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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.