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The aim of this paper is to address the issue of teaching politeness in textbooks dedicated to learners of Italian as a foreign language. It is assumed that in today’s ever-changing world, full of conflicts and challenges of various kinds, polite communication has become of increasing importance as it helps overcome differences between the participants of the act of communication and promote a peaceful coexistence. Politeness is a phenomenon particularly sensitive to the situational context: the forms considered appropriate vary according to the parameters such as place, channel, age or status of the interactants. Since the complexity of politeness and the variability of its exponents make it difficult to teach, the purpose of this research is to analyze if and how the current textbooks of Italian deal with this aspect of communicative competence. The paper examines which aspects of politeness are taught and with what methods. The analysis is based on the selected textbooks of Italian published in Italy and Poland, in order to compare their approaches.

The present paper is aimed to analyze how certain concepts of political identity are translated into poeticsof identity in contemporary Spanish narrative. The analysis covers four novels published since 1998,written by Spanish authors and which achieved high rates of sales and positive critical recognition. Thestudy was not limited to specific immigrant groups in order to reflect a variety of experiences and politicalpositions represented in the texts. The paper is a study of the image and functions of immigrantcharacters in selected Spanish novels of the last three decades: Háblame, musa, de aquel varón (1998) by Dulce Chacón, Ventajas de viajar en tren (2000) by Antonio Orejudo, Cosmofobia (2007) by Lucía Etxebarria and En la orilla (2013) by Rafael Chirbes. Sociologists and psychologists indicate three main classes of negative attitudes towards immigrants (citizen insecurity, threat to cultural identity and competitiveness in obtaining resources). Within this context the article aims to determine to what extent the literary representations of immigrant characters constitute reproductions or transgressions of culturally prefabricated images of the Other and explores the different narrative and ideological functions these characters play. The paper also studies the presence of discourses that support social exclusion of immigrants and the means of subverting them.

The conjunction como si select usually in the subordinated adverbial clauses (modal, conditional and comparative) the tenses of the subjunctive mood cantara / cantase and hubiera / hubiese cantado. However in some papers is mentioned the possibility of the construction of como si with the tenses of indicative mood. This paper contains the analysis of the modal selection after como si and, particularly, the possible substitution of subjunctive by the indicative tenses. The analyses is realized on the ground of the corpus of Real Academia Española (CORPES XXI, CREA, CREA. Versión anotada).

It is a pleasure for me to introduce papers presented at the 14th InternationalSymposium „Moral Competence: Its Nature, Relevance, and Education” hosted by theInstitute of Foreign Languages of the Faculty of Philology at Vilnius University, Lithuania,on 23-24 July 2020, in collaboration with several academic institutions from abroad, suchas Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Due to the pandemic restrictions, asymposium was organized in an online mode. Six papers were revised and submitted tothis special issue as symposium proceedings, completed by two additional and relatedpapers. The contents offer a thorough insight into the concept of – and reasearch into – themoral competence defined by Georg Lind (Institute for Moral-Democratic Competence;formerly: University of Konstanz) and visualized by his Moral Competence Test (formerly:Moral Judgment Test) certified in 41 languages. In certain papers research findings andmethods based on further measuring instruments, as well as the alternative approaches tomoral judgment and decision making were applied and discussed (e.g., moral foundationsapproach).

This paper aims at examining the causes of the emergence of French subordinate Noun-Noun com-pounds. It is well known that the Noun-Noun pattern in French remains marginal compared to other lexicogenic processes, especially N-PREP-N or N-A, and it is supposed that its appearance as well as its progressive development took place during the last two centuries (19th-20th). The aim of this paper is to examine more in detail when and why French Noun-Noun structures emerge. As for the first question, empirical data from the Frantext corpus allow to hypothesize that both the type and the token frequency of French Noun-Noun compounds remain stable since the thirties of the nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War and that after this period, especially during the sixties, it begins to grow exponentially. Contrary to Arnaud’s estimate (2003, p. 141), no significant change in frequency or productivity was observed around the middle of the 19th century. As for the second question, the author claims that the emergence of subordinate N-N compounds was triggered by an increase in the productivity of the attributive N-N compounds, for which there is no competitive pattern in French. The theoretical rationale of this hypothesis is anchored in paradigmatic approaches to word formation, with specific reference to the formalization made according to the Construction Morphology framework (Booij, 2010).

The paper explores the use of the lexemeshitin the corpus of Dave Chappelle’s stand-up specials released between 2000 and 2019. It consists of two parts: theoretical and analytical. The first one presents theoretical and pragmatic considerations connected with stand-up routines, touches upon slang semantics, and depicts the links between Dave Chappelle’s stage persona and the hip hop community. Lastly, it presents the reader with the past and present-day status of the lexeme at issue. In the analytical section of the paper the use ofshitin the aforesaid corpus is scrutinized from the semantic angle. The discussion is supplemented with the results culled from the corpus of rap lyrics compiled at the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The paper argues that (i)shithas lost its taboo status and is mainly used in both corpora as a less formal equivalent ofstuff,anythingandsomethingand (ii) Chappelle’s stage use ofshit, even though present in a different context and serving context-specific purposes, corresponds to the use of African American rappers in their song lyrics (assuming that rap lyrics depict African American English, this conclusion can be extended to the sociolect of African Americans).

