scholarly journals Polish LGBTQ+-Related Anglicisms in a Language Contact Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicja Witalisz

Abstract Research on anglicisms in Polish has nearly a century-long tradition, yet it was Jacek Fisiak’s 1960s–1980s studies on English loanwords that initiated continuous academic interest in anglicisms, coinciding with more intensive English-Polish language contact in post-war Poland. While English loans have been well-researched in the last four decades, the ongoing intensity of English lexical influence on Polish, yielding not only new loans but also new loan types, calls for further studies, especially in the area of quickly developing professional jargons and sociolects. The influx of English-sourced lexis is reflected in the diversity of semantic fields, whose number has grown from 18 (identified in Słownik warszawski 1900–1927 ) to 45 (Mańczak-Wohlfeld 1995). A semantic field that has been underresearched in studies on Polish anglicisms is the LGBTQ+-related lexis, which has drawn from American English gayspeak, shaped by the post-Stonewall gay rights movement initiated in the 1970s. The language data analysed in this study have been collected in a two-stage procedure, which included manual extraction of anglicisms sourced in a diversified corpus of LGBTQ+-related written texts, published in Polish between 2004 and 2020. The second stage involved oral interviews which served a verification function. The aim of this study is to contribute to the lexicographic attempts at researching English-sourced LGBTQ+-related vocabulary in Polish through its identification, excerption, and classification. Assuming an onomasiological approach to borrowing, we arrange LGBTQ+-related anglicisms on a decreasing foreignness scale to identify the borrowing techniques adopted by the recipient language speakers in the loan nativization process. We also address issues related to the identification and semantics of loans, and sketch areas of research on loan pragmatic functions that need further studies.

2015 ◽  
pp. 25-55
Author(s):  
Maciej Piasecki

Self-organising Logic of Structures as a Basis for a Dependency-based Dynamic Semantics ModelWe present Self-organising Logic of Structures (SLS), a semantic representation language of high expressive power, which was designed for a fully compositional representation of discourse anaphora following the Dynamic Semantics paradigm. The application of SLS to the description of possible meanings of Polish multiple quantifier sentences is discussed. Special attention is paid to the phenomena of: cardinality dependency/independency of Noun Phrase quantifiers and variety of quantification. Semantic representation based on several formal operators is proposed. They can be combined in many different ways, if one takes a purely theoretical perspective. However, in the paper we show that this huge number is practically reduced in the language use and is governed by several constraints motivated by the analysis of Polish language data. The Hypothesis of Local Range of Cardinality Dependency is formulated as an alternative to representations based on quantifier rising technique. SLS provides a multi-layered language description of inter-linked representation of sever antification, reference, presupposition and anaphora.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-140
Author(s):  
Fabio Scetti

Here I present the results of BridgePORT, an ethnographic study I carried out in 2018 within the Portuguese community of Bridgeport, CT (USA). I describe language use and representation among Portuguese speakers within the community, and I investigate the integration of these speakers into the dominant American English speech community. Through my fieldwork, I observe mixing practices in day-to-day interaction, while I also consider the evolution of the Portuguese language in light of language contact and speakers’ discourse as this relates to ideologies about the status of Portuguese within the community. My findings rely on questionnaires, participant observation of verbal interaction, and semi-structured interviews. My aim is to show how verbal practice shapes the process of identity construction and how ideas of linguistic “purity” mediate the maintenance of a link to Portugal and Portuguese identity.


2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 649-668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerzy Sas ◽  
Andrzej Żołnierek

Abstract The aim of works described in this article is to elaborate and experimentally evaluate a consistent method of Language Model (LM) construction for the sake of Polish speech recognition. In the proposed method we tried to take into account the features and specific problems experienced in practical applications of speech recognition in the Polish language, reach inflection, a loose word order and the tendency for short word deletion. The LM is created in five stages. Each successive stage takes the model prepared at the previous stage and modifies or extends it so as to improve its properties. At the first stage, typical methods of LM smoothing are used to create the initial model. Four most frequently used methods of LM construction are here. At the second stage the model is extended in order to take into account words indirectly co-occurring in the corpus. At the next stage, LM modifications are aimed at reduction of short word deletion errors, which occur frequently in Polish speech recognition. The fourth stage extends the model by insertion of words that were not observed in the corpus. Finally the model is modified so as to assure highly accurate recognition of very important utterances. The performance of the methods applied is tested in four language domains.


Author(s):  
Mark Donohue

<p>Studies of contact have revealed that all kinds of language material can, in the right circumstances, be borrowed from one language to another. Detecting, describing, and analyzing such situations typically involve the detailed study of at least two languages. An alternative involves detecting contact situations through database analysis. This cannot supplant the detailed work that requires detailed descriptive work in particular fields, but can allow us to examine large enough samples of languages that we can start to better understand, through calibration against known histories and other non-linguistic data types, likelihoods of different ‘social contact’ scenarios resulting in different kinds of linguistic traces, and also allow for the more targeted investigation of specific areas and language-to-language interactions. I shall describe the method, and illustrate its application in a number of case studies in regions for which we have good samples of language data.</p>


Author(s):  
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr

The decades 1960–80 witnessed a seismic shift in modern drama. The rage that came to define, and fuel, much of the drama in the 1960s and 1970s is directed at the audience. ‘Absurdism, protest, and commitment’ shows it is a post-war rage stemming from many sources: the Vietnam War, the Cold War, a feeling of betrayal by government and politicians, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, gay rights, feminism, the growing gap between rich and poor, and ethnic oppression. It is all about denying the audience what it expects of a play, provoking it out of real or perceived complacency, startling, and offending it. The plays of Pinter, Shepard, Beckett, Stoppard, Friel, and Fugard are discussed.


