The present article takes up one of the needs present in today’s Cognitive Linguistics: applying its theoretical assumptions to a detailed study of the phenomena encountered in particular languages. The instrument tested for this purpose is one of the aspects of construal offered within Cognitive Grammar – scope (Langacker 1987, 2000, 2008, etc.). It is applied to the description of several English temporal constructions in order to check both the range of phenomena which it can refer to as well as the efficiency and accuracy of such an account.
The paper deals with the rituals performed by party participants, both hosts and guests. The theoretical basis for the study is Erving Goffman’s (1955, 1967) seminal work on interaction rituals. The rituals discussed here include greetings and introductions, compliments and responses to compliments, food offers and responses to them, and parting rituals. They are presented against two different cultural backgrounds, Polish and generally understood Anglo-Saxon. The data used in the analysis were gathered in Poland, England and the English-speaking part of Canada. Participant observation, interviews and introspection were the methods used to collect them.
This paper has two main purposes: 1) to present a possible semantic account of phraseological meaning from a cognitive perspective and 2) to show the presence, the extent and the content of mental images and concepts in Spanish and Polish somatic phraseology.
I briefly define the notion of concept, its relationship with linguistic form and the mental image. After narrowing the notion of phraseologial unit, the main part of this paper focuses on an application of the notions of mental image and concept to selected somatic idioms. The phraseological units contain the somatic word boca ‘mouth’ as part of them and are presented by meaning correspondence in the Polish language. In the final section I point out to a possible difference with respect to the structure of meaning which could have natural and cultural implications.
This paper first looks into mechanisms that license the formation of transitive causative constructions with the motion verbs run and walk. As a further step, it takes into consideration intransitive constructions with these verbs and, in doing so, it contrasts the meaning of run with walk as its most natural counterpart. The paper provides evidence in favour of positing one of the verb’s senses as core, representing a kind of starting point against which some of the other motion senses are established. In this way, arguments are offered in favour of the lexical network model of polysemy. At the same time, it is shown that the extensive usability of run (and, by the same token, the restricted usability of walk) is closely related to the degree of the verb’s context-sensitivity, which, in its turn, points to the conception of the verb’s meaning as representing a dynamic potential.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the metaphorical and metonymical conceptual representations of God in The New Testament. The notion of God causes various problems since God is understood as One in Three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The idea of the Holy Trinity escapes human logic and natural reasoning. The metaphors and metonymies used for the conceiving of God in The New Testament form a complex system of schemata, mediating between the indescribable reality and language. Because of the transcendent nature of God, classifying some of the schemata as metaphor or metonymy is problematic.
The overriding goal of this paper is to present the most influential minimalist approaches1 to the resolution of the infinite regress in antecedent-contained deletion constructions. Therefore, the point of departure is the general description of the problem concerning the interpretation of sentences containing antecedent-contained deletion, which occurs at LF (Logical Form), when a null VP is filled with a copy of its antecedent creating at the same time an infinite regress. In the subsequent sections of this paper I strive to give an account of the attempts to resolve ACD by focusing on the theory of Vehicle Change developed by Fiengo and May (1993), the case-based approach proposed by Hornstein (1995) as well as the copy theory of movement by Fox (2002). In the last section of this paper I provide some Chomsky’s views (2004) on the direction in which the research on ACD constructions may proceed.
The aim of the paper is to explore two sandhi phenomena of liquid-zero alternations, i.e. linking and intrusion in two varieties of English recorded in southern England and north-eastern United States. Since, however, the analysis of linking/intrusive r can be found elsewhere (e.g. Kijak 2009), the main concern here, is the phenomenon of linking/ intrusive l. We address the questions concerning the distribution, representation and interaction of the lateral with the preceding vowel. We explain the mechanics behind the l-zero alternations. Additionally, we explore the problem of lexical representation of etymologically l-less and l-full forms participating in the linking/intrusion processes.