The paper investigates the approaches employed for attracting international full-degree students in three countries on the periphery of Europe/the European Economic Area: Norway, Poland and Portugal. These countries, considered semi-peripheral regarding international student recruitment, have shorter traditions for incoming mobility than countries that are major recruiters and which have been the focus of previous research on attracting international students. The paper analyses national policies and strategies, focusing on their emergence, rationales and instruments. The study is comparative, aiming to find commonalities and differences in the approaches of these countries further to the changing global environment in higher education. The major finding is that semi-peripheral countries appear to employ different strategies and resort to other comparative advantages than the largest student recruiters, exploiting political, cultural or geographical aspects rather than educational assets. The findings highlight the need for these countries to identify their distinctive attraction capacities and assets, as well as to be purposeful in choosing their target recruitment regions.

There is a body of literature that favors universal and unconditional public assurance policies over those that are targeted and means-tested. Two such proposals—the basic income proposal and job guarantees—are discussed here. The paper evaluates the impact of each program on macroeconomic stability, arguing that direct job creation has inherent stabilization features that are lacking in the basic income proposal. A discussion of modern finance and labor market dynamics renders the latter proposal inherently inflationary, and potentially stagflationary. After studying the macroeconomic viability of each program, the paper elaborates on their environmental merits. It is argued that the “green” consequences of the basic income proposal are likely to emerge, not from its modus operandi, but from the tax schemes that have been advanced for its financing. By contrast, the job guarantee proposal can serve as an institutional vehicle for achieving various environmental goals by explicitly targeting environmental rehabilitation, conservation, and sustainability. Finally, in the hope of consensus building, the paper advances a joint policy proposal that is economically viable, environmentally friendly, and socially just.

The paper discusses various possibilities of using structuralism in the current historical research. It seems, e.g., that this methodology or mode of reasoning could still be helpful to understand the origins of some historic phenomena. Despite the widely-held belief, the most important thinkers associated with structuralism, such as Jean-Pierre Vernant, Roland Barthes, or Pierre Vidal-Naquet, did not reduce their interests to the study of synchronic relations, but – as Foucault put it – attempted to fashion the instrument for a precise historical analysis. It was also a case of Michel Serres’ reflection on the origins of geometry. This example is closely examined in the paper to indicate some differences between both traditional and structuralist approaches to that question.

The current condition of philosophy as a discipline is quite problematic, in particular if we consider its relationship to other human sciences and to other disciplines in general. The philosophical debate appears fragmented, and philosophy itself has lost any specific role in the present scientific landscape. This situation determines a sort of “identity crisis”, whose main consequence is the coexistence of antinomical views about philosophy in the contemporary scientific and public discourse. Starting from this context, the paper aims at providing a description of philosophy as “theory of mediation”. This description does not want to be ‘original’, but rather tries to emphasize an element that is always been rooted in the very essence of philosophy, but that has also often been neglected. Philosophy has always pointed out the necessity to think the in-between of things, their relation and the passage from one to another, rather than just offering a taxonomy or a factual description of the world. In order to prove this point, the paper offers an analysis of some classical texts, in particular of some fragments by Heraclitus and of a passage taken from Hegel’s early writings. A view that rethinks philosophy as “mediology” allows a rehabilitation of philosophy as a specific discipline and as a systematic enterprise, at the same time providing a new framework for the understanding of the relationship between philosophy and other sciences.

Bailey and Maroldt (1977) and Domingue (1977) were the first to argue that language contact during the Middle Ages between Old English and both Old Norse and Norman French resulted in linguistic creolization. This theory, known as the Middle English creolization hypothesis, implies that Middle English, and perhaps Modern English as well, should be classified as a creole. Though frequently discredited on historic, linguistic, and terminological grounds, the creolization hypothesis has attracted interest for longer than might be expected. This paper argues that the persistence of the hypothesis may be ideologically motivated. The first section examines connotations of the term “creole” and applies these connotations to an analysis of the initial presentations of the creolization hypothesis. The second and third section of the paper review and analyze the forty-year history of the debate, focusing separately on arguments for creolization (and koinezation) between Anglo-Norman French and Old Norse, respectively. The fourth and final section examines challenges presented by the concept of creole exceptionalism to common attitudes about language equality and the theory of Universal Grammar. It is argued that these issues attract greater interest when contextualized within a discussion of a “major” world language such as English than when creolization is understood as an atypical process restricted to “peripheral” languages such as Haitian Creole. This paper also references relevant political issues such as the current controversy among medievalists about the field’s historic lack of inclusivity.

The euro was intended to bring more economic and political convergence between European countries. This was the main promise of the French Monetarists during the founding debate on European monetary integration, as well as European leaders who decided to permanently fix exchange rates and introduce the euro. Moving forward on the path towards “ever closer union” was the greatest hope of both the architects of the common currency and its political supporters. However, as a result of the eurozone crisis, European countries actually diverged from each other. The main argument of this paper is straightforward: the financial and banking crisis in the euro area gave rise to the dangerous divide between the core “surplus” countries in the north and peripheral “deficit” countries in the south. In this paper, I examine this divergence by looking at one crucial indicator: the number of young people who are unemployed and inactive (NEET) in the northern and southern countries of the eurozone, before and after the financial crisis. Erasmus + Programme of the European Union

In this paper, I present Christine Korsgaard’s style of building a conception of animal rights protection based on a concept of Kantian provenance, namely “end in itself”. Considering that an end in itself in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy includes only human beings, the American philosopher needed to modify (extend) the meaning of the abovementioned concept. This study aims at showing this change of the meaning in categories derived from Fregean semantics (sense and reference). Moreover, I will attempt to prove that by broadening the extension of “end in itself” Korsgaard uses a strategy called ethical extensionism and situates the revised (naturalized) categorical imperative ipso facto within environmental ethics.I start with elucidating Korsgaard’s views on the meaning of “end in itself” before she took interest in animal rights (set out mainly in Kant’s Formula of Humanity and The Sources of Normativity) and then I synthetically describe her animal rights philosophy with a special regard to the category of “natural good”. The second part of the article explains the methodology used in the paper, while the last part is intended to be an interpretation of Korsgaard’s thought.

