration, following an earlier study which concentrated on the Gospel of Matthew. In the paper it will not only be observed how frequently Gothic omits the definite article in places where Greek uses it in the Gospel of John, but also in what way the cases of the definite article vary in both languages due to their grammatical specificities.
This paper addresses the issue of the historical development of for fear (that) in English – a prepositional subordinator ushering in fi nite clauses of purpose in which negation is inherently coded, i.e. the content of the subordinate clause is negated by the complementiser which does not contain a negative particle in itself. The rise of this construction is studied within the theory of grammaticalization and it turns out to be a regular case of grammaticalization following the mechanisms of grammaticalization such as desemanticisation, extension and decategorialisation.
The present paper aims at investigating the problem of translating interjections from English into Polish. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its Polish translations by J. Paszkowski (1961), M. Słomczyński (1978), and S. Barańczak (1990) are chosen as the corpus for the present study. The analysis of the translations of the original English interjections will reveal the translational strategies followed by the translators. The first part of the paper is devoted to a short discussion concerning the definition and taxonomy of interjections. Next, the problem of the role interjections play in drama is discussed on the basis of the specialist literature. Finally, different translation strategies are presented followed by the analysis of the corpus material.
The paper approaches an important issue of the phonological similarity of words, relevant for current research in phonotactics, word recognition, production and acquisition, by analyzing the data collected in an experiment in which 30 native speakers of Polish were asked to provide phonologically similar words to 80 nonwords. The study demonstrates that the uncovered patterns of phonological similarity (segment substitutions, deletions and additions, the use of bigrams, trigrams and quadrigrams, noncontiguous sounds and segment metathesis) go beyond the commonly employed concept of neighbourhood density and point to the need to revise the current approaches to phonological similarity of words. It is argued that the experimental results can be attributed to the considerably more complex phonotactic and morphological structure of Polish than English.
The article deals with the patterns of segmental adaptation of Polish voiceless affricates in initial and fi nal CC (consonant + consonant) clusters by native speakers of English. The data have been collected in an online loanword adaptation experiment in which 30 native speakers of Southern British English reproduced Polish words containing such sequences. The major problem posed by the data is the divergent adaptation of the post-alveolar /͡tʂ/ vs. the pre-palatal /͡tɕ/, with the former substituted mainly with the coronal plosive [t] and the latter realised as the palato-alveolar affricate [͡tʃ]. It is argued that these patterns of nativisation are due to the highlyranked IDENT-IO[dist] constraint, which militates against the modifi cation in the value of the feature [distributed]. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the experimental results provide evidence in favour of the fundamental assumptions underlying the phonological approach to loan assimilation, namely the phonological input view as well as the faithful perception view.
On the basis of corpus-derived data, the present paper examines the collocational patterns of the singular and the plural forms of a pair of etymologically and semantically related quantifying nouns (QNs), namely English heap and its Polish equivalent kupa ‘heap’. The primary aim is to determine their respective levels of numeralization, operationalized as the frequency of co-occurrence with animate and abstract N2-collocates in purely quantificational uses, in an attempt to establish whether, and to what extent, the addition of the plurality morpheme bears on the grammaticalization of a nominal of this kind into an indefinite quantifier. Following the observations arrived at by Brems (2003, 2011), the hypothesis is that pluralization should yield a facilitating effect on the numeralization of nouns referring to large quantities by amplifying their inherent scalar implications. The results demonstrate that whereas heaps indeed exhibits a higher percentage of such numeralized uses than heap, kupy ‘heaps’ has turned out to be grammaticalized in the quantifying function to a markedly lesser degree than kupa ‘heap’. It is argued that this apparently aberrant behaviour of kupy ‘heaps’ can nonetheless be elucidated in terms of the specificity of numeralization in Polish, since at its advanced, morphosyntactic stage, the process in question affects solely the singular (accusative) forms of QNs.
The present paper focuses on the changing interpretations of the English gerund. Since no method can accurately and uniformly account for the meanings of all instances of existing -ing forms, previous studies have offered approximate characterizations based on small samples. This study looks at the numbers of -ing derivations denoting institutionalized activities, on the assumption that these represent non-eventive readings. The derivations in question are arranged chronologically in terms of their time of coinage to compare changing productivity levels of this process relative to -ry derivations. This count shows that -ing suffi xations outnumber other nominalization processes and this trend has increased in the last two centuries.
The aim of this study is to refl ect on two notions that are often used in contemporary research, relevant to cultural linguistics: linguistic vision of the world and linguistic image of the world. We start with expressing our conviction that it is not a question of two synonymic concepts nor do we believe that they are opposite notions. In our opinion, they are two ideas that refl ect the relationship between the language and culture of a speech community but at different levels and from a different perspective. In this study we will examine the research works that, in recent years, have used both notions in order to expose their advantages. In the fi rst part of our work we will discuss the background of the discipline and then provide the defi nitions of both notions and their uses most signifi cant uses. We will draw on the studies of researchers who study Slavic languages, Spanish and English.
