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Dialect in Upper Silesian Urban SpaceThe paper presents ways in which linguistic messages are stylized to the local dialect in the space of Upper Silesian towns. The multitude of examples is a testimony to fashion for Silesian-ness, a turn towards locality and opposition to globalization. The phenomenon is related to quest for identity and the state and status of Silesian speech. The author discusses the role of towns in sociolinguistic research, and the notion of linguistic landscape. The paper presents inscriptions observed in Upper Silesia: place names, product names, official messages, posters and billboards (including political and advertisement ones), exhibitions, inscriptions on walls and on clothes.

On the etymological dictionary of Romance languages (Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman, DÉRom) The paper presents to Polish linguists of various specializations the Romance etymological dictionary Dictionnaire Étymologique Roman (DÉRom) which, despite having existed for several years, remains entirely unknown in Poland. Its goal is to reconstruct the Romance protolanguage, protoroman, on as many levels as possible. Its novelty lies in the application of the historical-comparative method to modern Romance forms, and reconstructing Proto-Romance forms based on them. Departure from the traditional Latin-leaning etymology brings qualitatively new results to the field of Romance diachronic linguistics. The paper concludes with examples of two dictionary entries.

Elements of grammatical information in the dictionary edited by T. Lehr-Spławiński, as an example of socio-cultural factors in lexicography The paper examines the convention of formulating the inflectional information, especially pertaining to grammatical cases, in Trzaska, Evert, and Michalski’s Dictionary of Polish that was edited in the interwar period by T. Lehr-Spławiński. The author attempts to determine what factors informed the use of a lexicographically innovative solution that nonetheless did not upset the linguistic tradition, and has proven both very functional and influential for future conventions in Polish lexicography. The analysis of nominal inflection presented in the dictionary is compared to analyses in numerous academic and popular grammars, mostly from the interwar period or widely known at the time, and in the context of the publishing layout of the editor who contracted Lehr-Spławiński. The aim of the paper is to highlight the significant role that research on the sociocultural context plays in metalexicographical studies and in a better understanding and interpretation of dictionaries, not so much as linguistic compendia, but also as texts of culture.

Again on numeral-nominal phrases in subject position The paper presents a formal account of sentences with a numeral-nominal subject and an adjectival complement, such as Tych pięciu facetów zostało zabitych ‘These five guys were killed’. The agreements in such sentences are highly idiosyncratic. To cope with them in the framework of a certain formal grammar of Polish, a number of extra means are proposed: special “numeral” realization of the nominal phrase in subject position, special “plural” adjectival complement, special rules that introduce the adjectival phrase in genitive, special valence frames for such strange phrases, and, finally, a special mechanism of interphrasal gender-number agreements. The paper argues for individual treatment of idiosyncrasies, instead of an artificial account in terms of general principles.

Foreign elements in the Polish lexicon, using the example of Słownik elektroniczny jednostek frazeologicznych (SEJF) ‘Electronic Dictionary of Multi-Word Units’ The paper discusses the presence of foreign phraseological units and of their grammatical features in phraseological dictionaries of general Polish. The author adduces lexicographical descriptions of specific phrasemes from Polish and foreign words dictionaries, and compares them with corpus data. Based on these analyses, she proposes a set of detailed solutions which were implemented in Słownik elektroniczny jednostek frazeologicznych (SEJF) ‘Electronic Dictionary of Multi-Word Units’ that she is preparing. SEJF is going to be the first electronic grammatical dictionary of Polish idiomatic phrases to provide paradigms for the described units. The paper closes with a list of one hundred analysed phrasemes, each with the assigned lexeme class and, in the case of nouns, also the gender value.

On Some Possible Traces of Duale Tantum in Indo-European LanguagesThe paper is devoted to three selected Indo-European nouns that can be considered as dualia tantum. On the basis of lexical data preserved in historical Indo-European languages, I have reconstructed three probable archetypes:(1) IE. *ḱelī- (< PIE. *ḱel-ih1) f. duale tantum ‘two-component body of a human or animal’ is precisely attested in Avestan sairi f. du. tant. ‘two solid components of the human and animal body, i.e. the skin together with meat and bones; body, dead body, corpse’. The primitive dual form seems to appear in Old Indic (Vedic) śárīram n. ‘body, body frame, solid parts of the body, pl. bones’, also ‘a dead body’ (a derivative noun created by means of the suffix -ra- < IE. *-lo-), cf. also Pali sarīra- n. ‘body’, Prakrit sarira- n. ‘id.’; West Pahari sarīr, Old Gujarati saïra, sayara n. ‘body’.(2) IE. *agu̯ sī- f. sg. ‘axe’ (< PIE. *h2egu̯ s-ih1 f. du. tant. ‘double axe, two-edged battle-axe’) can be seen not only in the Germanic languages (e.g. Gothic aqisi f. ‘axe’, Old High German acchus ‘id.’, English axe ‘id.’), but also in some Greek-Latin derivatives (see Greek ἀξῑ́νη f. ‘double axe, twoedged battle-axe’, Modern Greek αξίνα f. ‘hoe, mattock, pickaxe’, Latin ascia f. ‘axe, trowel’). The original meaning ‘double axe, two-edged item’ is firmly confirmed by the Greek data.(3) IE. *oldhī- f. sg. ‘a kind of boat’ (< PIE. *h3eldh-ih1 f. du. tant. ‘a primitive boat built from two troughs’ ← *h3eldh- f. ‘trough’) is reflected in Tocharian AB olyi ‘boat’, Lithuanian eldijà f. ‘a canoe, a boat hollowed out from one trunk’, dial. aldijà f. ‘id.’, Old Church Slavic ladija f. ‘πλοῖον, σκάφη / navis, navicula’, also alъdija ‘id.’, Old Czech lodí f. ‘ship, boat’, Polish łódź f. ‘boat’ and so on. The basic noun *h3eldh- ‘trough’ is securely attested in the Germanic languages, cf. Norwegian alde f. ‘wooden trough’, Danish olde ‘id.’ (< Proto-Germanic *aldōn- f.).

