The aim of this article is to investigate the usage of a selected denominal adjective in English, namely the lexeme managerial. The data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) are employed to examine the occurrence of managerial as a qualitative adjective, a thematic relational adjective and a non-thematic (i.e. classifi catory) relational adjective. The question is considered whether relational adjectives can be treated as argument-saturating satellites of deverbal nouns.
This study focuses on the diachronic development of the discourse marker after all in English. Unlike other approaches by Traugott (1997) or Lewis (2007), the present analysis suggests that the uses of after all are not contingent on conventionalization, whereby stable meaning-form pairings emerge. The alternative proposed here is that the justificative and concessive uses of this and similar expressions follow naturally from the meanings of the individual lexical items found in these expressions. Thanks to the intuitive connection between the original meaning and the newly acquired uses, this discourse marker does not require as much consolidation as in the case of grammaticalized forms where the connection is less obvious.
The aim of the paper is to explore the process of diphthongization which is known in the literature as Old English Breaking. After the discussion of some earlier solutions proposed by researchers working in different theoretical frameworks, we propose a new solution couched in Element Theory (Backley 2011). The main questions we address in this paper concern the context, the effect of breaking and the interaction between the consonants and the preceding front vowels. Additionally, we explore the internal structure of the consonants triggering breaking and try to fi nd the element which links liquids and the velar fricative. The solution proposed here can help to understand the behaviour of velars and liquids in various phonological processes (both historical and in Modern English).
The purpose of this article is to present a brief history of the Greek text of the New Testament. The period of time that has been taken into consideration starts around the beginning of the Christian era and ends at around the time when the printing press was invented by Gutenberg. The discussion is devoted to the different kinds of witnesses to the Greek New Testament, such as the papyri, parchment manuscripts, minuscule manuscripts, and fi nally paper manuscripts. It occurs that the existing manuscripts are mere copies of copies, as the archetype manuscripts were lost at an early date. Nevertheless, by studying the earliest manuscripts, as well as a number of later manuscripts, it is possible to get a rough idea of what the original Greek text looked like.
This paper presents a force-dynamics analysis of the meaning of English periphrastic causative verbs. It challenges the traditional categorization of causative semantics into direct and indirect causation and highlights the role of lexico-semantic elements such as (i) the balance of forces, (ii) the desirability of the causal effect, and (iii) the animacy of the causative entities in interaction. Combined together, these elements help define causative semantics and offer a new causative typology built on the categories of factitivity, manipulation and permission.
This paper argues that it is the causative structuration of the motion situation that seems to be the crucial factor determining the status of intransitive verbs of locomotion and their potential to enter into a certain set of syntactical configurations. More specifically, the paper attempts to provide arguments against the commonly held view that locomotion verbs in directed motion constructions are unaccusative (this applies to both intransitive structures and transitive causative structures). If the subject argument of an intransitive manner of locomotion verb displays reduced agentivity (i.e. if it displays properties of both an agent and a patient), it is not admitted into transitive causative structures, in spite of the alleged unaccusativity of verbs that are admitted into them. The inability of path verbs to causativize is explained by appealing to the fact that these types of verbs render motion as not forming part of an energetic (i.e. a causal) chain. Related to this is the fact that the subject argument of these verbs falls outside the agent vs. patient classifi cation, which is commonly claimed to be directly related to the verb’s unergative vs. the unaccusative status, respectively.
The present paper is concerned with conceptualisations of Strategic Business Units (SBUs) that appear in a specific piece of business discourse – the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix. More specifically, the authors analyse both the names and the language used to talk about the SBUs. The data for the research comes from three languages: English, Polish, and French, the fi rst of which is the source language of the terminology, while the other two are target languages into which the terminology was rendered. Since the analysed phenomena are chiefl y metaphors and metonymies, the theoretical framework was provided by the Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Metonymy Theory.
The present article aims at identifying four types of metonymic mappings: formal, referential, propositional and illocutionary, as described by Bierwiaczonek (2013), in English X-phemisms. The use of X-phemisms in language is strictly connected with the rules of politeness functioning in communication. X-phemisms encompass euphemisms and orthophemisms that are used by language users to avoid dispreferred tabooed words, as well as dysphemisms which assume a deliberate use of a tabooed expression in order to offend, show disapproval or express negative feelings. Although linguists have listed a number of various mechanisms used in the creation of X-phemisms, often including metonymy as one of the rhetorical tools, it will be claimed that metonymy, understood as a conceptual process, may be also identifi ed in other linguistic means applied by English speakers to X-phemism creation.
The paper offers a critical outlook on the taxonomy of motion situations proposed by Zlatev et al. (2007, 2010) and its application to cross-linguistic comparison of motion-emotion metaphors (Zlatev et al. 2012). The critique is then applied, together with the results of a corpus-based analysis of motion metaphors by Woźny (2013), to creating a new, language independent taxonomy of motion situations, reflecting the naive physics – a linguistically coded, widespread set of intuitive beliefs concerning motion, proven to be resistant to the passage of time or the achievements of modern physics, extensively described by the body of literature collectively known as Disaster Studies (e.g., Champagne et al. (1980), Larkin et al. (1980), McCloskey (1983), Halloun et al. (1985), Hammer (1995), diSess a (1988, 1993, 1996).
