PORADNIK JĘZYKOWY

ISSUE 6 / 2015

ARTICLES AND DISSERTATIONS

  • Grażyna Zarzycka : Metaphorical illustration of European and Polish issues in the press discourse in the period of euro zone crisis during the Polish European Union presidency
    The object of this paper is the discourse continuing in the pages of Gazeta Wyborcza and Polityka in November 2011 (the last month of the Polish EU presidency) and in December 2011 (the time when important EU summits took place with prominent Poles participating). The subject of the discourse was the crisis in the European Union, in particular in the so-called euro zone, as well as the place of Poland in the EU and the place of the European Union in Poland. The metaphors, allegories, similes (e.g. “multispeed Europe”, which “crashes”, “crawls”, “the United States of Europe”, “the grand European project”, Poland as a “colony”, “reservation”, but also a “lurking tiger” and “hidden dragon”) used by commentators of the political and economic situation reflect the state of mentality of Europeans. They are also an illustration of the evolving European identity and national identities, including above all changes in the Polish identity. The analysis of the metaphorical expressions illustrating European and Polish matters was conducted with various ideological positions taken into consideration, with the application of discourse analysis and ethnolinguistic methodology. As a result of the analysis, answers were obtained i.a. to the following questions: how did “Poland” perceive Brussels in particular historical moments? How did it “see” its place in the EU? What were the viewpoints on the issue among various political groups in Poland? Metaphorical expressions serving the purpose of illustrating certain notions and phenomena were examined and their types and functions in the discourse were identified.
  • Anita Wiaderek : Bilingualism, biculturalism, national and cultural identification on the example of foreigners living in Poland

    This paper is dedicated to the presentation of research on bilingualism, biculturalism and identification of foreigners living in Poland. Interest in this area results from the need to know the foreigners who form – together with us – a multicultural society and from curiosity of the processes of becoming/being bilingual and bicultural.

    The research was conducted in a group of 28 persons. Interview with elements of questionnaire survey and identity interview was applied as the research technique.

    What follows from analyses of the collected material is that the most common type of bilingualism found in Polish immigrants is incomplete and dominant bilingualism. It is combined with biculturalism in the case of the majority of the respondents. As a result of functioning in the second language and the second culture all the time, the respondents’ identity and identification are subject to changes.

  • Bartłomiej Maliszewski : The warm : cold (ciepło : zimno) opposition in describing international relations
    This paper concerns exponents of the opposition: warm – cold, which occurs in comments about the course of international relations. One criterion of ordering the presented metaphors is their subject (names of states and changes in the situation) and the other – the degree of conventionalisation of individual metaphors (set, animated, occasional metaphors). In this paper, the author points to the regularity of metaphorical connections and numerical disproportion of the exponents that refer to positively and negatively evaluated states and changes in the situation.
  • Joanna Treska : The linguistic view of water in Polish and Czech phraseology and paremiology
    This paper attempts to examine the linguistic view of water in Czech and Polish phraseology and paremiology. Both languages belong to the same group and the nations using them live in similar climatic conditions. The symbolism of water in religion and culture is extremely rich – water is chaos and danger, power and fertility, death and rebirth, transience. Water is one of the elements, it is a symbol of the passive feminine principle, and magical powers are attributed to it. What also follows from the analysis of the linguistic material is that the linguistic view of water in phraseology and paremiology of both languages is based mainly on symbolism arising from everyday observations of water, its practical applications and risks it involves. The cultural symbolism is convergent with the linguistic view of water only in a few cases. Hence, Christianity and European culture exerted a secondary impact on the shape of the linguistic view of water in Polish and Czech.
  • Małgorzata Dawidziak-Kładoczna : Names of Catholic holidays in the consciousness of contemporary users of Polish

    The rich repertoire of Catholic holiday and celebration names provokes the following question: “Do contemporary users of the Polish language know the names and use them?” In order to answer it, I applied two research procedures: the corpus method (analysis of the National Corpus of Polish – NKJP) and the questionnaire method.

    However, I begin my paper with explaining semantic relations between the terms uroczystość (a celebration), święto (a holiday) and wspomnienie (a memoir). I treat them both as units functioning in the general variant of Polish and as specialised terms. Afterwards, I briefly recall names of the major holidays pointing to their rich synonymy. In the further part of this paper, I present figures obtained from the analysis of contexts excerpted from the NKJP and then I discuss the questionnaire data regarding the respondents’ familiarity with the holiday names. What follows from the NKJP is that the discussed vocabulary is present in Polish although its frequency is not too high. Familiarity with the lexis with which I am concerned among the responding students is significantly poorer, which I consider an effect of civilisation and social transformations. The research conducted with both methods lead to the conclusion that the most commonly known names are: Boże Narodzenie (Christmas), Wielkanoc (Easter), Wszystkich Świętych (All Saints Day), Trzech Króli (the Feast of the Three Wise Men), Zaduszki/Dzień Zaduszny (All Souls’ Day), Boże Ciało (the Feast of Corpus Christi), Niedziela Palmowa (Palm Sunday) and Środa Popielcowa (Ash Wednesday).
  • Ewa Kozioł-Chrzanowska : Comic transformations of set phrases

    The analysis of the linguistic material is aimed at identifying the types of consciously used innovations occurring in comic transformations of set phrases and units of language. The aim of the carried out research is related to noticeable changes in using such units, i.a. the decreasing resource of paroemias used nowadays and their simultaneous – usually comic – modifications.

    The adopted research method relies on a compilation of the analysed examples (coming from the Heca hecą column printed in the weekly “Przekrój”) with their canonical forms derived from selected studies and their division into groups representing modification types (the groups were distinguished based on a classification of phraseologism modifications presented in works by Stanisław Bąba and Grażyna Majkowska).

    Comic transformations of set phrases are lexical in nature; these are normally developing and replacing innovations, less frequently – contaminating and shortening ones. A formal change does not always cause a semantic modification; innovative meanings can, in turn, refer to the original ones (have the relation of antonymy with them, weaken their figurativeness, cause intended ambiguity) or not (transform them towards pure nonsense, create new meanings).

POLISH GRAMMAR

  • Magdalena Zawadzka : Compendiosa linguae Polonicae institutio by Jan Karol Woyna. The first grammar of Polish by a Pole

REPORTS, NOTICES, POLEMICS

  • Jerzy Białomyzy : A report on the academic conference “Kontynuacja badań Oskara Kolberga w Polsce północno-wschodniej” (“Continuation of the research performed by Oskar Kolberg in north-eastern Poland”), Olecko, 8 May 2014

REVIEWS

  • Władysław T. Miodunka : Michał Głuszkowski, Socjologia w badaniach dwujęzyczności. Wykorzystanie teorii socjologicznych w badaniach nad bilingwizmem (Sociology in research on bilingualism. The application of sociological theories in research on bilingualism), Toruń 2013
  • Renata Dźwigoł : Magdalena Puda-Blokesz, Mitologizmy frazeologiczne w języku polskim (na materiale leksykografii XX i XXI w.) (Phraseological mythologisms in the Polish language (on the material of the 20th- and 21st-century lexicography)), Kraków 2014

EXPLANATIONS OF WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS

WORDS AND PHRASES