Remarks on the Elision of Labial Consonants in Contemporary Polish MediaIntervocalic elision of labial consonants seems to be one of the most common types of distorting the pronunciation of contemporary Polish words in colloquial speech. This phenomenon was described by Biedrzycki (1978) as typical of everyday speech and unknown to media or in official situations. Now it has entered the world of electronic media on a large scale and has become something of a norm among television presenters as well as experts and actors. All of these speakers tend to employ articulatorily incorrect Polish in official situations. This paper includes a preliminary classification of contexts where the deletion of labials takes place, and as such it is a continuation of Jaskuła (2014). Moreover, an attempt has been made to determine the reasons for elision. Analyses of similar phenomena which can be found in the phonological literature concerning both Polish and other phonological systems have also been taken into account with a view to discovering whether or not there is an interplay between phonetics and phonology in this respect.

„W naszym timie…” – several remarks on the corporate jargon The goal of the paper is to present the various distinguishing features of corporate jargon, together with their probable causes. The sources of the material are internet websites devoted to the informal variety of language adopted by Polish divisions of international corporations. It has been established that the most distinct features of the analysed sociolect are overuse of borrowings from English and of Polish-English hybrids, and playful Polonisation of foreign expressions.

“Painting with words” – on the style of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s reports from painting exhibitions The paper aims to characterize the style of H. Sienkiewicz’s reports from painting exhibitions. The stylistic features have been determined from the genological perspective, with the assumption that the report is an alternative template for the review. The main stylistic features of the analysed texts are: 1. suggestiveness, graphical character, and persuasiveness, as features resulting from how the intention of the text was realized; 2. weakened adherance to templates, owing to the possibility of realization of various structural variants; and 3. eclectic nature, related to the richness of stylistic registers, including a sizeable repertory of means belonging to the artistic style, thematic vocabulary, and vocabulary directly linked to the subject of painting. Specialist vocabulary, concepts and terms characteristic of the art of painting, constitute a specific group.

Polish lexemes with the nud-/nędz- root The paper presents the lexical family with the root nud-/nędz-. The material, containing as many as 52 word forms, excerpted from all of the available lexicographical sources of historical vocabulary, has been presented in the form of a word-formative nest. The goal of the analysis was to reveal the internal structure of motivational relations between the centre of the nest, Proto-Slavonic nuditi, and a group of words of varying degrees of derivativeness. The conducted analyses have revealed the principal metaphorical analogies which contributed to the generation of new metaphorical senses of specific linguistic units, and also, made it possible to indicate and discuss the observed changes in their meanings.

On a more cautious than previously reading of mediaeval poetry Studies of Polish literature of the Middle Ages often judge and evaluate the preserved literary works. This paper uses the example of the extant copies of the song Jezus Chrystus, Bog Człowiek (‘Jesus Christ, God Human’) to show the impropriety of this procedure. In the case of Polish mediaeval texts, it is never known whether the preserved version is the original one, or the result of decisions made by the copyists. Texts deserve a fair description, not a judgement.

Roman Laskowski’s concept of grammatical gender in Polish Probably the most elaborate intellectual construct in Roman Laskowski’s morphology is his schematic presentation of the bridgeheads linking grammatical gender in Polish nouns to verbs, adjectives, and numerals. Although it occupies just two pages of print, to complete this study Laskowski had to analyze thousands of syntactic diagnostic contexts. The present paper tries to recall and comment on Laskowski’s original concept of grammatical gender in Polish.

Idiosyncrasies in morphological agreement inside and outside phrases with numerals of the pięć ‘five’-type as a consequences of syntactic agreement failures The paper discusses some problems inherent in the hypothesis on which numerals are heads that have a valued feature of case in nominative and accusative contexts. In the analysis offered here numerals and quantifiers are phrasal adjuncts in the extended projection of the noun whose head is a null functional category. 3 person, singular number and neuter gender verb morphology as well as alternating patterns of the morphology of pre-numeral and predicative adjectives reflect attempted but (partly) failed syntactic agreement.