The aim of the paper is to show the conditions of subjectivity constitution in terms of dialogue and the figure of the Other. The analytical and hermeneutical approach I hold is the foundation of interdisciplinary attempt to describe possible concepts of shared relation of the terms: consciousness, subjectivity and identity. The three appear to be recognized only in the ethical situation. It requires taking responsibility for the Other, for giving him the identity which mirrors one’s subjectivity. In this way the subject learns the limits and chances for gaining self-knowledge. The paper also presents a new approach towards redefining the definition of subjectivity, which includes artificially and medically enhanced entities.

The objective of the paper is to present various forms of constitutionalism, with a special focus on constitutionalism understood as a form of reflection of political community. The paper adopts the perspective of reflexivity theory in order to reconstruct the basic alternatives in that regard, and also to reveal their potential advant ges and weaknesses. As it is demonstrated, it is precisely philosophical and sociological conceptions of reflexivity that are particularly suitable for understanding the specificities of constitutionalism – indeed, the latter, as a discourse about the foundations of the political and legal existence of a given community, inevitably assumes the form of reflection. The special focus within the paper is devoted to two key distinctions within the sphere of reflexivity theory, which impact the manner in which constitutional reflection is performed. The first of the distinctions concerns the relationship of reflection to tradition, while the second is done according to the criterion of the logical structure of reflexive cognizance. It is argued here that the dominant version of modern constitutionalism prescribes that constitutional reflexion be perceived as a closed process with the objective of emancipation from tradition. An alternative to this mainstream approach can be proposed in the form of capturing constitutionalism as reflexion with its foundation in tradition, at the same time dialogically mediated in other forms of social and political discourse. Artykuł powstał w ramach realizacji projektu badawczego „Modele prawnej regulacji ryzyka w świetle teorii refleksyjności”, nr 2016/23/B/ HS5/00873, finansowanego przez Narodowe Centrum Nauki.

[EN] While the classic separable quotient problem remains open, we survey general results related to this problem and examine the existence of infinite-dimensional separable quotients in some Banach spaces of vector-valued functions, linear operators and vector measures. Most of the presented results are consequences of known facts, some of them relative to the presence of complemented copies of the classic sequence spaces c_0 and lp. Also recent results of Argyros, Dodos, Kanellopoulos [see 1 in the paper] and Sliwa [see 64 in the paper] are provided. This makes our presentation supplementary to a previous survey (1997) due to Mujica., The first three named authors were supported by Grant PROMETEO/2013/058 of the Conselleria d'Educacio, Investigacio, Cultura i Esport of Generalitat Valenciana. The second named author was also supported by GACR Project 16-34860L and RVO: 67985840.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the mechanisms used by the Francoist regime to seize the children of its political opponents, as well as to discuss the problem as depicted in contemporary historical novels. In order to achieve these goals, the paper begins with an inquiry into eugenics, as interpreted by the infamous Spanish psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera. Further, the author reviews the processes through which biological parents (and/or family) lost the legal control over their children, many of whom had their identities changed. Consequently, the analysis focuses on three new historical novels (La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón, Mala gente que camina by Benjamin Prado, and Si a los tres años no he vuelto by Any R. Cañil), which use the mediation of historical memory to recover the remembrance of the lost children of the Francoist regime.

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the assimilation in terms of voicing on the border between words in Macedonian and in Romanian. Although the compared languages belong to different language families, the pronunciation of the obstruental segments in this position is similar. In both Romanian and Macedonian, a regular regressive assimilation is observed on the border between two words. In Macedonian, the voiced obstruent at the end of a word can be pronounced as a voiced or a voiceless before a resonant at the beginning of the next word. It is important that more often the voiced obstruent at the end of the word loses voicing before a vowel in the initial position than before a sonant. In Romanian, before a resonant in the initial position, the voiced obstruent in the final position of the word in front of it is pronounced voiced. The voiceless obstruent on the border between words can be pronounced as a voiced if it occurs before a sonant in the initial position of the next word. This is an optional phenomenonlike the voiceless pronunciation of the voiced obstruent before a resonant on the border of two words in Macedonian. As one can see, in both languages, obstruents at the end of a word behave differently before initial vowels and sonants on the inter-word border.

The paper describes types of derivational formatives in Polish and Romanian functional, i.e. synchronic derivation, focusing on the proper derivation (i.e. derivation from single-word bases). The proper derivation is positioned as a type of word-formation and a branch of morphology. The author identifies theprimary functions of derivational formatives: the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic function. The formatives are identified using a methodology developed in Polish word-formation theory, especially within nest derivatology. Applying a methodology developed for the description of the Polish word-formationsystem is aimed at distinguishing derivational formatives in Romanian. The author identifies and classifies the following types of derivational formatives in Romanian: affixes (among these prefixes, suffixes, postfixes and ambifixes), alternants (defined as members of alternation), negative formatives (in backformation), paradigmatic formatives (defined as changes in inflexional paradigm), zero formative and accentual formatives. The author also suggests including the types of word-formation stems in the description of the formal structure of derivatives.

