HISTORY OF THE WORD POSŁANKA IN POLISHThe subject of the article is the occurrence of the word posłanka [female member of parliament] in Polish, referring to a member of the lower house of parliament. The sources used in the study are primarily Polish dictionaries and corpora, including the Corpus of Parliamentary Discourse and the National Corpus of the Polish Language. The discussion on the nomination of women in parliament in the pages of “Poradnik Językowy” (“Linguistuic Manual”), an interwar periodical dedicated to the culture of language, was also examined. The need to create a name for a woman holding an office in the parliament of deputy was a consequence of her obtaining the right to run for the office, which occurred in 1918 by decree of the Polish president. The records of the proceedings of the Parliament of the Second Polish Republic confirm the presence of the name posłanka, the frequency of which gradually increased from the first mention in 1922 to 120 appearances in the 3rd term. The term posłanka also has numerous confirmations from the sessions of the Parliament of the Polish People’s Republic but, due to the low rank and limited decision-making power of this institution, it disappeared from public use. Its presence in the 1980s is not recorded in the National Corpus of the Polish Language. It returned in the 1990s with the opinion of a neologism and a deprecating name.
SYNTACTIC FUNCTIONS OF THE POLISH ADJECTIVE OSTATNI ‘THE LAST’The word ostatni ‘the last’ is one of the ordinal adjectives in contemporary Polish. The unit in question occurs primarily in anteposition to the noun forming nominal phrase. The adjective ostatni is a lexical exponent of the notion of sequence which implies a succession of many (at least three) states of affairs. The unit under discussion is used occasionally but it is monosemic independently of the function performed in a sentence. The adjective ostatni can function as an attribute of the noun, as a predicative expression in basic predicative expression, and as a non-basic predicative expression in a given simple sentence. The unit mentioned above belongs to systemically intratextual adjectives.
EXAMPLES OF ONE-WORD BORROWED UNITS IN THE POLISH LANGUAGE SOVIET PRESS (BASED ON “GŁOS RADZIECKI” 1939) The paper presents examples of one-word borrowed units taken from the Soviet newspaper “Głos Radziecki” [Soviet Voice] from 1939. The author analysed lexemes which are loanwords from the East Slavic languages and units with foreign etymology which were adapted to Ukrainian and Russian languages and then penetrated into the Polish language of Soviet press. The examples were divided into three groups: formal-semantic borrowings, semantic and structural calques. They are given along with lexicographical descriptions and examples of using. For the comparative analysis the author used dictionaries of the Polish, Ukrainian and Russian languages, as well as historical lexicons.
THE MEANING OF THE ADJECTIVE ŻAŁOSNY IN THE LIGHT OF COGNITIVE SEMANTICS OF FEELINGS The aim of the article is to analyse the meanings of the adjective żałosny from both a diachronic and synchronic perspective, in the context of the semantics of the emotion of żal (‘pity’). The goal is to show how the concept of żal is evoked in both historical and contemporary meanings of this adjective. The methodological foundation of the analysis is based on concepts from cognitive and cultural linguistics, frequently used in research on linguistic expressions of emotions: Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory (1978), Charles Fillmore’s frame semantics (1985), and Anna Wierzbicka’s (1999) suggestion for describing emotion scenarios. The material basis consists of historical and contemporary dictionaries of the Polish language as well as corpus data. The results of the analysis indicate a transformation in the meanings of the adjective żałosny, linked to a shift in evaluative connotation, which can be explained by changes in the prototypical emotion scenarios (and their profiled elements) evoked in the respective meanings of the adjective under study.
LINGUISTIC PROPERTIES OF LOCAL TAXES FOR KRAKÓW BAKERS FROM THE YEARS (1573–1630) In the National Archives in Kraków, within the series Libri taxarum victualium et rerum mechanicarum, under reference number 29/667/115, there is a folder containing manuscript documents of exceptional value for historical and linguistic research: Voivodeship Price Regulations for Bakers from July 15, 1573 to August 16, 1630. These regulations are subjected to a linguistic analysis in the present article which is divided into four parts. The first part addresses the generic features of the price regulations, as the structure of these documents for bakers is relatively uniform. It can be captured within a certain compositional framework, allowing the hypothesis that the regulations represented a distinct genre of official text in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second part reviews selected characteristic phonetic features of these documents, namely: the realization of nasal vowels, closed vowels, the pronunciation of e before j in the ending -ej>ėj and in the suffix of the comparative degree of adverbs, vowel changes in dependent positions (i. e., the development of i, y before l, ł into e), the influence of other half-open vowels on preceding vowels, the pronunciation of l’, the anticipation of palatalization, and the unification of consonants in terms of voicing in medial position and at word boundaries. The third part, focused on inflection, examines the following forms of adjectives and nouns: instrumental singular of the pronominal-adjectival declension; genitive, dative, and locative singular as well as genitive plural of the feminine declension; accusative singular of vowel-stem feminine nouns; the expansive use of the -ow ending from the -ŭ- declension to other masculine nouns in this case; the locative singular of the -ŏ- stem declension; remnants of the dual number in the regulations. In the fourth part, an analysis of the superlative forms of adjectives and the puzzling form jemny/odjemny is presented.
