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This article assumes that formative aspects of research on borrowings are today largely placed on a borderline of studies of native and foreign language resources. Based on this assumption, the article provides examples of formative measures with the aim to picture foreign elements in the structures of words and the manners to get accustom with such structures in Polish and Russian.
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The dual is a morphological category that has completely disappeared in most Indo-European languages, but may have left traces in the morphosyntax. The case of Kashubian, described in the following article, shows the process of extinction of this category in the last two centuries, and at the same time, its influence on the process of the birth of a literary language which took place in parallel. The fall of the dual in this small Slavonic language is introduced by comparing preserved forms and the structure of the corresponding paradigm in Kashubian with existing forms in other languages. The key focus of the study includes grammar and literary works which represent many interpretations of the semantic value and use of the dual, allowing to follow the steps of the degrammaticalization of a grammatical category appearing in the history of other languages. The question related to the last living forms that may be interpreted semantically as the dual (the paradigm of the first person pronoun and corresponding verb endings) remains semi-open.
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The Internet has divided endangered languages researchers into enthusiasts, seeing in it the chance for the survival of minority languages, and critics who point out that the presence of a minority language in the Internet does not influence its use in everyday life, hence: will not save it. The paper is based on examples from Upper Sorbian, a Western Slavonic minority language, spoken by about 12 000 people. We can divide websites in minority languages into two categories. First, websites demanding only passive knowledge of the language (to read information, as an illustration next to the text in the dominant language) and second, websites which demand active participation (blogs, forums, social networks etc.). The first type of websites have only prestigious significance for the language. The second type can’t be overestimated. For researchers they constitute an important source of information about the living language, used by young people for whom in rapid communication the dictionary rules are not important. New words, expressions, constructions, influence of dominant languages and English can be observed. A minority will find a new space of language use in the Internet: the possibility to meet other people who know the minority language and to use its written form often for the first time.
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This contribution discusses, on the one hand, the conventional way in which (in)defi niteness is marked in Polish which does not possess articles. On the other hand, new linguistic developments will be focused upon, namely the increased frequency of appearance of determining pronouns, especially the demonstrative pronoun ten. Since the use of demonstrative pronouns allows for a defi nite way of reading, the question arises whether in this case the process of their transformation from lexical to grammatical signs has already begun. Based upon the corpus it shall be tested whether initial stages of grammaticalization of Polish demonstrative pronouns can be identifi ed. This paper also addresses the role of the article, which is one of the most important features of language to indicate (in)defi niteness, in languages that have articles. For this purpose, German will be used for comparison.
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The realization of Polish passives is influenced by the specific properties that a given participle shares with its verbal base. These include: argument structure and aspectual type, the conjugation class and the phonological properties of the stem. This paper offers an account of how these variables are reflected in the exponence and morphophonology of Polish passives. The paper presents an analysis of the distribution of Passive Participle Markers -ł- /ɫ/, -t- /t/, -n- /n/ and -on- /ɔn/ in Polish within a syntactic approach to word formation (Jablonska 2004; Caha 2009, Embick & Marantz 2008). I also address the issue of the morphophonological mutations attested in Polish passive participles and postulate that they should not be given a uniform analysis. The alternation between /ɛ/ and /a/ attested in Polish ej- and e-verbs is suppletive in nature, while mutations attested in the thematic marker -ną-~-nię- /nɔ̃/~/ɲɛ/̃ and the Passive Participle Marker -on-~-eni- /ɔn/~/ɛɲ/ are triggered by the integration of floating features into the structure of the said exponents.