The aim of this paper is to present the Spanish proverbs related to the topic of greed that can be understood as a continuation of Publilius Syrus’ sentences. For the analysis are taken into account the contributions of two Hellenistic philosophical schools (Stoicism and Epicureanism), which illuminate the scope of the criticism of greed that occurs in these proverbs, both from a psychological as a social point of view. Latin sentences and Spanish proverbs are compared according to their formal or semantic continuity, as well as depending on other aspects (such as the tone or prosodic issues)

Coordination has been described far more rigidly than its actual usage shows. This paper describes cases of coordination structures in Spanish that break with some commonly held ideas and show that the search for communicative efficiency in languages rises above rigid formal rules.

In this paper, it will be shown that Hegel’s philosophical thematisation of subjective freedom has given a fundamental contribution to the historical innovation of modernity, which regards not only human rights, but also norms and values. Besides, it played an important role concerning the cultural transformation, i.e., the process of the realization of the historical innovation oriented towards the ideals of modern freedom. To show this, the author will focus on some passages from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right of 1820, in which Hegel regarded subjective freedom as universally-normative and, at the same time, as socially and historically contextualized (situated, respectively). Hegel, namely, explicates modern freedom in its ideality and moral normativity, addressing its realization in particular forms of life. Marriage, for instance, as it will be shown towards the end of this contribution, exemplified as the right to particularity, is the normative basis of modern subjective freedom. Tensions and collisions will permanently challenge this type of freedom and also require permanent (and self-defeating) efforts invested in striving for a (too contextualized and situated) „reconciliation“ (in Hegel´s terms Versöhnung).

Moving from Fichte’s assumption that “the essence of the I is its activity”, this paper tries to analyze the meaning and implications of the idea of “activity” [Tathandlung] in order to explicate the peculiarities of Fichte’s critical, transcendental, and moral idealism. Fichte’s idea of activity will be examined with reference to such basic concepts as collision [Anstoss], interaction [Wechselwirkung], inter-determination [Wechselbestimmung], and striving [Streben]. However, it is freedom which frames and connects the core components of Fichte’s thinking and sets up the goal of his philosophy of action. What freedom accounts for, can be identified both at the transcendental level, in the internal dynamic of infinity and finitude constituting the subjectivity of the I, and at the moral and social levels of Fichte’s thought, as the goal of the human action in history and in the society. In assuming the unitary character of Fichte’s philosophical system, concluding remarks are developed concerning the moral meaning of the act of striving for freedom and, conversely, the immorality of attitudes and feelings such as fear, resignation, and fatigue.

In this paper I will focus on education as the core function of reason in Kant and Fichte. The notion of reason carries an intrinsic tendency to universality, which is difficult to be reconciled with its local (cultural, historical, anthropological) background and actualisation. I believe that the stress on the importance of learning, which can be seen in the works of both Kant and Fichte, might provide useful clues to approaching the relation between universality and particularity. I will start by focusing on Kant’s narration on the genealogy of human reason in the Conjectural Beginning of Human History, and then move on to the critical writings and selected lectures in order to focus on the role of human dignity and ethical education for the moral appraisal and the practice of virtue. Later, I will consider Fichte’s lectures on the Vocation of the Scholar, the Vocation of Man and The Characteristics of the Present Age, which are crucial to understanding the social, ethical and political role of the scholar. For Fichte, education is the best instrument to eradicate selfishness, regarded as a historical phenomenon which can lead a nation to ruin. I will then provide some conclusions concerning the two accounts and their implications.

Since mid-2016 a debate has been going on about the necessary changes in the system of science and higher education in Poland. One of its elements is the discussion on how to improve the level of scientific excellence, recognition of Polish science worldwide and its internationalization. The paper puts forward proposals for several solutions helping to attain those goals. This concerns in particular an increase in the number of prestigious international grants redeemed at Polish universities, particularly those awarded by ERC. The paper also proposes criteria for selection of the universities that might obtain additional financing for transformation into research intensive universities. They would be based on demonstration of the path of the changes to be carried out, which require additional financing. The main aim of the paper is to propose specific solutions that might be applied in a new legislation regulating the issues of science and higher education.

Epistemic modality indicates the degree of certainty or doubt a speaker has for the proposition expressed by their utterance. Evidentiality, on the other hand, is the indication of the kind of evidence for a statement in question. Given the eminently persuasive character of homiletic discourse, it frequently makes use of epistemic and evidential markers. The preacher emphasizes his high degree of certainty about the content of what he says and, in order to gain credibility, he supports his reasons citing the Bible or other reliable sources. This paper aims to analyze the markers of epistemic modality and evidentiality in Catholic sermons in Spanish. Moreover, it intends to defi ne the limit between different kinds of evidence. In order to carry out this analysis, twenty homilies pronounced in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City have been examined. First of all, the defi nitions of epistemic modality and evidentiality are presented and the relation between these concepts is explored. Then, a classification of evidential values, based on the one by Plungian (2001: 351, 353), is illustrated. After that, the results of the analysis of epistemic modality and evidentiality in twenty sermons are discussed. Finally, the paper touches upon some problematic issues resulting from the classifi cation of different kinds of evidence.

It is a well-known fact that the etymology of the French lexicon is mostly Latin. But this apparently obvious consideration hides a signifi cant amount of unsure, if not biased, etymologies. This paper aims fi rst at criticizing the laxity of the etymological method : use of reconstructed vulgar Latin and old Frankish etymons upon unclear principles, huge distortions of meaning, phonetic irregularities, ignorance of the historical context, etc. In a second time, this paper aims at showing that the neglected Gaulish substratum can sometimes afford better explanations to some of these doubtful and impressionistic etymologies, and proposes new etymologies based upon attested Gaulish etymons.

