This paper addresses pre-verbal agreement in Polish dual copula clauses with the verbal copula być ‘to be’, the pronominal copula to and two third person nominative expressions, one pre-verbal and one post-verbal. It first shows that despite the common consensus in the literature, this agreement is perfectly grammatical in the construction under consideration. Then, it briefly outlines problems this NPNOM1-controlled agreement creates for the contemporary approaches to agreement in Polish dual copula clauses. Finally, it advances a way for the Agree relation to work in order to derive the pre-verbal agreement effect.
This article examines the concept of phraseological universals, understood as shared features of phraseological units (PUs) that reoccur across different languages. The analysis foregrounds the structural and functional similarities among PUs, supported by examples drawn from Italian, French, English, Polish, Turkish, and Korean. The phraseological universals addressed in this study encompass several phenomena: the coexistence of transparency and opacity within PUs, the systematic classification of PUs, the capacity for modification of otherwise fixed expressions, the notably high frequency of phraseological components within certain semantic fields, the occurrence of mono-collocational elements, the universality of sources from which PUs originate, their role as repositories of cultural and cognitive stereotypes, the presence of reciprocal relational patterns among PUs, and the convergence of their functional roles across languages.
The paper explores the selection and distribution of moods in subordinate clauses in sermon samples representing two periods: late Middle and Early Modern English, transcribed from manuscripts housed in the Durham University Libraries and the Newberry Library. Specifically, the study relies on two samples from the mid-15th century and two from the 17th-century (ranging from 3,700 to 3,900 words), offering their synchronic and diachronic analysis. Since accounts of diachronic distribution of moods, particularly of the subjunctive, tend to view specific clause types as their typical contexts, this perspective also serves as the starting point of the paper. Given the instructional nature of sermons, they are especially conducive to the use of the subjunctive, although its presence was already waning at the time due to competition from the indicative and modal verbs. The percentage distribution of moods across clause types in the four samples is also discussed and analysed in relation to Moessner’s (2020) extensive corpus study, which serves as a reliable point of reference for observing general trends in the area in the relevant periods.
This paper explores Civil War letters written by less literate Confederate soldiers based on the Private Voices corpus. While structure and form are addressed, the main focus is on content – an area often overlooked in linguistic research. Six central themes emerge: letters (exchange of correspondence), military life, health, hope, otherness, and civilian life. These topics reveal the expressive depth of marginalized voices and invite further study by linguists and cultural historians. Structurally, the letters follow a recognizable epistolary format – opening, body, and closing – and commonly feature conventional formulaic expressions. In terms of form, the letters display nonstandard grammar, irregular spelling, and inconsistent punctuation. Despite limited formal education, the writers show an intentional effort to engage with shared communicative norms, offering insight into everyday literacy practices during the Civil War. Overall, the paper calls for deeper scholarly engagement with the Private Voices corpus to better understand not only linguistic, but also cultural dimensions of Confederate epistolary practice, especially as expressed by those who, prior to the war, received limited (if any) formal education.
Review article of Olena Synchak 2022. Vebslovnyk zhinochykh nazv ukrajinsjkoji movy. Peredmova [Web dictionary of female names of the Ukrainian language. Preface]. Ljviv. URL: https://r2u.org.ua/html/femin_details.html.
This study analyzes illocutionary speech acts in the 2024 U.S. presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, using Searle’s Speech Act Theory and a qualitative descriptive approach. A total of 124 speech acts were examined from transcripts and video sources. Both candidates predominantly used assertive acts, Trump in 91% of his utterances and Biden in 74% to project credibility. Biden used more commissives (17%) than Trump (4%) to foster trust. Directive and expressive acts were minimal, and declaratives were absent. The findings reveal distinct rhetorical strategies, emphasizing how speech act patterns shape public perception and influence political communication.
Studies on suspects’ confessional statements during interrogations abound. However, sufficient attention has not been paid to suspects’ confessional statements as captured in newspaper reports, especially how suspects deploy discursive resources to frame inclusion and exclusion in crime. Thus, this study attempts to examine how suspects recruit context-sensitive linguistic devices in their confessional statements reported in Nigerian dailies and blogs. Seven inclusion/exclusion strategies are identified in this work. The study states that these linguistic strategies serve various functions, primarily to amplify or downplay the severity of the crime committed, and to de-emphasise the suspects' involvement in an attempt to pursue exoneration. Depending on the situation they find themselves in, suspects leverage these linguistic devices to construct narratives of guilt, ignorance, innocence, withdrawal, shared responsibility, self-defense, and remorse. It will be interesting to see how future studies would incorporate a corpus-aided approach into this study.
