Names of Catholic holidays in the consciousness of contemporary users of Polish
NAZWY ŚWIĄT KATOLICKICH W ŚWIADOMOŚCI WSPÓŁCZESNYCH UŻYTKOWNIKÓW POLSZCZYZNY

Summary/Abstract: The rich repertoire of Catholic holiday and celebration names provokes the following question: “Do contemporary users of the Polish language know the names and use them?” In order to answer it, I applied two research procedures: the corpus method (analysis of the National Corpus of Polish – NKJP) and the questionnaire method. However, I begin my paper with explaining semantic relations between the terms uroczystość (a celebration), święto (a holiday) and wspomnienie (a memoir). I treat them both as units functioning in the general variant of Polish and as specialised terms. Afterwards, I briefl y recall names of the major holidays pointing to their rich synonymy. In the further part of this paper, I present fi gures obtained from the analysis of contexts excerpted from the NKJP and then I discuss the questionnaire data regarding the respondents’ familiarity with the holiday names. What follows from the NKJP is that the discussed vocabulary is present in Polish although its frequency is not too high. Familiarity with the lexis with which I am concerned among the responding students is signifi cantly poorer, which I consider an effect of civilisation and social transformations. The research conducted with both methods lead to the conclusion that the most commonly known names are: Boże Narodzenie (Christmas), Wielkanoc (Easter), Wszystkich Świętych (All Saints Day), Trzech Króli (the Feast of the Three WiseMen), Zaduszki/Dzień Zaduszny (All Souls’ Day), Boże Ciało (the Feast of Corpus Christi), Niedziela Palmowa (Palm Sunday) and Środa Popielcowa (Ash Wednesday).

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