The paper discusses basic income in the context of feminist political ecology using the concepts of reproductive labor, both performed by people and by nature. In the first part we elaborate on Wages for Housework campaign as a forerunner of the idea of basic income. The campaign inscribed the concept of income into intersectional relation between patriarchy and capitalism what was a key element of its revolutionary dimension. In the second part we analyze three different social struggles in order to create a ground for further reflections over the legitimacy such tools (and resolutions) as basic income. On the one hand the paper highlights some elements of the crisis of social reproduction, brought and further deepen by neoliberal reforms in Poland over the 25 years. On the other hand, it speaks to the issues of ecological crisis which needs to be taken into account in every anti-capitalist theory or strategy. Thus, the article aims to investigate if the wage demands for both reproductive and productive labor are still relevant in the era of neoliberal capitalism.

The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive, theoretical overview of how proverbs are used as a communicative and discursive strategy, taking into account the speaker’s communicative intention. I will pay attention both to the benefits of the use of this type of formulaic sequence in the construction of the speech, and to the illocutionary force and pragmatic implications entailed by these utterances. In order to do so, some considerations will be required – the encoding of the meaning of the proverbs, the decoding process by the addressee, and the way proverbs are inserted in the discourse. This paper inspects the importance of such factors as the need for articulation of fluent speech, the assumption of cultural patterns, the appeal to proverbiality that aligns the speaker with power structures of the community, or the masking of the speaker’s voice behind a collective entity in order to socialize and release tensions related to interpersonal contact.

The present paper aims at analysing the trajectories of the Romanian intellectuals immediately after the Revolution in 1989, and the fall of Communism. During the Communist years, the term itself (intellectual) had been used with ideological connotations. The intellectual (as a social value) was discussed according to the Marxist ideology, taking into consideration his concrete usefulness and his contribution to the Communist society. Immediately after 1989, the fundamental dilemma faced by the Romanian intellectual represents the necessity of the implication of the intellectuals inside the society or, on the contrary, the isolation in an Ivory Tower of creation. The second challenge aimed at the necessity of synchronizing the Romanian elite with the European one; the topics for debate in Western and Eastern Europe during the Cold War were fundamentally different. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the influence and the commitment of the Romanian intellectuals in reshaping the Post-Communist Romanian society.

The paper discuss the problem of lusophony as a poscolonial neoimperial Portuguese ideology. The author claims that the lusophonic mythology, that is currently being created, is ingrained in the tradition of salazarist propaganda. Also the frequent mentions of lusotropicalism in the context of the modern lusophony is observed especially in the case of enunciations of the Portuguese dignitaries of whom Mario Soares is the most proeminent. The conclusion is that the idea of lusophony may resemble lusotropicalism in many aspects, especially if we take into account the Portuguese point of view. Also the approach towards the idea of lusophony of the Portuguese speaking African countries and Brasil is shortly discussed.

The main purpose of the article is to present analysis of comic book Nô Pintcha which – as we state – is the exceptional example of visual representation of theory of education from period of early independ-ence of former portuguese colonies in Africa. Nô Pintcha was published in 1978 during the summit of ministers of education and educators from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé. Authors of Nô Pintcha considered comic book as a apendix to the basic literacy campaign in Guinea Bissau. Theory of education which was used during literacy campaign had origins of emancipa-tory popular education of Paulo Freire. Thus the analysis presented in this paper lies parallely in looking for the Nô Pintcha in perspective of comic book theory as well in looking for traces Freire’s theory.

The paper attempts at interpreting the condition of contemporary consumercapitalism through the prism of messianic enterprise. The aim is to considerthe possibility of subverting commoditization from the inside and to outline potentialways of doing this. The theoretical matrix of the paper are Walter Benjamin’sworks set in the tradition of Isaac Luria’s kaballah, along with their further criticism.The final result of the paper should be the figure of a “messianic dustman”and explanation why it has been chosen as the subject of subverting capitalism.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comparative analysis of a novel written in Italian by Laura Mancinelli, 'The Twelve Abbots of Challant', and its translation into Polish prepared by Maciej Brzozowski. Focusing on a few examples, such as the use of grammatical tenses and moods, differences in the syntax, and the problems of translating idiomatic and metaphoric expressions, the paper aims to compare the author’s style with that of the translator. The task undertaken by the translator seems very hard indeed from the very beginning due to considerable differences between the Italian and Polish languages in the use of tenses and moods. While the Italian grammar uses four moods, eight simple and seven compound tenses, the frugal Polish grammar makes with just three modes, one compound and three simple tenses. The discussion will clearly illustrate that thanks to some modifications it was possible to translate and preserve the meaning and the spirit of the Italian grammar and style.

The linguistic description of possessives is controversial. In traditional grammar they are defined as carriers of the meaning of possession or belonging; however, this paper intends to prove that in many cases such a meaning does not appear, and therefore, the possessive semantics of adjectives and pronouns known as possessives is a myth. Moreover, this article’s aim is to show the importance of context in the interpretation of the real meaning of a possessive. in order to confirm these hypotheses, and given the scarcity of works concerning Portuguese possessives, studies on English, Spanish and Polish ones carried out by various authors have been analyzed. What is more, some data from Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese (CRPC) have been examined. First of all, two different classifications of possessives are presented. Then, some cases of possessor deletion are shown, special attention being paid to the forms of expressing inalienable possession. After that, some structural characteristics of possessives are described, as well as their function as determiners. Finally, the paper shows the role that cultural and situational contexts play in the interpretation of the meaning of possessives.