This paper explores bipolar constructions in German, such as ob Freund oder Feind or ob du willst oder nicht, which express concessive irrelevance without relying on prototypical connectives like obwohl or trotzdem. Within the framework of Construction Grammar, these structures are analyzed as idiomatic form–meaning pairings that neutralize contrasting alternatives through syntactic parallelism and scalar or categorical opposition. Drawing on the concept of the concessive triangle, the study models their semantic structure as a pragmatic suspension of expected inference. A corpus-based analysis of 241 examples from the Deutsches Referenzkorpus reveals a typology of bipolar constructions across different word classes and highlights their consistent function: the preemptive dismissal of potential objections. The findings broaden our understanding of concessive strategies in German beyond canonical conjunctions and show how irrelevance can serve as a distinct rhetorical and interactional resource.
This article advances a specific approach to the categories of count and mass nouns in English. The proposal is to treat them as prototype categories, that is, as revealing the prototype effects (e.g. Geeraerts 2006 [1989]). The article aims to check whether such an approach is viable, and what consequences it would have, e.g. which nouns would instantiate the prototypes, and which would be marginal for the categories. This is done through an analysis of 30 count and 30 mass nouns that are used in over 1,700 utterances produced by native speakers of English.
The aim of this paper is to provide a brief study of online threats in adolescent cyberbullying. Cyberbullying refers to different forms of repeated and intentional electronic aggression. Online threats constitute an important mechanism of electronic abuse. The paper opens with a brief introduction into the issues of cyberbullying and the speech act of threat. Subsequently, a practical study on the database of 255 cyberabuse testimonies published on https://cyberbullying.org/stories is carried out. The aim of the analysis is to determine the presence of online threats in adolescent cyberbullying, the types of threats and the verbs of harm by which the threats were expressed. The results of the analysis confirm the presence of online threats in adolescent cyberbullying. The most numerous category reported in the database included death threats, followed by threats of physical violence. The most common verb of harm in the dataset was the verb kill, with other verbs significantly less represented. The analysis of the dataset reveals online threats in adolescent cyberbullying as made in a direct and unrestrained way. The results of the study also show online threats in adolescent cyberbullying as complex lexical and conceptual events, often perpetrated in connection with other forms of abuse and having important detrimental consequences for the victims. While acknowledging limitations of the present study, this paper also points to a number of practical benefits coming from further investigations into online threats in adolescent cyberbullying.
Introductory it is an important persuasive device in academic prose. This study analysed the variability of this structure in 200 public health research articles across the Introduction-Method-Result-Discussion part-genres. Occurrences of introductory it were analysed for their section-specific frequency, matrix predicate semantics, syntactic composition, and inclusion of modifying features. The results show both similarities and differences across the sections, reflecting their individual communicative purposes. For example, while all sections favour adjectives and mental and communication verbs as matrix predicates, the Methods section has a high proportion of predicates expressing dynamic and deontic modality. The findings advance our understanding of the rhetorical mechanics of academic prose, highlighting the strategic use of introductory it to fulfil section-specific functions. Pedagogically, the study offers practical insights for academic writers and educators who can use the structure to enhance disciplinary argumentation, rhetorical effectiveness and genre awareness in research writing.
The aim of the paper is a linguistic analysis of mechanisms responsible for construing and communicating emotions inherent in a text as reversed. The focus is on the phenomenon of modification of the emotional potential (germ. Emotionspotential) in a way that the recipient perceives one of the activated emotions as transformed into a different one. The method used in our research is the DIMEAN model proposed by Warnke and Spitzmüller (2008). The research material consists of selected song lyrics in English and in German where emotional load is either reversed from negative to positive or vice versa. We posit that in construing emotions as reversed, conceptual metaphors play a salient role with other linguistic/discursive factors reinforcing the effect of the use of metaphors.
The present paper examines references to medical doctors in the history of English. Particular attention will be given to less formal expressions to trace the changing attitudes towards those involved in the healing art. Also, we will take a look at different ways of forming the terms under scrutiny, including the most productive word building processes (e.g. derivation, compounding, abbreviation) and formations characteristic of non-standard medical vocabularies. The study is based on the lexical material collected from dictionaries (the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE), Thesaurus of Old English (TOE), Bosworth Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (B-T), Middle English Dictionary (MED), Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and Green’s Dictionary of Slang (GDS)).
Research within Distributed Morphology has pointed to a strong correlation between the productivity of a word formation process and the structural complexity of its derivatives. This study sets to shed new light on this issue, analyzing nominal compounds in English and Polish from the point of view of how their productivity translates into the ability of the elements within the compound to undergo modification, with particular focus placed on non-heads. It is shown that the link between productivity and syntactic complexity is weaker than what has been assumed, with semantic compositionality being of greater importance to whether elements in compounds can be further modified. Non-head modification is common in synthetic and endocentric nominal compounds in English and the study reveals that non-heads in English exocentric compounds can also be complex (as long as they are semantically transparent), even though exocentric compounding is not a productive pattern in English. It is also shown that non-heads in Polish compounds can also be complex as long as they are semantically transparent (irrespective of whether the pattern is productive).