In our paper we are going to demonstrate that hypotactic constructions develop from paratactic ones and not the other way round. On the basis of numerous Old English examples, we will try to demonstrate how hypotactic constructions come into being and what is the possible mechanism lying behind this process; one can speak of a hypotactic relation between two clauses when one of them is subordinate and the other is main, so in this sense the term subordinate clauses could actually be used interchangeably with the term hypotactic structures. We will concentrate upon the transition phase between parataxis and hypotaxis, which will allow us to see how hypotaxis was developing from parataxis in English.
Defined as “the ways the writers project themselves into their texts to communicate their integrity, credibility, involvement, and a relationship to their subject matter and their readers” (Hyland, 1999: 101), stance can be expressed by a variety of means, including, among others, hedges, emphatics and attitude markers. The use of these elements – their frequency, distribution and variety in different text types – is language and culture-specific. This paper focuses on selected exponents of stance by which speakers of English and Polish express their assessment of the truth of a proposition and their commitment to this assessment, and more specifically, on high-value modal verbs of epistemic necessity and inference used in linguistics research articles in these two languages. The analysis is based on two corpora of research articles published in the years 2001–2006 in English- and Polish-language linguistics-related journals, each corpus consisting of 200 complete articles. The analysis focuses on the following modal and quasi-modal verbs: MUST, NEED, HAVE (GOT) TO (Eng.) and MUSIEĆ (Pl.) in an attempt to discuss their use in one specific genre and discipline but across languages and cultures. The results indicate that, compared to the English necessity and inference cluster, Polish MUST is heavily underrepresented, but that the proportion of epistemic and root meanings as well as the ratio of epistemic proper and indirect evidential senses is similar across the two studied corpora. It is also apparent that for the English data the relative frequency of individual modal expressions is different from that reported from non-academic varieties of English, and that the proportion of epistemic and root meanings for these modals is different in the studied sample and in non-academic contexts.
This paper analyses the use of Polish achievements with durative expressions of godzinę (in an hour) and przez godzinę (for an hour) – types, their use in the progressive and finally a possible relationship between this use and the terminative recategorisation of imperfective achievements. In the analysis we have accounted for a number of linguistic and contextual factors that influence the possibility of the progressive use of achievements. This has allowed us to propose several subclasses of achievements that may undergo recategorisation under specific conditions set in the concluding section.
In this paper I will present an analysis of the semantic bias in partially-directed compound words (PCWs) in modern Chinese. As a very special type of compound words, PCWs are of great value to the study of modern Chinese. They can prove and reveal the inseparable relationship between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese. Furthermore, we can judge the cultural psychology of Chinese nation through the analysis of the bias feature.
The meaning of temporal distributiveness occurs either in situations in which a habitual activity is correlated with the recurrent periods of time, or in situations in which the recurrent periods of time are accompanied by an activity. The present paper is yet another contribution to a series of papers exploring temporal constructions in Polish that express the meaning of distributiveness. It focuses on the analysis of constructions such as ostrzał gęstniał z każdą minutą, which are exponents of the so-called intensifying and distributive time.
The article discusses a new jargon; so-called “jazyk padonkov”. It originated spontaneously about 10 years ago in the Russian Internet. Its users describe themselves as the representatives of the counterculture and they object to all norms, orders and bans. The jargon itself is characterised by not following orthographic rules, i.e. the words are written in their phonetic form. In the vocabulary one can find a lot of emotives and vulgarisms. Despite the fact that the jargon is new, single words and idiomatic expressions created by internauts have become popular enough to become a part of the colloquial language.
The study focuses on the names of Opel cars and serves as an example of the potential contribution that a linguist can make to the process of development and evaluation of brands. It also analyses how the patterns of branding have changed together with the shift from the descriptive names in the production era through those influenced by semantics and social rank to those phonetically and orthographically guided in the marketing era.