A goal of the paper is to present Islamic feminism as a political-intellectualphenomenon that has been developing in the international Muslim womencommunity for a few decades. The author distinguishes Islamic feminism (thatpostulates gender quality and women’s empowerment on the basis of the religiousprinciples of Islam) from earlier feminist tradition that she labels after Margot Badranas Muslim feminism. The paper discusses political and intellectual background ofthe emergence of Islamic feminism and shows its complex relationships with bothpolitical Islam and the Western feminist discourses. A key factor here is a heritageof European colonialism and anti-Muslim politics of the West. The author refers tothe works of main representatives of Islamic feminism, such as Fatima Mernissi,Amina Wadud, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Asma Barlas, and examines their attempts toarrive at non-patriarchal reinterpretations of the Muslim tradition, Quranic texts and the established interpretations of the Sharia law.

The aim of the paper is to analyze a popular pseudo-scientific discoursein Germany in the twenties that developed an idea of a state as a living organism.The discourse was sometimes named “the biology of the state”. The aim ofthis analysis is to provide a genealogy of the term “biopolitics” that was first usedby a Swedish theoretician of the biology of the state Rudolf Kjellén and to showthe influence, that the idea of the biology of the state had on the development ofthe Nazi biopolitics. The paper reconstructs the main aspects of Michel Foucault’sgenealogy of the modern biopolitics and subsequently shows, how the idea of thebiology of the state constituted the extreme development of the naturalistic tendenciesdiagnosed by Foucault in the modern theories of (bio)politics.

In this article the two authors problematize the moment of stabilization in doing fieldwork and writing ethnography from a feminist perspective. The paper begins with an introduction to the question: How do feminist science studies scholars reconcile a normative need to stabilize our research site to create knowledge within the shifting ground of “truth claims” that feminist practices acknowledge and document? The heart of the paper reflects on our experiences as feminist theorists, teachers, and ethnographers with vignettes from studies of high-risk pregnancies in the industrialized world, specifically the United States, and gender and everyday technologies in West Africa. Our goal is to theorize this instability in order to highlight the limits and benefits of working with consciousness and reflectivity in social contexts while challenging and enriching the vibrancy of our feminist theory and practice.

The present paper aims at discussing selected syntactic aspects of cognate objects in European Portuguese, along the lines of Distributed Morphology (Haugen, 2009). Cognate objects may be readily discovered in numerous human languages, including European Portuguese (Chovia uma chuva miudinha). It is assumed in papers devoted to their English counterparts that they belong to various subclasses. Indeed, some of them are genuine cognates (to sleep a sleep...) or hyponyms (to dance a jig; Hale & Keyser, 2002). It turns out that in European Portuguese, they can be split into four different categories: (i) genuine cognate objects (chorar um choro...), (ii) similar cognate objects (dançar uma dança) (iii) objects hyponyms (dançar um tango) and (iv) prepositional cognate objects (morrer de uma morte ...). There are, then, significant differences between various classes of cognate objects: whereas the genuine ones call imperatively for a restrictive modifier and a definite article, the remaining ones admit it only optionally. It might be concluded, then, that a lexicalist theory set up along the lines of Hale and Keyser is unable to deal successfully with distributional facts proper to various classes of cognate constructions in European Portuguese. That is why the present study is conducted more in accordance with syntactic principles of Distributed Morphology, with a strong impact of hypotheses put forward by Haugen (2009).

The interlocutory dialogicality of press discourse manifests itself, among other things, in the use of common expressions that give the impression that “it is the language that speaks, not its users” (Bon-homme, 2012, p. 77). Euphemisms, for example, are used to raise difficult or polemic inducing issues, such as poverty, exclusion, war, politics, etc. Meanwhile, expressions that have become common in the source language, and are consistent with generally accepted norms, do not always remain transparent during the translation process. Depending on the translator’s choices, the phrases used in the target text can have various effects, ranging from the erasure of sensitive topics, to their hyperbolization. The subject of the paper is the comparison of articles published in the French monthly Le Monde diploma-tique and their translations, which appeared on the pages of the Polish edition of this periodical. Its aim is to reveal the traces of the translator’s presence, visible through his or her ways of interpreting euphe-mistic phrases, or toning down harsh expressions.

In the 17th century, the English region of East Anglia contained many of the major population centres of the British Isles, not least Norwich, England’s second city at that time. One might therefore predict that East Anglian dialects of English would have played a major role in determining the nature of the new colonial Englishes which were first beginning to emerge during this period. This paper considers some of the phonological and grammatical features of East Anglian English which can be argued to have been influential in this way.

This paper addresses a certain contradiction in the application of the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) to domains involving the long-distance Genitive of Negation (GoN) and wh-movement in Polish. It appears that in syntactic domains of the tensed sentence including an infinitive complement, there is a tension between a long-distance dependency (holding between NEG in the main clause and the embedded object in genitive) and a cyclic operation of wh-movement. The operation of wh-movement, a classic example of Chomsky’s Move, observes cyclicity and the PIC, judging by the standard tests based on reconstruction (Chomsky 1995; Heycock 1995; Fox 1999; Safir 1999; Legate 2003; Witkoś 2003; Lebeaux 2009), while the Agree-based case marking requires the PIC to be inoperative in exactly the same context and in the same domain. Both operations place contradictory requirements on the PIC, which implies that this condition does not apply to them in the same manner: it always holds of Move but does not always hold of Agree.

