PORADNIK JĘZYKOWY

ISSUE 8 / 2016

ARTICLES AND DISSERTATIONS

  • Hélène Włodarczyk, Andrè Włodarczyk : About the pragmatic nature of predication (or about meta-information in linguistic predication)
    This paper is an attempt at presenting the long and complex history of the concepts of subject and predicate both in logic and linguistics in a nutshell in order to shed light on the pragmatic apprehension of these concepts proposed recently in the metainformative centering (MIC) approach. Although this new linguistic theory revisits notions belonging to a language philosophy tradition that is more than two thousands years old, it takes modern neurolinguistic and artificial intelligence research, especially results concerning the importance of attention sharing as well as the idea of knowledge sharing, into account and applies them to linguistic communication.
  • Jadwiga Linde-Usiekniewicz : Elusive to. A side note to Derwojedowa and Kopcińska’s paper On non-nominal subjects
    The paper addresses only one issue raised in the study by Derwojedowa and Kopcińska, i.e. the surface-syntactic representation of sentences bearing the segment in question, e.g. Grać w brydża, to gram, ale tylko z bratem w parze (roughly: I do play bridge but only with my brother as a partner). According to the Authors, in such sentences to is a dependent of the verb and the dependency relation is that of modification. In this paper I argue that the so-called topical (or thematic) to (featured in the example above) shows semantic, syntactic and information structure properties that distinguish it both from the so-called focal (or rhematic) to, e.g. To w brydża gram z bratem w parze. (It is bridge that I play with my brother as a partner) and from topicalising expressions, such as jeśli chodzi o… (as to…). It is argued that topical to should be seen not as a modifying (single place) particle, but as a kind of connecting word, which joins the sentence rheme with the sentence theme, with the latter presented as emphatic one, i.e. one that excludes another potential and semantically similar themes.
  • Mariola Wołk : Non-physical hunger – on the meaning of expressions: głodny [czegoś] (hungry [for something]), spragniony [czegoś] (thirsty [for something]) and żądny [czegoś] (greedy [for something])
    The paper focuses on the adjectives głodny (hungry), spragniony (thirsty) and żądny (greedy), which appear in contexts which are not typical of their common usage. While sentences like On jest głodny/spragniony (He is hungry/thirsty) with the adjective as a predicative expression, and adjectival phrases such as głodny/spragniony wędrowiec (hungry/thirsty wanderer) are instances of typical usage, głodny czegoś (hungry for something), spragniony czegoś (thirsty for something), żądny czegoś (greedy for something), are untypical, and the last expression appears only in such a form. Tentatively, the author perceives the analysed adjectives as indicators of the will of the experiencer. The phrases are units of language (as defined by Andrzej Bogusławski, see Bogusławski 1976) different than one-segment expressions głodny and spragniony, although historically they refer to words such as głód, pragnienie, żądza/żądanie (hunger, thirst, greed, respectively). However, acknowledging the lexical independence of the units does not mean that the analysed units, as regards their content, are set apart from the expressions from which they are derived. The research is aimed at characterising their semantic properties, as well as determining relationships among them (deciding whether they are equivalent in meaning), establishing their relationship with the semantically simple verb chcieć (ktoś chce czegoś) (to want (someone wants something)), and – as a consequence – making an attempt at explicating their meanings.
  • Natalia Zemlanaja : On the semantic relation between the expressions zdarzenie, wydarzenie, event (words meaning incident, occurrence, event) in contemporary Polish
    The author of this paper aims at analysing the semantic relation between the Polish expressions zdarzenie, wydarzenie (words meaning incident, occurrence, event) and the borrowing event. The last of the enumerated expressions, according to the chronological data derived from NKJP (the National Corpus of Polish), occurred in the Polish language in the mid-1990s. Polish has been familiarising with this expression: it has assumed the Polish inflection paradigm, it also proves to be active in terms of word formation. In numerous contexts, event replaces its Polish dictionary equivalents: zdarzenie and wydarzenie. In the research process, semantic analysis methods were applied, including in particular the method of making hypotheses and verifying them with contradiction tests. It was proved that the language units zdarzenie and wydarzenie are not synonymous, and the former one is simpler in terms of semantics. The borrowing event can be deemed a lexical counterpart of none of the analysed Polish expressions as its meaning is much more specialised and its main semantic characteristic is ‘being organised by someone for someone for a purpose’.
  • Celina Heliasz : What can be heard in one’s voice? The metapragmatic relation of vocal activities
    The object of this research is a prosody of utterances as vocal activities as well as utterances about the realised or possible utterances which are formulated in the natural language. The method applied to the research was the theory of language units, cf. Bogusławski (1973, 1988, 2008), as well as the principles of metalinguistics, cf. C. Caffi (1994: 2461-2466), J. Lucy (2004), W. Bublitz and A. Hübler (2007: 1-26). Two types of expressions forming metapragmatic relations of vocal activities were distinguished. One is speech act verbs. The other is adverbial qualifications of the voice (or the tone of voice).
  • Monika Jabłońska : Prepositional structures as one of the manifestations of the Polish language analysation
    The object of the analysis presented in this paper is five pairs of structures, composed of a correct synthetic structure and a corresponding analytic structure, which is disapproved of in terms of prescriptivism yet occurring quite frequently in utterances by contemporary language users. Due to subtle semantic differences between the synthetic and analytic forms, the latter one is beginning to win the speakers’ approval and is slowly being absorbed by the language system. The process is evidence of the intensifying tendency for analysation of the Polish language, which was observed already in the 16th-century texts and is a source of the increasing number of syntactic synonyms today.

POLISH GRAMMAR

  • Alina Kępińska : Czy nasz język jest filozoficzny? (Is our language philosophical?), Wywód fi lozoficzności naszego języka (The reasoning on the philosophical nature of our language) by Jan Nepomucen Kamiński

REVIEWS

  • Izabela Stąpor : Krystyna Długosz-Kurczabowa, Wyrazy, które intrygowały i które intrygują (The words that were and are intriguing), Warszawa 2015
  • Małgorzata Miławska-Ratajczak : Edward Łuczyński, Wiedza o języku polskim dla logopedów (The knowledge of the Polish language for speech therapists), Gdańsk 2015

EXPLANATIONS OF WORDS AND EXPRESSIONS

BIOGRAPHICAL ENTRIES AND MEMOIRS