This paper presents the results of a small-scale study into advanced trainee interpreters’ performance in tasks which involve consecutive interpretation of openly evaluative texts, with particular focus on the use of agentless structures and nominalizations by male and female subjects. It seeks answers to the following questions: i) Is the interpreter’s involvement in the ongoing discourse a factor that may elicit agentless structures in the output? ii) Does the preference for such constructions seem to be related to the gender of the interpreter? The analysis is based on 40 interpretations of four formal addresses, of which two express criticism and the other two praise of the audience. One text in each set is addressed to students of English at the University of Silesia, a group to which the trainee interpreters belong and with which they identify. The results indicate that while there is no substantial difference in the use of agentless structures in contexts which involve identification of the interpreter with the ultimate receiver and in contexts which preclude identification, nominalizations tend to be used slightly more frequently in the former set of circumstances. It also appears that female interpreters are more likely to use nominalizations in texts which express open evaluation of the audience with which they identify, irrespective of the direction of valuation.
The use of foreign language elements in advertisements is quite a common practice. Therefore, a large number of publications on this topic comes as no surprise. However, for the study purposes the researchers apply different perspectives and points of reference when it comes to defining what actually constitutes the use of foreign-language elements. The present paper offers a short review of those approaches, showing the discrepancies between various standpoints. It also addresses the methodological difficulties related to the application of clear-cut definitions. Given the variability of standpoints, it is suggested that the issues outlined in the paper need to be taken into consideration before any attempts are made at comparing the results of different studies of the problem.
The paper focuses on the analysis of the lexical borrowings of English origin used in the Polish language of Internet message boards. First, general information is given about typical features of the language used in Internet texts, followed by the summary of various understandings of the term ‘borrowing’. The main part of the paper focuses on the description of the loans found in the texts taken from Internet message boards. Both the differences between individual users as well as between different topics of conversation (i.e. context) are taken into account. Finally, the findings of the present analysis are compared with those for the spoken spontaneous Polish (Zabawa 2006) and the Polish language of hip-hop songs (Bartłomiejczyk 2008).
The aim of my article will be the analysis of the results of the empirical research concerning the process of acquisition of English article system by Polish learners, carried out at three different levels of L2 acquisition.
English articles, as a semantic category non-existent in Polish, constitute a notorious source of difficulties in their acquisition by Poles. Polish learners of English at the beginning of their education, being at the elementary level, do not actually acquire articles because of the lack of associations with Polish counterparts. The semantics of English articles differs while compared to Polish, where instead of the articles: a/an, the demonstrative pronouns occur, e.g. ten (this), tamten (that) or there exists a different word order, different intonation, verbal aspects and many other syntactic-semantic processes.
While teaching English, we may easily observe that the process of acquisition of English article system by Polish learners differs depending on the level of advancement in learning English. In my article I would like to familiarize the addressees with the question of acquisition of articles by young teenagers, late teenagers and young adults. I hope the results of my research will evoke an interesting source for scientific discourse.
This paper concerns itself with the process of conceptualization, which is understood as on-line conceptual and linguistic formation of messages prior to verbalization. The issue is discussed in terms of Levelt’s (1989) model of speech production and von Stutterheim’s (2003) paradigm for text analysis. In particular, the paper looks into the claims advanced by von Stutterheim regarding the role of grammatical aspect in the construal of events, which may be either closed or open-ended, the perspective taken by the speaker and the resultant amount of information packaged into utterances. Even though the underlying theory constitutes a consistent framework, the incoming research data is beginning to show divergent stylistic preferences within aspectually related language types. This calls for careful examination of the existent findings, with emphasis on specific languages and/or language pairings rather than broad typological categories. The paper ends with predictions regarding event encoding patterns in Polish, as these are likely to influence L2 encoding preferences.
The article aims at presenting a few neuroanatomical models and neuroanatomically based theories (the Maturational State Hypothesis, the Aging Hypothesis, the Fragile Rote Hypothesis and the Entrenchment Hypothesis, among other things,) inherent in the concept of fossilization. The models will be considered from the point of view of the advanced users of language, an emphasis being put on an interplay of factors responsible for the fossilized language competence.
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