Search

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.

Syntactic and Semantic Features of dotądThe paper discusses the expression dotąd. The author makes a distinction between contextual (endophoric) and consituational (exophoric) uses. The analysis is limited to the latter because exophoric uses allow for a locative and temporal interpretation. The author distinguishes two units of language: a pronoun which replaces a temporal or locative expression, and the relator dotąd, aż which indicates a temporal relation between the events described in component sentences.

Do We Speak Simpler when Using a Simpler Language? Formally Instrumental Phrases which Characterize SpeechThe paper describes the connectivity and the meaning of the formally instrumental phrase językiem (jakimś)/(czyimś) which co-occurs with the metatextual mówiąc. Depending on the filling of the valence spot, it can fulfill different functions: a) indicating the choice of the best code or register for the given communicative intent, b) indicating the source of a cited statement, c) informing how to interpret, according to the speaker, what has been said previously in the text. As is the case with other formally instrumental phrases counted as adverbials, here too a regular substitution of those forms with adverbial phrases cannot be observed. The restrictions, however, are probably not of lexical nature (the lack of the appropriate adverbials or adverbial constructions); rather, they result from the fact, that the meaning of the noun is relevant (the meaning of mówiąc slangiem cyklistów is different as jak cykliści). Sometimes there can be also observed a semantic emancipation of some formally instrumental forms (innymi słowy, (jednym) słowem).

Poszczególne ‘individual’ among quantification operators The paper presents a syntactic and semantic analysis of a Polish lexical unit poszczególne ‘individual’. It contains a description of the limits of its use, and a proposition of representation of its meaning. Moreover, it justifies the hypothesis that the meaning of poszczególne implies the notions of multitude, ordering, and openness of the set, and that the unit is one of the operators of distributive quantification.

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 the symbolic unit [ktoś1] dotknął [kogoś2 /czegoś] ‘someone touched somebody/something’. A semantic-cognitive study The paper describes the symbolic unit [ktoś1] dotknął [kogoś2/czegoś] in the cognitive perspective. The starting point for a semantic-cognitive analysis in the present sketch are uses of the phrase excerpted from texts from various registers of contemporary Polish. Importantly, the author describes both concretizations and metaphorical extensions of the prototypical occurrence of the analysed unit. Basing primarily on the assumptions of cognitive grammar, she attempts to reconstruct the mechanisms initiating the emergence of specific uses of the analysed symbolic unit. She conducts an analysis of the senses of the phrase [ktoś1] dotknął [kogoś2/czegoś] within the framework of three domains: 1. physical space, 2. temporal, and 3. mental, and using the theory of image schemas.

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.

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.