2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Trudgill ◽  
Terttu Nevalainen ◽  
Ilse Wischer

There are two important differences between American English and British English with respect to main verb have. First, American English typically employs do-support in constructions such as Do you have any coffee? while traditional British English does not. Secondly, American English typically does not use have in expressions such as I took a shower whereas British Isles English does: I had a shower. In this article, we discuss the possibility that there is a connection between these two facts. We argue that the connection lies in the failure of have in North American English to acquire the full range of dynamic meanings that it has acquired in other varieties of English, and suggest language contact as one explanation for this phenomenon.


English Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-26
Author(s):  
Vincent Chanethom

For many centuries, the United States has opened its doors to a variety of immigrants throughout the globe, engendering situations that Fishman (2004: 406) characterizes as ‘pluralistic societal impact.’ Upon coming to America, twentieth century immigrants found themselves immersed in a context in which not only their cultures clashed with that of the U.S., but also their mother tongues interacted with American English. The language patterns resulting from such interactions between immigrants' native languages and American English has been of great interest to the linguistic research community for the past several decades. For instance, research in the field of language contact has been particularly marked by the influential work undertaken by Thomason and Kaufman (1988) in which they developed a model to predict the nature of these contact-induced changes and to examine the mechanism by which these changes emerge.


Author(s):  
David Quinto-Pozos ◽  
Robert Adam

Language contact of various kinds is the norm in Deaf communities throughout the world, and this allows for exploration of the role of the different kinds of modality (be it spoken, signed or written, or a combination of these) and the channel of communication in language contact. Drawing its evidence largely from instances of American Sign Language (ASL) this chapter addresses and illustrates several of these themes: sign-speech contact, sign-writing contact, and sign-sign contact, examining instances of borrowing and bilingualism between some of these modalities, and compares these to contact between hearing users of spoken languages, specifically in this case American English.


Linguistics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Y. Dubinina ◽  
Sophia A. Malamud

AbstractThe present paper contributes to the study of speech act pragmatics, language contact, bilingualism, and heritage languages by bringing attention to the pragmatics of a contact language, heritage Russian (HR). The current study has a descriptive orientation, its main goal being to create a baseline for the pragmatic competence of speakers with incomplete acquisition of L1, which characterizes language contact in immigrant populations. We focus on communicative strategies and the choice of linguistic forms in requests made by heritage speakers of Russian, native speakers of full Russian, and native speakers of American English. The specific research questions explored in this study are: Is the linguistic variable – the form of polite requests – correlated with the population (speakers of HR vs. speakers of full Russian)? How do the differences play out? Do HR speakers have their own communicative norms? If yes, did these new norms develop under the influence of English or as a result of language-internal restructuring? We report that HR exhibits evidence of developing its own conventions for expressing polite requests which differ from the corresponding conventions in full Russian. Specifically, HR speakers use significantly more impersonal modals than monolingual native speakers of Russian in informal scenarios and rely on increased syntactic complexity to mark polite requests in formal scenarios. In indirect requests produced in both types of scenarios, HR speakers overuse the downgrader


Author(s):  
Olga S. Sapanzha ◽  

This paper focuses on two stages in the development of post-war production interior porcelain. The first stage is the completion of the development in the decorative and industrial arts of the grand style. The second stage is the development of modern style, which is reflected in the works of mass porcelain. The research refers to the Leningrad Factory of Porcelain and the production of the enterprise from 1956–1966. The products of the plant have not been studied sufficiently so far. However, the factory was one of the many Soviet porcelain enterprises that was involved in the creation of a new living environment. Two stages in the development of industrial art related to the organisation of the residential interior were reflected in the company’s products, i.e. works of small porcelain plastics, utilitarian porcelain, i.e. vases, boxes, bottles, night lamps, etc. The first stage is filled with works of small plastic arts (second half of the 1950s). The second stage is associated with the interior, in which porcelain goods played the role of accents in the interior, emphasising empty space (first half of the 1960s). The author of the article carries out analysis of caskets and vials of the enterprise (40 Years of October caskets, casket with a lion, Matryoshka casket, Summer Garden, a series of bottles and caskets), vases and pots (Lines planters, decorative vases, damask, and stacks), lamps (Chinese Pagoda night light, Golden Cockerel night light). Based on the interpretation of the value of the enterprise in the formation of the interior, the value of products in the processes of transition from the grand style to the modern style, a conclusion is drawn about the importance of the plant in the formation of the living environment. The massive nature of the works of the plant influenced the fact that the current stylistic trends were available to a vast number of Soviet citizens, who perceived new aesthetic norms.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document