This article first surveys the current, somewhat unproductive state of research into potential universals of translation. Then it considers in specific the “first translational response universal” (Malmkjær 2011), suggesting that it may be rooted in the cognitive mechanism of priming. Empirical evidence for this is next sought in the analysis of a set of 34 novice translations of the same short passage from Swedish into Polish, which are shown to exhibit the effects of priming to a considerable extent. Overall, the objective is to illustrate a possible way of investigating postulated translation universals: first identifying a cluster of cognitive mechanisms to motivate the universal, then determining the linguistic structures that are concrete manifestations of such mechanisms in languages meeting in translation. The proposed research procedure thus proceeds from a cognitive process to a detailed language structure, allowing for the examination of phenomena observed in the “third code” on the supra-cultural level.
The aim of the present paper is to discuss metaphorical constructions, based on figurative uses of words, in informal Polish in the field of computers and the Internet. The study is based on the author’s own corpus, compiled on the basis of short informal texts (entries, posts) written on 32 selected Internet forums. Altogether, the corpus consists of 1,541,449 words. The paper, as the title suggests, focuses on one metaphorical formula, i.e. COMPUTERS ARE BUILDINGS. The metaphors which can be subsumed under this heading belong to the most frequent in the corpus (alongside a different type, i.e. COMPUTERS ARE HUMANS). They are discussed within the cognitive framework, as introduced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Some attention will also be devoted to the possible infl uence of English upon Polish metaphorical constructions used in the area of computers and the Internet.
The aim of this paper is to analyse various animal-specifi c complex lexical units together with patterns that can be held responsible for their underlying conceptual structure. Many examples of the data investigated in the paper seem to represent compounds as they are traditionally understood in the literature of the subject (see, among others, Bauer 2003; Katamba and Stonham 2006; Lieber and Štekauer 2009; Fàbregas and Scalise 2012; Bauer et al. 2013); however, others do not meet the basic criteria for compoundhood as postulated by, for example, Altakhaineh (2016). In my research I use the term animal-specifi c complex lexical units with reference to all animal-related composite expressions being the result of the working of metaphor-metonymy interaction.
The aim of this article is to illustrate the most frequent conceptualisations of depression in the contemporary Italian media discourse. The analyses presented in the paper are mainly based on the cognitive theory of metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and form a part of a wider research topic regarding the differences in conceptualisation of depression depending on such factors as the language, the type of the discourse and the personal experience of the author concerning the state of depression. The study revealed that depression is represented the most frequently in the analysed corpus through the frame of disease, and by the metaphors DEPRESSION IS AN ENEMY and DEPRESSION IS A LOCATION, often situated down and taking the form of a container. Less numerous and regular were other kinds of its personifications and representations of depression as an object or danger.
Every part of the human body goes beyond the anatomy-physiology limits to reach deep contents and symbolic meanings.
We can identify a range of verbs (which constitute a part of idiomatic expressions) that indicate different alterations of the body’s integrity. As for their figurative use, they serve to describe a mental state. The parts of the body linked to the sensory, motor and intellectual spheres tend to be accompanied by adjectives that are part of the terminology of the psychiatric past.
We come to the conclusion that some medical terms (in this case the parts of the body) have entered into everyday speech and have assumed symbolic meanings. From the interlingual point of view, it is whereas possible to see considerable differences between Italian and Polish. It follows that the linguistic picture of the world helps to understand the generally accepted statements in a certain community.
German academic language contains far more phrasemes than it used to be assumed. Apart from specialist expressions, there are many collocations, idioms and pragmatic phrasemes, which perform a number of textual functions. Scientific discourse has received an increased interest lately, however, no study of body-part phrasemes in academic language has been conducted. This paper presents an analysis of occurrence of phrasemes with the component “eye” in a specially created corpus of German academic texts in such branches as: linguistics, literary studies, foreign language teaching, and medicine. The paper approaches the following questions: Are such phrasemes used in scientifi c discourse and, if so, in which branches of science? What are the purposes of their use? Which phrasemes are favoured in all the analysed branches?
The objective of the article is to examine the approximative and adjustive uses of the verb dire, which is mostly regarded as an assertive and eventful verb; hence nonapproximative. Meanwhile, in many expressions, in an impersonal use, in negation when the subjunctive mode is used, in the conditional forms, its evidence value is weakened and the verb dire can express approximation. The study is situated in light of the enunciation theory, notably it refers to a notion of modalisation. The corpus was established on the basis of dictionaries, which are representative for normative uses, but we will refer as well to press texts, particularly interviews, where the verb say is frequently used as a marker of the position of the speaker.