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Настоящая работа обращает внимание на социолингвистические разницы в области польского разговорного языка с учетом разницы поколений (первое, второе, третье и четвертое поколение эмигрантов) и общественной среды (интеллигенты, бизнесмены, ремесленники, квалифицированные рабочие и рабочие без квалификаций, польские крестьяне, ставшие в Шотландии рабочими). Интеллигенты первого поколения эмигрантов в принципе пользуются нормативным польским языком. В роботе рассматривается в основном отступления от нормированного польского языка информантов первого поколения (в возрасте с 58 до 93 лет) без образования, в речи которых наблюдается высокая степень интерференции польского и английского языков, отражающая процессы адаптирования в шотландской среде. Обращалось внимание на два основных процесса: 1) Предрасположение к уподоблению отечественных элементов с невысокой частотностью употребления к чужим языковым структурам; 2) Тенденции к сглаживанию большего количества системных различий польского разговорного языка по отношению к английскому языку. Приводились примеры характеризирующие эти направления в основном в области фонетической, флективной, словообразовательной и лсксикальной системы.
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The paper deals with media texts by K. Capek, C. Milocz, J. Pshibora and S. Bau-mann (pamphlets, correspondence, reportages, memoirs, essays) written between the 1930s and the present mainly when traveling abroad, as well as the love correspondence between J. Pshibora and A. Oshecka. The travelogues of eminent intellectuals and journalists have not only a documentary but also fictional character. Their poetics is in the discourse of post-modern intercultural communication between homo viator and a reader in a world that is constantly changing.
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This paper deals with the influence of Latin and German on word formation in Czech and Sorbian. On the example of the prefix před- / pśed- and its equivalents in the contact languages we demonstrate the development of a productive means in the word formation of these Western Slavic languages and confront it with the situation in other Slavic languages. The meaning of the prefix in Sorbian and Czech seems to be adjusted to the meaning of its equivalents in the contact lanuages. In this paper we give an overview over data gained from the corpora Diakorp and Hotko as well as a more detailed analysis of data from the Lower Sorbian corpus Dotko. There is a large number of calques with před- / pśed-, which Sorbian and Czech have in common. Thanks to the Czech corpus as well as dictionaries we can follow the semantic development of derivates borrowed already from Old Church Slavonic or formed during the Old and Middle Czech periods as well as the formation of numerous new calques during the national revival. The data furthermore show some striking differences in the development of Sorbian, where the particle prědk was often used instead of před- / pśed- in older texts. It seems that in Lower Sorbian a complementary distribution of prědk (abstract calques) and pśed- (local and temporal meaning) could have functioned, had there not been the puristic interventions under the influence of Upper Sorbian and Czech National Revival from the end of the 19th century on.
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This study tries to reconstruct the evolution of the dialectal fragmentation of the Polabian- -Pomeranian area from its separation from the Western Slavonic until the destruction of the local language continuum. The difficulty of this task consists in the limitation of the sources, which comprise the onomastic data and the reconstruction of early phases of the languages preserved until the Modern Age (New Drawehn Polabian, Kashubian). In the first part, the study discusses the presence of the common Western Lekhitic features in all Polabian-Pomeranian regions and in the neighbour areas (Sorbian, Polish). The second part is introduced by the overview of various concepts of dialectal division of the area and further, the article treats single phenomena and innovations per zone concerned (East – Pomeranian, West – Polabian, South – Polabian-Sorbian transition zone). In the final part, we try to describe the process of the dialectal fragmentation of the whole area in the chronological order. This shows the Polabian- -Pomeranian area as a field of various tendencies originated mostly in the Western or Eastern peripheries. The Western one is characterized by an early political separation, while the Eastern one represents a bridge towards the Eastern Lekhitic (Polish) area. The central Polabian-Pomeranian dialects seem to accept many of these innovations just as inconsistent tendencies; the Southern zone seems to be the most passive, even if it probably absorbed, rather as an echo, few Old Sorbian tendencies. The study also clearly shows that there is still much to be clarified in the history of the Polabian-Pomeranian area and tries to map the lacunas in our knowledge.
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The Old Czech prothetic v- before o-, appearing in the 14th century, has not been connected to the loss of the soft-hard consonantal correlation in the historical grammars of Czech. The author attempts to link the v-prothesis in Old Czech to labiovelarization of the preceding hard consonants, typically bilabials, and discusses the conditions and reasons enabling its stabilization which might have been manifestation of the tendency to push the phoneme /v/ out of the system.
