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The main focus of the paper is to analyse selected English and Polish online comments on the Russia-Ukraine war (2022) from the perspective of dialogical discourse and define to what extent the exchanges satisfy the criteria of different types of dialogism with regard to their self- or other-referential character, i.e., inwards- or ingroup- directed, and what other circumstances are decisive in the determination of the exchange profiles. The materials are derived from selected Twitter comments referring to the war in Ukraine and its refugees, which dominate large segments of today’s online discourse. The research methodology employed is an interactional discourse analysis, which assumes that meanings are dynamic and created in interaction, and shaped by the cognitive and social potential of the participants, and their ideological preferences. The outcomes of the analysis indicate a complex character of the exchanges from a dialogical typology dilemma perspective and shed some light on the speakers’ argumentation. The analysis also shows a lower radicalization axis than in comparable samples referring to earlier refugee crisis scenarios in the years 2016–2020.

The focus of the paper is to identify and discuss cases of what we call emergent impoliteness and persuasive emotionality based on selected types of discourse strategies in Polish media which contribute to increasingly high negative emotionality in audiences and to the radicalization of language and attitudes when addressing political opponents. The role and function of emotional discourse are particularly foregrounded to identify its persuasive role in media discourses and beyond. Examples discussed are derived from current Polish media texts. The materials are collected from the large Polish monitor media corpus monco.frazeo.pl (Pęzik 2020). The analysis is conducted in terms of quantitative corpus tools (Pęzik 2012, 2014), concerning emotive and media discourse approaches (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and Wilson 2013, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2015, 2017a, 2017b). The analysis includes a presentation of the ways mass media construe events (Langacker 1987/1991) in terms of their ideological framing, understood as particular imposed/constructed event models and structures (cf. Gans 1979). Special attention is paid to the negative axiological evaluation of people and events in terms of mostly implicitly persuasive and offensive discourse, including the role emotion clusters of harm, hurt and offence, anger and contempt play in the media persuasive tactics. The research outcomes provide a research basis and categorization of types of emergent impoliteness and persuasive emotionality, which involve implicit persuasion directed at negative emotionality raising with the media public, as identifiedin the analyzed media texts.

The focus of the paper is to present arguments in favour of a complex set of areas of reference in cross-linguistic analyses of meanings, aimed in particular at the identification of a set of relevant analytic criteria to perform such a comparison. The arguments are based on lexicographic and corpus linguistic data and specifically on the polysemic concept of integrity in English and its lexical counterparts in Polish. It is generally assumed in Cognitive Linguistics, which is taken as the basic framework of the present study, that meanings, which are defined as convention-based conceptualizations, are not discrete entities, fully determined, even in fuller context but rather they are dynamic conventional conceptualizations[13]. Therefore, it is considered essential to identify first their basic, prototypical senses and then their broad meanings , which include, apart from the core part, their contextual, culture-specific, and connotational properties, defined in terms of a parametrized set of semasiological as well as onomasiological properties. The study methodology has also been adjusted towards this multifocused analysis of linguistic forms and considers the interdisciplinary - linguistic, psychological, cultural and social domains to identify the cultural conceptualizations of the analysed forms. In the present case a cognitive corpus-based analysis in monolinguistic English contexts and in the English-to-Polish and Polish-to-English translation data of lexicographic and parallel corpus materials, as well as cultural dimensions will be exemplified to conclude with a parametrized system of cognitive cross-linguistic tertia comparationis to more fully determine their broad linguistic meanings.

Discourse practices are investigated in English and Polish online comments which display different degrees of linguistic extremism. The present contribution identifies the contexts and targets of such practices and argues that hate speech is conditioned by culture-driven emotional experience and emotion expression profiles prevailing in particular societies. The discussion focuses on Polish and UK English emotionality and on relevant cultural models of the negative emotion clusters identified in Polish and English online political and social comments in posts collected between 2013 and 2018 on topics connected mainly, though not exclusively, with migration and the perception of the Other. First, the article shows that there are differences in the display and expression of emotions between English and Polish discourses, the latter being more negatively explicit and more often addressing the current online interactant. Second, in both groups, two opposing camps are identified. Finally, the rise in meaning and expressiveness of radicalization is observed in both English and Polish across the investigated period.

What is discussed in the present paper is the assumption concerning a human narrowed sense of perception of external world and, resulting from this, a basically approximate nature of concepts that are to portray it. Apart from the perceptual vagueness, other types of vagueness are also discussed, involving both the nature of things, indeterminacy of linguistic expressions and psycho-sociological conditioning of discourse actions in one language and in translational contexts. The second part of the paper discusses the concept of conceptual and linguistic resemblance (similarity, equivalence) and discourse approximating strategies and proposes a Resemblance Matrix, presenting ways used to narrow the approximation gap between the interacting parties in monolingual and translational discourses.

The paper aims to uncover the interactional discourseThere are cultural and language-related aspects of these processes identified with regard to differences between Polish and English in terms of discourse strategies, cultural dimensions, presence of incivility and emotionality dynamics. Considered from the overall level of the relationship between conflict and emotions, what is observed is the radicalization of the attitudes and their language expression, accompanied by the rise in emotional arousal as evidenced both in the English and Polish sets of data, although differences in the degree of its overtness are still distinct.

The objective of the present paper is a comparison of the GRID questionnaire and a cognitive corpus-based analysis, which are used to investigate a selection of emotions, particularly surprise and related concepts, in Polish and British English. The research questions asked concern the cross-linguistic status of emotion concepts and the identification of the universally valid tertium comparationis. Overlaps with other emotions both within Polish and English and between these languages are investigated and general conclusions concerning the nature of meaning that evolves from the study are presented.

The hypothesis defended in the paper refers to the existence of a certain aura of meaning connected with individual lexical items which spreads over the senses of their neighbours by creating specific semantic expectations. This phenomenon is referred to as semantic harmony or semantic prosody (cf. Sinclair, 1994), which, in analogy to phonology, is understood as a fairly systematic spread of a feature from a ‘trigger’ to other linguistic units which I call ‘targets’. If the semantic expectations are overridden by the occurrence of items different to those expected, the result may be figures of speech such as irony or paradox (e.g. Louw, 1993). Instances of the triggers with some forms of explicit or implicit negation in their conceptual/semantic structure are discussed and an attempt is made to show to what extent the items in the same utterance or in a larger unit of speech (say, speech event or a paragraph) harmonise with the negative nature of their triggers. It is suggested that the semantic prosodies of some triggers exihibit a universal character, while some others remain language-specific. The analysis is illustrated with examples from English and Polish.