This paper, part of a long-term programme of research into the forms and functions of the vernacular in late medieval liturgical practice in England, offers a “cultural map” of the Middle English poem known as The Lay Folks’ Mass Book (LFMB). Comparatively little research has been undertaken on LFMB since Simmons’s edition of 1879. However, new developments in the study of manuscript-reception in particular regions of the Middle English-speaking areas of Britain, combined with greater understanding of the cultural dynamics of “manuscript miscellanies” and of medieval liturgical practice, allow us to reconstruct with greater certainty the contexts within which LFMB was copied and used. LFMB survives in nine late medieval copies, but each copy presented a distinct version of the text. This article brings together linguistic, codicological, liturgical, and textual information, showing in detail how the poem was repurposed for a range of different cultural functions. In geographical terms, it seems clear that the work circulated in Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire, in Yorkshire, and in Norfolk, and can thus be related to other texts circulating in those areas. Some versions are likely to have emerged in parochial settings, possibly owned by local priests. There is also evidence that the text could be deployed in monastic contexts, while other versions probably formed part of the reading of pious gentry. What emerges from a study of the codices in which copies of LFMB were transmitted is that a range of shaping sensibilities for these manuscripts may be distinguished; the authorial role in texts such as LFMB was balanced with that of their copyists and audiences. In the manuscripts containing LFMB creativity was negotiated within textually-transmitted communities of practice.

The present contribution discusses the phonological reality of initial fricative h- in words of Germanic and French origin in dialectally identified 106 texts from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose (Markus 2008), with the focus on native words where initial h- is frequently mute, as confirmed by (a) h-less spellings like ouse for house or especially (b) the use of the article an before h-nouns. In the early texts a phrase like an house may testify to the survival of the historical determiner (OE ān) put before both initial vowels and consonants, but in later texts this position may indicate mute initial h- in the following noun (or in an adjective before a noun). The paper offers numerical data concerning such distributions in particular Corpus texts as well as analogous data referring to the adjectives MIN and THIN (later on my and thy), where the final nasal consonant was lost when used in the function of an attribute. Consequently, this development led to the rise of a set of possessive adjectives with a syntactic, not phonological, distribution The data from the Innsbruck Corpus seem to indicate that an early loss of initial prevocalic h- in Middle English words of Germanic origin took place in particular texts rather than in texts from the whole region. The evidence from the Corpus shows that the implementation of the contemporary distribution, i.e., a before consonants and an before vowels, had a partly regional character, its first traces coming from as early as the 13th century.

1.Introduction The phenomenon of V-to-T movement, which is considered to oppose Romance languages on the one hand and a large majority of Germanic languages on the other hand, has been the target of analysis of the so-called Rich Agreement Hypothesis or RAH, which contends that the movement of the finite verb to the T(ense) head is caused by rich agreement morphology, that is, rich person and/or number morphology, combined or not with rich tense morphology: see e.g. Roberts (1985,1993), Platzack & Holmberg (1989), Rohrbacher (1994, 1999), or Vikner (1997), where it is stated specifically that "V-to-T movement applies if and only if person morphology is found in all tenses" (p. 201). The simplified labelled-bracketing configuration in (1a) shows in an informal way a sequence where no V-to-T applies, just the movement of V to the v head, and (1b) corresponds to a sequence where the movement of V to v is followed by V-to-T movement. (1) (1)[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] The RAH has not thus far nevertheless appeared to make precise the proper formulation of richness relative to V-to-T, and it has come to be criticised both on the grounds that there are languages with rich verbal morphology that appear to be V-in situ languages and on the grounds that there are languages with scarce verbal morphology that exhibit V-to-T movement. It must also be noted that accounting for the trigger of V-to-T movement is further complicated by the lack of consensus on the use of diagnostic tests in order to acknowledge a given language as V-to-T or V-in situ, as can be easily inferred among others from the works of Thrainsson (2010) or Koeneman & Zeijlstra (2014): such diagnostic tests are typically the ones postulated mainly since pollock (1989), namely, the placement of negation or also of medial adverbs like always or often. Thus, the order V-Neg or V-Adv would arguably indicate that V-to-T movement has applied, whereas Neg-V or Adv-V would indicate just the opposite. However, the syntactic status of negation as e.g. a phrase or a clitic, or the variable position of medial adverbs, can arguably mask the position of V itself. Also, the V2 phenomenon, that is, the movement of V up into the C(omplementiser) position above TP can prove to be an obstacle for the actual verification of the movement of V-to-T. In this paper I argue that the trigger of V-to-T lies in rich tense morphology in the sense of variations or asymmetries across teases, which happen to be provoked by the so-called stem or thematic vowel. The proposal consists in that the stem or thematic vowel segment gives rise to variations or asymmetries across tenses in certain languages, which makes the processing or derivation of verbal forms more complex or longer: such languages are V-to-T languages. In minimalist terms, the stem or thematic vowel morpheme or segment is made to correspond in the present approach with a v feature that T must value in the course of the derivation at narrow syntax. I defend the hypothesis that Germanic languages are all in their old periods V-to-T languages, in a parallel fashion to Romance languages, though later on, in contrast to Romance, they become non-V-to-T. The exceptions to the latter are: Icelandic, Yiddish and also the Faroese language in its original version, since these three Germanic languages have arguably gone on being V-to-T. (2) Because of the relevant role that must be conceded, in my view, to the historical perspective, my main focus in this paper is on Old English (OE), and I first use Romance as a testing ground for the account of V-to-T that I would like to propose. The focus of the discussion is specifically on explaining V-to-T in OE in a parallel fashion to V-to-T in a Romance language like Spanish. In order to support the present account of V-to-T I also use Icelandic on the one hand and German on the other, since these languages are very similar to each other as regards rich agreement morphology, and also rich tense morphology (in the sense of number of markers as compared to number of persons), though they have each received a different treatment in the literature. …