Pole sport is gaining popularity and is contributing to the emerging subfield of sport linguistics. This study examines the language of the Polish pole sport community, focusing on the frequency of English lexical borrowings compared to native Polish equivalents. Results show that 57.3% of respondents recognize and use English terms, while 55.5% use Polish equivalents, indicating synonymous rather than preferential use. Additionally, the community demonstrates linguistic creativity by coining multiple alternative terms. These findings highlight a lack of linguistic unification within the community, likely due to the recency of the phenomenon.
The present paper examines pronunciation tendencies observed in the articulation of vowels and consonants in modern political speeches by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. It investigates which phonetic style of standard German pronunciation these speeches can be classified under, based on their segmental characteristics. The data were collected through the acoustic analysis of two speeches delivered by Olaf Scholz in the context of Putin’s attack on Ukraine. The analysis focuses on features such as the realization or elision of the schwa sound, the associated modification processes, and the articulation of the phoneme /r/ in content and function words. Our results showed that, in the analyzed speeches, the schwa sound is elided not only after a plosive, fricative, and lateral but also, to a large extent, after a nasal and a vowel. Moreover, this elision leads to the formation of partial and total contact assimilations according to the place of articulation and nasality, which occur with high frequency and intensity in both unstressed function words and accented content words. The analysis of the realization of the phoneme /ʁ/ revealed that, even in the official context of political speech, the consonantal realization variant as a uvular fricative [ʁ] predominantly occurs in the onset of potentially stressed syllables. In addition, the number of positions in which elision and vocalization of the phoneme /ʁ/ dominate is increasing. This applies both to the position after long and short vowels as well as to the syllable onset of the unstressed syllable <-ren>, which can influence the phonetic characteristics of the preceding vowels. The observed tendencies are characteristic of a speech style with reduced articulation precision and represent phonostylistic features of spontaneous speech. On the other hand, these tendencies suggest a certain softening of the German pronunciation norm, as the boundaries between the phonetic styles of formal and spontaneous speech are becoming more fluid. Moreover, such assimilation phenomena could give political speeches a more natural and authentic sound.
This paper constitutes the first part of a research project aimed at examining the use of primary interjections in Shakespeare’s plays from the perspective of their pragmatic functions. The project is structured in three successive phases, beginning with the comedies and followed by analyses of the tragedies and historical plays. Each phase will explore how interjections function pragmatically within their respective dramatic contexts, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare’s use of these expressive linguistic elements across different genres. The paper surveys the pragmatic functions of primary interjections occurring in Shakespeare’s comedies, placed against the context of general discussion on the pragmatic functions of interjections and their use in theatre plays.
With the occurrence of Machine Translation (MT) tools, their reduced efficiency was observed; hence, rules for translation evaluation were introduced among professionals. This paper examines the issue of Google Translate’s (GT’s) performance in the translation of legal texts from English into Polish based on an excerpt from The Louisiana Civil Code, which is studied in terms of errors made by GT and quality improvement in the post-editing (PE) process based on a manual evaluation metric chosen. In a comparative study, possible GT errors were classified in order to carry out PE and streamline legal MT while maintaining quality.
The present article aims to investigate the pragmatic-discursive value of Spanish canonical phraseological units (PUs). Based on a two-level metapragmatic model of phraseological meaning proposed by Timofeeva (2008, 2012, 2018), we analyze the contextual dependency of selected PUs, namely their inference within a larger utterance. In other words, we focus on the discursive behavior of PUs according to their inherent semantic complexity. Our object of study will be, on the one hand, PUs whose evaluative implicatures present a fixed character, that is, they impose their semantic load on the host utterance and thus respond to the pattern of conventional implicatures (CIs). On the other hand, we will analyze PUs whose evaluations can be affected by contextual circumstances despite showing a certain degree of conventionalization and, as a result, acquire characteristics of generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs). Finally, we will investigate PUs that develop particularized implicatures (PCIs), i.e. those generated in a given context and not necessarily based on the first level of phraseological meaning.
The aim of the paper is to discuss a few points of Radden & Dirven’s (2007) proposal regarding the main event schemas and their formal representations in the grammar of Modern English. It is argued that some of R&D’s proposals, such as the inventory of participant roles and the ordering of the “worlds” presented in their monograph should be modified while others require more serious revisions and/or extensions. In particular, it is suggested that schemas representing bodily and complex cognitive states should be added to the Psychological World and the number of the worlds should be extended to include the Social World with its own set of event schemas based on the experience of verbal communication.
