PORADNIK JĘZYKOWY

ISSUE 5 / 2019

ARTICLES AND DISSERTATIONS

  • Irena Szczepankowska : International collocations as components of capitalist discourse and their reception in the contemporary Polish language.

    This paper analyses international collocations, winged words and aphoristic phrases being components of capitalist discourse, which has been intensively adapted by Poles since 1989, such as: wolny rynek (free market), wolna konkurencja (free competition), własność prywatna (private property), kapitał spekulacyjny (risk capital), prowadzić biznes (to run a business), zaciągnąć kredyt (to take out a loan), niewidzialna ręka rynku (the invisible hand), gra interesów (an interplay of interests), raj podatkowy (a tax haven), pracować w szarej strefie/ na czarno (to work in the grey economy / informal sector), wpaść w spiralę długów (to fall into a debt spiral); Pieniądz nie śpi (Money never sleeps), Kapitał nie ma narodowości (Capital has no nationality), Nie ma darmowych lunchów (There is no such thing as a free lunch), Dajemy wędkę, nie rybę (Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime); Gospodarka, głupcze! (It’s the economy, stupid). A broad reception of this type of phrases in the colloquial Polish language and their frequent reproductions in journalistic texts and comments published in recent years on popular Polish web portals have been noticed. It has been proved that experts featured in the media (economists, politicians, lawyers, and journalists) shape the collective mentality by means of collocations, which are to a large extent calques of the corresponding expressions and phrases used in English-language texts, reproduced in the discourse. They serve the purpose of imposing a common ideologically conceptualised view of reality on discourse participants. Hence, the quoted collocations are treated in this paper as carriers of the capitalist worldview and a substantial component of communicative competence of public discourse participants, which fulfils several significant functions characterised in this paper as: nominative (referential), persuasive and evaluative functions.

  • Joanna Kowalczyk : Obraza uczuć religijnych (insult to religious feelings) – a legal, linguistic, cultural category. A linguistic and systemic problem.

    This paper is dedicated to a complex legal, linguistic and social category, namely obraza uczuć religijnych (insult to religious feelings). Definitions of terms such as uczucia religijne (religious feelings) and obraza uczuć religijnych found in normative acts, judicial decisions and doctrine studies were
    analysed and described. Due to the nature of this paper and the social context, the interpretation of the principles of Catholicism was also included in the research.

    The aim of the conducted analyses was to determine the meaning of concepts such as uczucia religijne and obraza uczuć religijnych in light of statutory and cultural determinants shaping the secular state of law with Christian roots.

    The principles of the linguistic and systemic interpretation were chosen as the methodological basis of the research.

    The overview revealed the unstable pragmatic position of the discussed categories. It was established that the main cause of the interpretational instability was the difficulty to adopt a unanimous standpoint regarding the meaning of the lexeme obraza (insult) being part of the term obraza uczuć
    religijnych. A correlation between the secular law and the canonical doctrine was identified and described in the course of the examination. This part of the study presents how legislative and case-law texts are connected with Christian values.

  • Małgorzata Karwatowska : On palliative communication.
    By reference to Grice’s maxims, the principles of politeness and empathy, that is emotional identification with another person, mental engagement in what the speaker feels, experiences, says, the author proposes the term komunikacja paliatywna (palliative communication), which, however, she does not intend to be used only with respect to a patient with a chronic disease or nearing the end of their life. She wants it to be understood in accordance with the etymology of the word “palliative”. “Palliative communication” would mean, in her opinion, gentleness, sensitivity, warmheartedness, empathy to the ill. She wishes that each doctor-patient interaction be treated as a relationship marked with humanitarianism, respect for the Other, concern about them. The paper points not only to verbal but also to non-verbal behaviours. It discusses selected forms of palliative communication, such as: the use of indicators of colloquial style instead of medical jargon, the application of more familiar means, e.g. diminutives, inclusive WE, euphemisms.
  • Anna Dąbkowska : Is confiding online still confiding? On the evolution of the genre of confession.

    The object of this paper is contemporary statements posted on Polish Internet forums, which can be interpreted as confessions.

    Its purpose is to check whether the semantic features of the genre of confession, with the corresponding verbal lexeme zwierzyć się–zwierzać się (to confide) and the derived noun lexemes zwierzenie (confession) and zwierzanie się (confiding), described by theoreticians and lexicographers, are reflected in online usages. And whether analysing such contexts will result in the necessity to extend or modify the dictionary explications and definitions.

    This is because online confessions differ from the original genre. This gives rise to the question if this results only from the change of the medium of making confessions or they have undergone the process of adaptation based on a peculiar communication situation, as an effect of which the prototypical genre characteristics have lost their significance, being pushed to the background, or the change of the medium has involved so significant genological modifications that the statements can no longer be called confessions and a new speech genre has been created. And it is extra-structural characteristics, namely the communication situation, that have become the indicator of the genre.

  • Karolina Lisczyk : Wege (vege) – an independent unit, a compound element, a motivational word.
    The purpose of this paper is to provide a linguistic description of the unit wege (vege), the expansion of which in the contemporary Polish language has been noticeable for more than ten years now and the grammatical status of which has still not been stabilised. It functions both as an independent word (a negative derivative coined based on the adjective wegetariański (vegetarian) or the noun wegetarianizm (vegetarianism)) and a compound element in non-affixal structures, which is added directly to noun stems. Neologisms derived from wege, e.g. wegować, wegowy and weg, have been noticeable in the environmental lexis used by vegetarians in recent years. Apart from the unit wege, forms wega and wegi as well as their graphic variants vege and vega can be found in online texts, which reflect colloquial speech. The description of the signalised forms was made based on the findings from the area of the contemporary structural word formation and the material was obtained from the Internet and the National Corpus of Polish.
  • Monika Szymańska : On singular masculine nouns in the accusative case. A cognitive approach.
    The subject matter of this study is the phenomenon of replacing forms of singular inanimate masculine nouns in the accusative case equal to the nominative case by forms equal to the genitive case. The analysis of some examples of this mechanism is aimed to determine the pattern according to which this process takes place and where its causes can be sought. At the same time, it is an attempt to answer the question why the phenomenon of the ACC sg = GEN sg syncretism refers to some inanimate masculine nouns only (e.g. in common phrases such as wyrwać *zęba (to pull a tooth), zdjąć *buta (to take off a shoe), which are considered incompliant with the language standard), and not to others. The aim of the discussion is the findings concerning the semantic function (role) of the genitive case in the linguistic structures where it occurs in the place of the accusative case equal to the nominative case that is sanctioned by the language standard and tradition. The analysed material (language expressions being a combination of verbs and subordinate singular nouns in the accusative case) was obtained from the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) with the use of the PELCRA search engine. The methods applied for the purpose of this study were modelled on the research instruments of cognitive grammar. This because it was assumed that using ACC sg = NOM sg and using ACC sg = GEN sg are two different ways of coding and that choosing one of the possible methods of coding by the speaker is related to profiling situations and events, which takes place in their utterances and statements.

POLISH GRAMMAR

  • Małgorzata Parys : Charakterystyka psychologiczna języka polskiego (Psychological description of Polish) by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay.

REVIEWS

  • Stanisław Dubisz : Tadeusz Szczerbowski,Polskie i rosyjskie słownictwo slangowe (Polish and Russian slang vocabulary), Kraków 2018.
  • Anna Jaworska : Urszula Sokólska (ed.), Socjolekt, idiolekt, idiostyl. Historia i współczesność (Sociolect, idiolect, idiostyle. The past and the present), Białystok 2017.

EXPLANATIONS OF WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS