The concept of family in Hausa

The paper attempts to define the notion of family in Hausa, an African language which is very distant, both geographically and culturally, from the European context. With reference to the universal features of the notion family, the culture-specific concept of family is discussed, focusing on traditional model of the Hausa family and relations between family members. The main features of the concept are identified through the analysis of the lexicon, phraseology, and structural features. The discussion includes some specific profiles of the concept of family in Hausa, manifested in religious discourse and in the language of popular culture.

Bread in small forms of Lithuanian folklore

Bread is one of the oldest human-made foods. With the emergence of agriculture, it became a daily meal and so began to be appreciated, personalised and deified. The image of bread in small forms of folklore shows that it is the main food, so important that people are ready to work hard for it and even baking bread is considered difficult. The result of all this work is a person whose hunger is satiated, and the same is true of the entire family. Although all work is valuable, that of a plougher or generally of ordinary people is particularly appreciated because it is most strictly connected with bread and land. Considerable attention is paid to the quality of bread: it not only has to look nice but also be tasty. Bread allows one to differentiate one’s folk from strangers; it reminds one of home and motherland, functions as a symbol of stability and harmony in the family. Data from folklore highlight mutual relationships between bread and people: bread protects people from misfortunes, it heals and warns them of danger. Therefore, people protect and respect it and attribute magical qualities to it. This understanding of bread was typical of our ancestors. However, given that the data from folklore used in this study come from the 19th and early 20th c., the contemporary understanding of bread may be different.

On being decent. The meaning and axiology of the lexemes przyzwoity ‘decent’ and przyzwoitość ‘decency’ in the history of Polish

This study was inspired by the famous turn of phrase that came from the Polish statesman Władysław Bartoszewski: “It’s good to be decent” (Warto być przyzwoitym). It is frequently quoted in public discourse and invokes decency as a value that is construed intuitively and is difficult to define. The article presents a diachronic analysis of the lexemes przyzwoity ‘decent’ przyzwoitość ‘decency’, and przyzwoicie ‘decently’ since their oldest records until current usage. These lexemes appeared at the beginning of the Middle Polish period but their axiological load was low at that time. The evolution of their meanings – from axiologically neutral to positive – occurred late (in the second half of the 18th c.) and progressed quickly. Their neutral meanings, which were well-documented as late as in the 18th c., disappeared; the lexemes remained in current usage but as axiologically positive ones. Through an analysis of the early contexts an attempt is made to reconstruct of the original sense of decency and to discover its key sense in contemporary Polish.

The role of names in the reconstruction of the linguacultural worldview of mushrooms

The article shows the role of names in the reconstruction of the linguacultural view of mushrooms. The large number of the names of mushrooms testifies to the practical importance of mushrooms for country people. Many of the names are polysemic and synonymic. In the analysis, the onomasiological basis of mushroom names plays a crucial role. Those names can be based on the appearance of mushrooms (e.g. lejek ‘funnel’, czerwieniak ‘the red one’), their properties (twardziok ‘the hard one’, słodzianka ‘the sweet one’), including their (in)edibility and poisonous properties (grzyb godzący ‘the edible mushroom’, truciciel ‘poisoner’, grzyb jadowity ‘the poisionous mushroom’), as well as the time and place where they grow (wrześniak ‘September mushroom’, dębowiec ‘oak mushroom’).

Russian ethnopsycholinguistics and its implications for translation research

The article presents the sources of communicative models of translation, founded on the results of enthnopsycholinguistic contrastive research conducted by the Department of Psycholinguistics and Communication Theory of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (later: Russian Academy of Sciences). It focuses on the description of the relations within the triads of language-ethnos-culture or language-consciousness-culture. The problems raised by ethnopsycholinguists from the point of view of translation include lacunae and linguistic awareness of the participants of communication, including bilingual communication.

Democracy on the basis of Belarusian media (mid 2020 – early 2021)

The article in concerned with the stereotype of democracy in Belarusian journalism from mid-2020 to early 2021. The data come from printed and online sources, in Russian and Belarusian, of various political orientations. It is concluded that the stereotype has acquired a new profile in Belarusian public sphere.

Methodological basis of cognitive-anthropological semantics. The case of the Axiological Lexicon of Slavs and their Neighbours (vols. 1-5, 2015-2019)

The article consists of two parts. The first, methodological part presents the goal of cognitive-anthropological research in opposition to structural semantics and describes successive steps that lead to that goal. The second part contains commentary on the Axiological Lexicon of Slavs and their Neighbours, especially volume 5, devoted to honour. The aim of semantic-structural research is to reconstruct the semantic-lexical system of a language (as code) serving interpersonal communication – in other words, it is to reconstruct the information that one may obtain through the use of the code. The aim of cognitive-anthropological semantics is to reconstruct the conceptualization of linguistically salient fragments of reality.

Grammaticalization of modality in natural languages: The case of the noun tsumori in Japanese

The Japanese noun tsumori is used as the so-called formal noun and the head of syntactic nominalization. Its main meaning of ‘aim, intention’ is expressed through the basic sentence pattern of (suru) tsumori da. The modal meanings of this noun reveal close connections with the pragmatics of linguistic politeness and manifestation of attitudes in interpersonal communication. The article deals with the main sentential patterns and functions from the comparative perspective.

Older Slavic literature: An ethnolinguistic approach

The study presents an ethnolinguistic approach to the secular pre-standard literature of the so called Slavia Orthodoxa in its final period. In focus are the methodological aspects of the research. The approach proposed here is based on a philological model developed by the author. The model operates on the text level and includes linguistic and non-linguistic (textological and sociolinguistic) properties of text. It has now been extended to cover the ethnolinguistic factor and is applied to the 17th-18th c. East Slavic and Serbian corpus.

Flannel and beggar’s blanket: metaphors or conceptual blends? A cognitive analysis of selected common names of mullein in English

The paper offers a cognitive analysis of selected common English names of mullein (Verbascum thapsus L.) motivated by the appearance of the plant. While analyzing such names as flannel and beggar’s blanket, the author strives to portray the way they are conceptualized by recalling Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Integration Theory, in particular the Brandt and Brandt six-space model of conceptual integration, also known as a cognitive-semiotic approach to metaphor. In the course of the analysis, the author also makes reference to those aspects which seem indispensable from the standpoint of cognitive linguistics, viz. (i) the role of human experience and embodied thought in the conceptualization process, (ii) the dynamic and context-dependent meaning construction and (iii) the role of linguistic worldview in decoding meaning.