1. Introduction The present paper focuses on the language of John Lydgate's works. Lydgate was a Late Middle English poet writing in the East Midland dialect and greatly inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer. The specific linguistic issue analysed here is the unique use of the prepositions and adverbs meaning 'between'. The aim of the study is to establish the repertoire of those lexemes employed by Lydgate as well as to provide their etymology, syntax, dialect distribution, as well as temporal and textual distribution. In terms of quantity, the number of the recorded tokens of each investigated preposition and adverb in particular texts will be evaluated. Moreover, the proportion of the application of particular lexemes will be examined in the context of other Middle English preserved texts. As regards the applied method, historical English dictionaries such as the Middle English Dictionary online (henceforth the MED) and the Oxford English Dictionary online (henceforth the OED) are employed to critically evaluate the origin of the analysed prepositions and adverbs and to construct their tentative dialect and textual distribution. Moreover, corpus linguistics methodology is used to investigate the quantitative aspects of the lexemes under discussion. The selected corpus is the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (henceforth CMEPV), which is a part of the Middle English Compendium online supported by the University of Michigan. The corpus consists of 146 texts and text collections of all attested Middle English genres and text types, sometimes presented in two or more preserved manuscripts each (http://quod.lib.umich.edu /c/cme/browse.html; 28 December 2015). The linguistic material collected in the corpus includes ten texts by John Lydgate, which will be the subject of the investigation. Additionally, the analysis is supplemented with seven complete Middle English texts by John Lydgate not included in the corpus and one extra manuscript of a text found in CMEPV. All the examined texts will be searched for all the attested Middle English spelling variants of the discussed prepositions and adverbs. Those spelling variants are retrieved not only from the MED headwords but also from the MED quotations as well as from the OED. Numerous wildcard searches will also be performed in order to include possible spelling options not mentioned by either of the two dictionaries. 2. Recent studies on Medieval English prepositions and adverbs Medieval English prepositions and adverbs have been recently of interest to scholars. Molencki (2005, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2011a, 2011b) devotes his papers to the study of prepositions/adverbs such as after, before, because, forward developing into conjunctions (in the framework of Hopper & Traugott's grammaticalization (2003) and Traugott's subjectification (1989, 1995)) as well as to the analysis of a group of prepositions/conjunctions borrowed from French. For his studies Molencki applies various dictionaries and corpora. Krygier (2011) investigates the preposition till in Old English and pays a special attention to the investigation of its actual etymology in the context of structural borrowing. Iglesias-Rabade (2011) selects for his study a group of twelve Middle English prepositions including aboue, after, at, bi, before, bihinde, biside, in, on, ouer, purgh, and under and studies their attestations in the Middle English part of the Helsinki Corpus. Alcorn (2013) concentrates on the placement of nominal and pronominal objects in phrases including variants of the Old English prepositions by, for, and between found in the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. Esteban-Segura (2014) investigates the possible historical variation between the prepositions among and amongst motivating their selection in Present-Day English. The Medieval English section of her study is based on the Old and Middle English sections of the Helsinki Corpus. Hotta (2014) discusses the spelling variants of the ME betwixt and between, focusing on their etymology and further competition of different spelling variants. …

Taking as its starting point two crucial moments of the Belgian history – the events that took place in 16th (the reign of Charles V and afterwards) and in 19th centuries (from the Battle of Waterloo until the Belgian Revolution in 1830) – the paper demonstrates how non-French literature written in French was born in a country where this language actually came into being, but which, nevertheless, never came as far as to acquire the status of a nation state. Belgian literature in French never became able to convey either the History, or its relationship to the world or its identity in accordance with French interpretative models and French narrative standards. The paper sheds a light on how, in 19th and 20th centuries, European historical events – esp. the two wars – affected slight details of the initial pattern, but failed to contest successfully both the reluctance to see the History as a device to grasp the Sense and the preference for privileging the fabled, the legendary and the fictitious at the expense of factual realism.

Following paper is concerned with the problem of Is/Ought dichotomy in Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law. This is one of the most important problems which needs to be addressed in order to provide autonomous legitimacy of law in terms of normativism. The claim that those two spheres ought to be separated, is analysed from three different philosophical perspectives: ontological, epistemological and normative. Each of them posits Kelsen’s dichotomy as essential to a development of his concepts. The paper is an attempt to answer the question why this distinction is necessary in the context of legal validity and effectiveness.

The aim of the paper is to discuss the relevance of media and information education in language learning at advanced levels. The present paper is based on the empirical data obtained during the action-research conducted with the Romance philology students attending the course of French as a foreign language. The main object of the research is to establish to what degree an oral argumentation task, preceded by the task of planning the discussion on Wiki is considered to be a learning situation by students themselves. The research focuses on a selected aspect of the learning process, namely, on the use of media resources while negotiating the discussion outline and specifically, while negotiating its topic, objectives and its cognitive value. The principal conclusions indicate 1) that the task scenario should be based on the critical and dialogical approach to media and 2) that this kind of instruction can reinforce the argumentative dimension of the discussion.