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In this paper, we introduce an inventory of language means that express the semantic feature of mutuality in Czech verbal constructions. Based on the results of recent typological surveys, we distinguish between lexical and grammatical means. The lexical means include a limited group of inherently reciprocal verbs with the feature of mutuality in their lexical meaning. The grammatical means involved in the syntactic operation of reciprocalization are primarily used by a large group of verbs to which we refer as syntactic reciprocal verbs; these means involve (i) the reflexive personal pronoun se/sebe, si/sobě, sebou, (ii) the expression jeden – druhý ‘each other’, and (iii) adverbials. While the use of the grammatical means is obligatory for expressing mutuality with syntactic reciprocal verbs, it is often only optional for inherently reciprocal verbs. We thoroughly describe various functions that these language means have in encoding mutuality in Czech.
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Numerous Old and Middle Czech derived nouns contain a morphematic component typical for verbal participles in their structure. These substantives can be interpreted in terms of word formation in different ways, depending on which semantic feature is accentuated: as motivated by a verb or by a deverbal adjective with a different meaning and categorical classification. Some other nouns are indisputably derived directly from the verbs (e.g. jědenec ‘eater’). In this article, we study possible factors for this, which involves determination of the motivation. Following our analysis, we consider the meaning of the derivative to be decisive. Finally, we observe that historical material requires modification of the onomasiological categories used in contemporary Czech, and we determine reasons for the difference between the situation of historical and contemporary Czech in this regard.
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Exceptive phrases are a group of expressions used to indicate that something is an exception (e.g. English "except Mars", Czech "kromě Marsu"). Some of these expressions are ambiguous: either they can subtract something from a particular set or they can add something to it. For these two types of phrases, this paper introduces the terms extractive exceptive phrases and additive exceptive phrases, respectively. The core of this paper is the examination of the semantic and syntactic properties of both types of exceptive phrases in Czech, with a focus on phrases headed by the ambiguous expression "kromě". We build our analysis on the basis of the description of exceptive phrases provided by the formal semantics literature. Our investigation leads us to the conclusion that the Czech language has, in fact, two distinct expressions of "kromě" with different grammatical properties.
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The article will attempt to verify the hypothesis stating that, in contemporary Polish (especially in colloquial language), syntactic structures containing two imperative verb forms may be defined as serial verb constructions (SVCs). As our starting point, we assume that structures such as ‘idź głoś’, ‘idź się utop’ (lit. resp. ‘go preach’, ‘go drown’) which are the subject of our analysis, fall into the definition of SVC containing five components: compositionality, being monoclausal, the two verbs being independent and having no linking element and no predicate-argument relation between them. In the analysis that follows, we will concentrate on structures containing the element ‘idź’ (‘go’) and discuss their characteristic features concerning prosody, morphology (mode and number adjustments), semantics and syntax. We consider those characteristics as non-standard, i.e. specific for those types of serial verb constructions.
