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The following is a brief comparative / contrasting discourse of "situation types" in English clauses and their Polish renditions in "The Hobbit or There and Back Again" by J. R. R. Tolkien. The article highlights certain types of situations in English predicates which are intertextually related to their Polish counterparts expressed through contrastive lexical means. The description seeks to sensitize Polish users of English to the impact of the aspectuality of English clauses on the construal of the situations presented in the dynamics of discourse, which is 'limited' to the grammatical means available within the Polish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of World & Word / Świat & Słowo is the property of University of Bielsko-Biala and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of the present paper is to examine the degree to which the first year students of English philology at ATH in Bielsko-Biala are able to recognize the particular modal constructions occurring in authentic linguistic materials, after having been introduced to their forms and meanings theoretically. The paper focuses on contextualization by means of linguistic corpora of selected English modal constructions, such as the perfective use of central modals on the example of 'must HAVE done', and particular 'intermediate' modals (1. must have; 2. dare + bare infinitive; 3. WE/I shall; 4. BE about to; 5. BE to; 6. HAVE got to; 7. BE bound to; 8. BE willing to; 9. HAPPEN to), following a remote lecture on descriptive grammar of the English language via the MS Teams application during the coronavirus lockdown in January, 2021. The case study concerns the results obtained from an assignment administered to 64 first year students, presented in four tables. The assignment, attached in the form of an MS Word file to edit, required the students to select and cite from either of the two corpora of the English language -- BNC or COCA -- examples of authentic use of each of the modal constructions studied during one of the lectures. The paper consists of six sections, two on the main theses in cognitive linguistics, whose achievements pertain to usage-based acquisition of new linguistic material, three parts related to the research conducted, including the methodological part, an analysis of the results obtained, followed by a discussion and general conclusions. The last section signals how selected theses of cognitive linguistics apply to the results of the said research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the paper is to present English clauses with canonically arranged phrases from the perspective of "valence relations" adopted by the cognitive theory developed by Ronald W. Langacker (1987). Valence concerns connections between arguments or linguistic entities within a grammatical construction. Langacker employed the notion in his cognitive grammar. The paper demonstrates a technique of revising grammatical constructions and their order within a sentence through a text, with awareness of the notion of semantically motivated "valence relations", which is likely to eliminate rote learning, forgetting, and consequently committing errors in structuring English sentences. This claim, however, has still to be tested. The paper contains a theoretical piece of research. It is especially aimed at first year university-level students of the English language who go through the course in Descriptive Grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Jezikoslovlje is the property of University of Osijek, Faculty of Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)