PORADNIK JĘZYKOWY

ISSUE 5 / 2017

ARTICLES AND DISSERTATIONS

  • Radosław Pawelec : Presumed deviations and erotic excesses or a “dangerous competence” in interpretations of Old Polish works
    This paper presents three texts regarding erotic behaviours: from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Their interpretation in the works by historians of literature and manners is subjected to a critical reflection aiming to show that inattentive or unskilful reading of the language of an old text or perception of old behaviours from the perspective of the contemporary culture leads to distortions and misunderstanding. As a result, evaluations of the same phenomena and behaviours are completely different, which prevents understanding and acceptance of the specificity of the world of the past.
  • Beata Jarosz : The first lexicon of sexuological vocabulary – Słownik płciowy (Sexual dictionary) [1913] by Stanisław Kurkiewicz. Linguistic preliminaries
    This paper is dedicated to the forgotten first dictionary containing sexuological lexis, which has not been covered by lexicographic research to date. The lexicon includes the vocabulary coined by an eccentric pioneer of the Polish sexuology but also commonly used forms referring to various issues related to sexual life. The author proves that Stanisław Kurkiewicz did not take up the word-formation game, he only tried to supplement the Polish language system with expressions designating phenomena which had not been named before, at the same time ensuring informativeness and specificity of the names. She also argues that the dictionary is evidence of the development of the specialised medical language since individual forms correspond to units of knowledge.
  • Zuzanna Krótki : Names of card games in the Middle Polish period

    This paper analyses Middle Polish names of card games. This field, which was a novelty in the sixteenthcentury Polish language, developed extremely fast, which was greatly influenced by foreign languages: German and French. This research was commenced in order to answer the question how Old Polish dealt with the excessive number of units of foreign origin, how its users strove to adapt the lexis.

    It turned out that Poles often replaced foreign names of card games with Polish ones in the old times. They chose units implying analogous images with respect to foreign lexemes, if possible. Occasionally, they would also form language hybrids, that is contaminations of foreign and Polish words.

    The prevalent method in this sketch is the analysis of the contexts where the words from the CARD GAMES semantic field were present. The semantic value of a word in a given period was inferred from the certifications of its usage in the dictionaries recording Old Polish. The discussions were enriched also by later, nineteenth-century, descriptions of card games the names of which were recorded in the Middle Polish period.

  • Katarzyna Sornat : The woman in the titles of epigrams by Jan Andrzej Morsztyn (based on an analysis of female names)
    The fact that none of the monographs dedicated to the output of Jan Andrzej Morsztyn presents the linguistic creation of the female sex in the initial part of the poet’s works motivated the author of this paper to take up this type of analyses. The study was carried out according to the structuralist paradigm and the structural methods applied during the research enabled an exhaustive elaboration of the topic. This paper presents and discusses the results of a severalstage lexical analysis aimed to reconstruct the linguistic view of women established in 50 titles of poems by the author of Lutnia (Lute). The feminine names were selected randomly based on the edition of Utwory zebrane (Collected Works) compiled by Leszek Kukulski. A sample of the material, consisting of 35 noun lexemes, was subjected i.a. to morphological, frequency, axiological, and stylistic analyses. The numerical and percentage results of the research discussed in the text are illustrated by tables.
  • Beata Kuryłowicz : Proverbs as a source of knowledge of the eighteenth-century spiritual culture of Poles (based on Nowy dykcjonarz (New dictionary) by Michał Abraham Troc)

    This paper brings observations of the spiritual world of the eighteenth-century participants of the Polish culture, which was reconstructed based on nearly 800 proverbs noted down from Nowy dykcjonarz (New dictionary) by M.A. Trotz. The analysis of the paroemias registered in the dictionary serves the purpose of reconstructing the community reflection about the world, about the attitude to moral principles and system of values, to beliefs, attitudes towards the God and people, to judgments about the style of life, art, language, law, etc.

    Proverbs, which are the object of the discussions in this text, are evidence of the tradition and culture, where universal contents are coded, and a testimony of a given time – an epoch when they originated and the period when they formed the living substance of the Polish language, namely the second half of the 18th century.

    Due to their cliché nature, proverbs are carriers of conventionalised, not seldom stereotypical, information and therefore they reflect the thinking patterns that are most established in the cultural code. Owing to that, the cultural message contained in these short, yet not seldom meaningful, texts is a valuable supplementation of the information coming from other textual, historical, cultural sources.

  • Milena Wojtyńska-Nowotka : Lexical Germanisms in Rozprawy literackie (Literary Treaties) by Maurycy Mochnacki
    This paper is a continuation of a cycle dedicated to discussing the share of borrowings in the vocabulary of Rozprawy literackie (Literary Treaties) by M. Mochnacki. The analysis falls into the stream of research dedicated to the lexis of the 19th-century language. The author discusses the issue of the influence of German through i.a. indicating the methods of adapting the discussed borrowings to Polish, confirming their presence in lexicographic sources of the epoch, and carrying out a semantic analysis of the vocabulary with the use of lexical and semantic fields. Based on the presented material, the researcher concludes that the discussed lexical resource cannot be considered an innovative one since the lexemes of German origin used by Mochnacki are part of the standard, general variant of the 19th century Polish language.

POLISH GRAMMAR

  • Paulina Faliszewska : Systematyczna składnia języka polskiego (Systematic syntax of Polish) by Antoni Krasnowolski

REVIEWS

  • Małgorzata Kapusta : Jan Kutyła, Słownik gwary lasowiackiej Kamienia i okolicy na Rzeszowszczyźnie (Dictionary of the Lasowiacy dialect of Kamień and its area in the Rzeszów region), Rzeszów 2016
  • Anna Jaworska : Błażej Osowski, Justyna Kobus, Paulina Michalska-Górecka, Agnieszka Piotrowska-Wojaczyk (eds), Język w regionie, region w języku (Language in the region, the region in language), Poznań 2016

EXPLANATIONS OF WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS

WORDS AND PHRASES