The unit najróżniejsze ‘all sorts of’ against the background of the semantic operation of grading The paper presents a detailed semantic and syntactic analysis of such linguistic units in Polish as różne, najróżniejsze, and a preliminary description of such units as przeróżne, najprzeróżniejsze. The following hypotheses are substantiated: 1. The adjectives różny, przeróżny are not gradable; 2. The sequences najróżniejsze, najprzeróżniejsze resemble the superlative form of adjectives, but are separate linguistic units, and not in fact superlatives.

Russian липа, липовый ‘counterfeit’ and Polish lipa, lipny ‘false’ The paper debates the interpretation of the etymology of Polish lipa ‘something untrue’ given by A. Bańkowski in his Etymologiczny słownik języka polskiego ‘Etymological dictionary of Polish’. Based on Russian and Polish lexicographical data, the author describes the rise of the Russian noun липа as a derivative from the older adjective липовый ‘false, counterfeit’ in the thieves’ slang of the 19th century, and subsequently its path into colloquial Russian. The word lipa was borrowed into Polish in the second half of the 19th century in the meaning ‘fake passport, document’, also ‘something counterfeit’. It first appeared in the slang of Polish thieves, then penetrated into the dialect of Warsaw, and eventually into colloquial Polish where it is used as a polysemous word, and became the base for the also polysemous derivative adjective lipny.

The lexeme верх: its phonetic and semantic features, and derivative resources in south-western dialects of Ukrainian The paper is an attempt to analyse the word верх ‘top’, and to construct a derivational nest for the root -верх-. The source material was excerpted from linguistic atlases, dialectal dictionaries, dialectal recordings, and other specialist studies. The focus lies primarily on the phonetic, semantic, and wordformative aspect. The analysed words display phonetic features that are typical for south-western dialects of Ukrainian, as well as their semantic and derivational variation. The resulting derivational nest is a complicated system of cognate words that cover four different levels of word formation (the first level is the base word верх). Dialectal data are provided in tables. The examples show that an analysis of the system of derivatives is able to: identify the most complete phonetic variants of words, find semantic variants of each derivative, compare UD derivatives of the root -верх- (-wierzch-) with PD, describe specific dialectal word-formative patterns which are not characteristic of the standard language, and to record an ancient phenomenon.

Pragmatics in word-formative classification of nouns The article presents a classification of Polish nominal word formations with a particular regard to derivatives with a categorial pragmatic (expressive) element. It discusses some of the existing proposals of classification, and suggests the author’s own. The highest floor of the classification contains: I. nominations (mutations) and II. renominations; the latter being divided into 1. transpositions, 2a. type modifications (feminitives, diminutives, names of young beings, etc.), and 2b. pragmatic modifications: emotional-evaluative, and stylistic derivatives. Also distinguished are III. mixed derivatives: 1. nominational-modificative, and 2. compound renominations. The general classification of derivatives counts transpositions and modifications as a single word-formative type that stands in opposition to mutations. Moreover, the paper makes more precise the understanding of the poetic function of word-formative affixes and word-formation in general. This function can be viewed as a variety of the pragmatic function, and more literally, as the function that tightly binds the derivative with the poetic language and with the “reality” it creates.

On studying semantic virtuality in the interpretative perspective The goal of the paper is to present semantic virtuality as a linguistic problem, and to outline a proposition of a theoretical-methodological approach to the phenomenon. Based on the devices of French interpretative semantics (which uses the method of element analysis), I put forward a definition of virtual sense as a relevant absence of certain minial elements of content, which are made perceptible by their relation to units of the actual sense. I briefly present a typology of virtual semantic features which includes, on the one hand, definitional elements of content which undergo contextual visualization during the interpretation (neutralized semes), and on the other, interpretationally relevant alternatives of semes actualized in context (potential features).

Hyponyms of place in Polish and American wordnets The aim of the paper is to compare the sets of hyponyms of place in Polish and American wordnets. Polish “Słowosieć” and American WordNet are thesauri which define the meaning of an individual lexeme by the lexical-semantic relations existing between this and other lexemes. The researched material consists of several thousand of synsets (sets of lexemes referring to a common concept) which have been linked by interlingual, lexical-semantic relations to the synsets of English lexemes in a process of mapping of a fragment of the Polish wordnet to the American database. An analysis of particular cases illustrates the basic issues concerning the procedure of mapping, first of all the problem of choosing a foreign synonym for the original word. It also shows the incompatibility of the corresponding fragments of the Polish and English lexical systems, which is usually not reflected in dictionaries and other glottodidactical publications. Differences between the structures of semantic trees of the two languages result partly from different assumptions made by the authors of both wordnets, and partly from language-specific factors, such as different word-formation systems or different ways in which some objects from the real world are conceptualized.