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By common consent, one of the most characteristic categories of the Polish verb is aspect. There can be little doubt that the origin of the aspect category may lie in Proto-Slavic or much further back in the Proto-Indo- European language. It is a moot point whether the aspect was already a strong category in Proto-Slavic. Nonetheless, it is beyond dispute that the consequences of its emergence were far-reaching and took a relatively long time to clarify in the daughter languages. The various categories such as aspect, biaspectuality, and tense providing the main themes of the present paper were closely related and did interact, however, the essential effects of their interaction can only be identified by scrutiny. In Old Church Slavonic, a certain degree of competition between the category of aspect and that of tense can already be observed, and this is also evident in Old Polish, in which tenses like the aorist and the imperfect were slowly falling into disuse. Their occurrence is quite rare even in the earliest Polish written records. In due course, the perfect tense gained ground and the pluperfect became almost completely obsolete. In Modern Polish, the latter only serves to archaize literary texts. In the further stages of development, the aspectual opposition also extended to the future tenses thereby affecting the entire Polish tense system. Also, in the aspect-tense system of the Modern Polish language, the tendency of the category of aspect to prevail over the category of tense together with the gradual decline in the number of biaspectual verbs, still common in the 16th century, seems to be quite clear. Most of the originally biaspectual initial verbs were later perfectivized by means of prefixes. Thus, the simple verbal bases and their perfectivized derivatives could establish an aspectual partnership. In the case of verbs with foreign roots, the prefix z-/ s- played a pivotal role in perfectivation, while other prefixes such as za- and po- had a less important role. The process of perfectivation in Polish was so extensive that only few biaspectual verbs remained free of the opposition of aspect as reminders of the fact that the development of this category is still an ongoing process. This is also shown by the more recent biaspectual verbs with borrowed roots for which it can be anticipated that they will form their perfective counterparts soon. The paper concludes that the amount of verbs with an aspectually uncertain status is likely to be a reliable indicator of the development of the aspect category for the earlier periods in the history of the Polish language. An important role in this may play the diachronic corpus-based investigation, which, though for a long time considered a stepchild of Slavic aspectual research, may still help to clarify a number of issues related to the category of aspect.
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This paper analyses the impact of linguistic loyalty and solidarity on the preservation of the Slovak language community in Vojvodina. These factors represent an essential element in the model of linguistic description of a language community in a minority position. In the first part of the paper, we present the structure and components of ethnolinguistic solidarity of the Slovak community in Vojvodina, and in the second we show results of the survey conducted in 2014 among members of the community related to the level of their linguistic loyalty. Language attitudes of members of the Slovak language community in Vojvodina presented in this analysis bring us new insight into the structure of ethnolinguistic solidarity and reveal the reasons and motivation of their linguistic loyalty, or the absence of it. Vojvodinian Slovaks consider their own language as the most important constituent of their ethnicity, but the survey nonetheless also identified characteristics of the initial phase of the process of language relativisation, as well as a reduction of its role as the cultural marker of the community.
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Review of: Przemysław Gębal, Władysław T. Miodunka, Dydaktyka i metodyka nauczania języka polskiego jako obcego i drugiego, PWN, Warszawa 2020, pp. 454.
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The paper strives to introduce terminology tools in creating a German-Slovak terminology database of the relevant specialized terms used in hunting in the context of the diversity of available resources and verification tools such as the German and Slovak national corpora. The focus will be on corpora as verification tools and their role in creating a terminology database. In addition, we will consider the principle of the diversity of existing sources. The theoretical basis is grounded in corpus linguistics, technical language, terminology work, and semantics. The authors of the study being presented have explored corpora as a relevant tool in terms of quantity and quality. The German and Slovak national corpus serves as an indicator of rare terms – with a low occurrence presupposing a higher professional level of specialized lexemes. The approach of common or zero occurrence in national corpora needs to be implemented into terminology work and creating terminology databases. Thus, the authors of the study use, compare, and analyze the German federal corpus – DWDS (Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache) and the Slovak national corpus (SNK). In the process of terminological search in the canons, they have applied homogenous search criteria. As a result of the analysis underpinned with concrete examples from the hunting field, they demonstrate a procedure for creating a terminological database of a specialized domain. Overall, they attempt to deliver an innovative approach combining the latest knowledge in linguistics and terminology work.
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The article presents Kashubian literature in the optics of feminist criticism discourse. The analysis begins with the description of the authors writing in the decade between the First and Second World Wars, which initiated the writing of Kashubian women. The considerations are completed with the authors publishing their works in the last decades. In the article, special attention is focused on Krystyna Muza (lyricism) and Krystyna Lewna (epic) as writers whose discourse on feminist criticism is a visible factor that creates the subjectivity of contemporary women.
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