The present paper aims at presenting a short study of the prefixed forms of the Polish verb pić (‘to drink’) (napić, wypić, popić, przepić, opić, zapić, etc.) and their French equivalents found in two parallel corpora: Glosbe and Reverso Context. In the first part, selected theoretical approaches concerning the verbal prefixation in Polish are discussed, with particular attention to the hypothesis of “perfective hypercategory” by Włodarczyk and Włodarczyk (2001b). The second part focuses on the results of the contrastive Polish-French analysis. The research is carried out in the general framework of the Aktionsarten theory and tries to discover by which linguistic means (grammatical and/or lexical) the French language expresses different semantic values conveyed by the Polish prefixes. The results of the analysis are appropriately formalized according to the principles of the object-oriented approach by Banyś (2002a, b), i.e. described by the syntactic-semantic schemes (which, after several changes of specifi cation, can be applied in the machine translation programs). The purpose of the investigation is, therefore, twofold: theoretical, since it is the matter of discovering certain relations between two languages expressing differently a given linguistic phenomenon, and practice, which consists in formulating interlinguistic correspondence rules for the purpose of the Polish-French translation.
Becoming more and more a multidisciplinary domain of study, the development of research in second language acquisition, and even more visibly in multilingualism, has moved away from its sole focus on cognitive aspects to social-affective dimensions. Consequently, research in these areas makes more extensive use of research methodology characteristic of social sciences. The focus on identity brings together issues of social context and the construction of one’s identity through negotiation of who we are, how we relate to the outside world and how we position ourselves in relation to others (Pavlenko 2001). Language is the main tool in this construction/ negotiation through the acquisition/learning and use of multiple languages. In relation to the development of one’s multilingual identity, the major distinction has to be made between acquiring a language in its natural context (the case of one’s mother tongue or immigration) and learning it in formal contexts. Block (2014) believes that the issue of identity can only be studied in a natural environment of language acquisition, and not in a formal instruction context. This article aims to confi rm or reject the above belief, based on evidence from various studies of bi- and multiple language users and how they perceive their identities and their relation to the languages in their possession. It includes a pilot study of trilingual language learners and their understanding of how the individual languages they know (L1, L2, L3) build their identities and the way they enrich, impoverish or challenge who they see themselves to have been by birth (Gabryś-Barker 2018). The issues discussed relate to external (other people, situations, contexts) and internal identity-building factors (individual affectivity, personality features).
The essence of advertising lies very often in unusual and surprising juxtapositions of apparently incongruous elements, which nevertheless successfully combine in producing a coherent and understandable message. A vital role is performed by a skillfully engineered context, which allows for simultaneous activation of certain otherwise inconspicuous senses and the construction of novel and attractive connections. Such theoretical proposals as Lemke’s traversals (2001; 2005), Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory (1998; 2002) and Kecskes’s Dynamic Model of Meaning (2008) seem to describe many vital aspects of the phenomenon in question. It is in advertising that we often come across the linking of elements by transgressing naturally existing borders between domains which are unrelated, and we are invited to map onto one another different mental spaces on the basis of their salient analogy or identity, and indulge in creative riddle-like exploration of contextual elements in order to reconstruct the intended message. These techniques’ true power lies in their ability to blur the distinction between ‘the real’ and ‘the imagined’ to such an extent that certain irrational but attractive connections, implanted in the minds of the audience, contribute to subsequent decisions in the real world. The present study attempts to uncover the ways in which certain unrelated elements are skillfully brought together in a context which allows for such a juxtaposition in selected Polish TV advertisements for various medicine and health-related products. The method employed is an in-depth content analysis of the material, followed by an attempt to integrate the identified mechanisms with the models of meaning-making mentioned above. The results will hopefully help in better understanding of the ways in which particular components of the context may interact with the message expressed verbally or pictorially in the construction of multilevel meanings in advertising communication.
The article offers a discourse-analytic examination of original (English) and interpreted (Polish) versions of several extracts from plenary speeches by three Members of the European Parliament (Janusz Korwin-Mikke, Nigel Farage and Guy Verhofstadt). Controversial statements that have met with adverse reactions of the audience and/or the media are selected for analysis. The author endeavours to assess the degree to which pragmatic equivalence has been achieved by Polish interpreters. Another pertinent question is whether the identifi ed shifts are due to some systemic differences between the pragmatics of the source and target languages or to other factors, such as the constraints typical for simultaneous interpreting or specific, local problems.
The article presents Charles Taylor’s critical philosophy of language and it reviews his recent book on the human linguistic capacity. Critical philosophy of language is understood here as a broad (philosophical, social and political) perspective on language characterized by multifaceted concern with the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms involved in language use. The paper discusses Taylor’s interest in language and philosophy of language, and focuses on his seminal distinction between the ‘designative-instrumental’ and ‘constitutive-expressive’ theories of language. In the former theory language is understood within the confi nes of Cartesian representational epistemology, whereas in the latter language constitutes meaning and shapes human experience (one of the features important for defi ning the critical approach to philosophy of language).