Concluding the series of papers on the semantics of distributiveness in Polish, this study deals with synonymics of temporal distributive constructions. Part II. presents the analysis of constructions with the remaining (apart from units of time) classes of lexemes used in distributive constructions (including names of specifi ed or unspecified periods of time, names of periods of the day, seasons of the year, days of the week, months, expressions functioning as modifi ers of date and nouns with no lexical meaning related to time.
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the description of cooking terms in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3) can be improved with the massive dataset of Google Books. The paper, which can be treated as a case study, summarizes the research results offered to OED3’s lexicographers, explaining which findings were taken into the dictionary and which were left behind. It also suggests additional evidence that is likely to update the treatment of the headwords.
Universal Grammar is a theory proposing that the ability to learn grammar is embedded in the neuronal circuitry of the human brain and language learning is facilitated by a predisposition that human brains have for certain structures of language. This theory shows that linguistic ability reveals itself without being taught and that there are properties that all natural human languages share. Universal Grammar suggests that every human brain has the innate property that causes it to posit a difference between nouns and verbs whenever presented with linguistic data.
The article discusses the complex relations between the three different areas of culture and language in the Swiss canton of Grisons and describes the historical processes that have created this situation. The developing of the diversity of languages and cultures on the territory of Grisons was infl uenced to a high degree by the mountainous confi guration of this region, the isolation of the alpine valleys and by the situation of Grisons on the border line between the territories of the German and Romance cultures and languages. So the linguistic landscape of the canton of Grisons is composed nowadays of areas of German, Italian and Romansh. The peculiarity of Grisons is the existence of Romansh, one of the most ancient languages of the Alps. This Romance language was in the 5th century the only language used in Grisons, but has lost his dominant position to German and today it is struggling for its survival.
The article presents an analysis of renderings of the Swedish –s passive voice construction in a sample of multiple non-professional Polish translations of the same non-literary Swedish text, with a view to verify the validity of the thesis that translators resort to the minimax strategy while translating, as well as it discusses the possible correlation of this strategy with the development of characteristic features of the language of translation, the so-called “third code”. The article is structured as follows: Firstly, it presents the origin of the notion of the minimax strategy in translation studies and discusses it in reference to the psychology of translation. What follows is a brief description of the “third code” and its characteristic features. The subsequent part offers a discussion of the passive voice structures in Swedish and Polish as well as the semantically akin Polish constructions that may potentially be used to render the Swedish –s passive conceptualisations. Subsequently, the collected data are examined to answer the research questions. The article concludes with suggestions for further research on the “third code” and translation universals with reference to the minimax strategy.
Sentence stress is one of the most prominent elements of intonation. For the unmarked cases certain regularities can be observed as to its location, however, it has no single, established once-and-for-all site in an utterance, instead it is used to signify and signal additional information, such as thematic/rhematic structure, co-reference, contrast or emphasis. The fact is that within a linguistic unit containing more than one stressed syllable, these stresses will be perceived as being of different relative prominence. This difference is normally used to perform a number of varied linguistic function. Yet, it appears to be rarely consciously used. This feature of connected speech has been given relatively little attention, both within discussions of phonological systems of individual languages as well as in a contrastive or interactional perspective. The paper attempts to partially fi ll this gap by investigating the awareness of additional meanings carried by the marked/variable position of sentence stress. The investigations will focus on Polish speakers of English, as users of their native Polish language but also as competent users of English. The respondents are residents of Poland who have passed the extended level of the fi nal secondary school leaving examination in English at the minimum level of 80%. The observation of this preliminary study seems to be that Polish speakers modify their sentence stress patterns proportionally to the growing profi ciency and impact of other languages, with slightly different patterning than as predicted by, among others, the normative sources.
The present paper aims to discuss recruitment advertising as a promotional genre, as well as to investigate its rhetorical structure and provide a tentative comparison between job ads and the central promotional genre, i.e. marketing-type (or ‘mainstream’) advertising. Based on an analysis of a corpus comprising 400 online job advertisements, the study discusses the communicative purposes of the genre (juxtaposed with the general goals of promotional genres), and attempts to identify and describe the prevalent structural patterns found in the sample. It also offers a rough comparison between job ads and prototypical/marketing-type advertisements in terms of the rhetorical structure and other defi ning characteristics, following Bhatia (2004, 2005) and Cook (2001). The analysis confi rms numerous similarities between job advertising and the central promotional genre, yet it also identifi es major differences, particularly those pertaining to the communicative goals, structural elements (company identifi cation, targeting the market, justifying the ‘product’, offering benefits/incentives, making use of testimonials and pressure tactics), as well as other significant features including the level of ‘artistry’, the number of voices involved, generic stability, provoking controversy, being parasitic upon other genres, occupying the space at the centre/periphery of attention.
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