Odnajdywanie śladów przeszłości gatunków prasowych. Uwagi historyka języka

This paper deals with issues described as the life of genres. The aim was to present the early beginnings of modern genres, mainly informative ones, in the old press. Therefore it was essential to include modern per-spective in the research of historical material. The problems with isolating old forms/genres of the state-ments and naming them was emphasized in the paper. Research postulates and conclusions were presented and supported by the analyses of the press statements of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Wyrazy mi(e)zyniec, mizynek ‘mały palec’, ‘najmłodsze dziecko, cielę, prosię, kurczę’ odczytane na nowo

The text discusses the wordsmi(e)zyniec, mizynek ‘little finger’, ‘youngest child, calf, piglet, chicken’. A few decades ago, K. Nitsch dedicated a separate study to this subject, published in the Język Polski journal. Our text, contingent on the methodologies of linguistic geography, presents the history and geography of these words in Polish within the broader Slavic context. It follows from the findings that the individual forms from the *měz- stem are to be differently viewed. Some forms may certainly be seen as relics of the early Slavic unity and cannot be treated as lexical borrowings. Besides, some forms, especially the *mězinъkъ deriva-tive which has no equivalent of the mie- form in the Polish language, can be seen as a Ukrainian loan word.

Formuła zalecenia służb jako wyraz grzeczności językowej w epistolografii polskiej XVII i XVIII wieku

In the paper, a formal form of proposing services evidenced in Polish epistolography of the 17th and 18th cen-turies is described. The formal and semantic structure of the formula and its evolution has been presented to show, among other things, that in the 17th century the said formula was an integral whole with the formula of applying oneself to grace, e.g. oddawać (zalecać) usługi łasce (‘apply (propose) service to grace’) whereas in the 18th century it was associated with the category of responsibility, e.g. być w obowiązku usług (‘be obliged to serve’) and it assumed new forms such as czekać na rozkazy or czekać rozkazów (‘await orders’). Moreover, it has been indicated that the service formula was also related to other acts of Middle Polish epistolary eti-quette and the nobility politeness model at that time.

Internetowa madka jako wariant stereotypu współczesnej matki

The paper is trying to answer the question of how the popular concept of madka can affect the stereotype of a mother and the social perception of the family. The author takes up the current topic regarding contem-porary changes in the perception of motherhood using anthropological and cultural linguistics methods, and the considerations are put in the sociological and sociolinguistic context. Reconstruction of the mean-ing of the new concept leads to the conclusion that its strong negative markings affect the social image of mothers and leads to stigmatizing families.

O dystrybucji synonimicznych przyimków i operatorów adnumeratywnych

The article presents the results of questionnaire studies on the nominal – ad-verbal and post-prepositional – distribution of Polish prepositions and adnumeral operators of the form około ‘ a b o u t ’, od... do... ‘from... to...’, po ‘each’, and między ‘between’. These results demonstrate that adnominal operators około, od... do... and między are acceptable to various degrees, from the highly acceptable około, to the at best marginally accept-able między. They also confirm the existence of the distributive operator po, albeit limited to the positions of the subject and, perhaps, accusative object. Also the prepositions około, od... do..., and po are acceptable to various degrees and only in ad-verbal nominative, accusative and genitive positions.

Morfoskładnia w Słowniku właściwych użyć języka

This article outlines the theoretical basis of describing morphosyntactic problems in The Dictionary of Proper Uses of Language. The main point was to 1) show the principles of the reference grammatical model and 2) to describe the main phases of the procedure of language facts evaluation. In the first case, we refer to the dependency syntax model, which reflects the relationships between the elements of syntactic structures through assigning them to a specific type of binding. In the second case, in contrast to the traditional nor-mative model, the importance of the frequency of the specific syntactic structures is much more underlined. Ultimately, the combination of prevalence and frequency of language elements allows for constructing an objective assessment procedure.

Norma językowa jako fakt społeczny fundowany na uzusie. Uwagi w kontekście Słownika właściwych użyć języka

The prescriptive approach has been prevalent in discussions about the linguistic norm for many decades. Many linguists question the primacy of social custom and make many arbitrary changes to establish the subjective form of the norm. In connection with the planned The Dictionary of Proper Uses of Languagethe author of the article presents the best structuralist traditions and calls for research on the linguistic norm which is based on descriptive methods. It is necessary to completely break away from all manifestations of arbitrariness and subjectivity in contemporary prescriptive linguistics. The fundamental premise that the linguistic norm is a fact based on usus must be reflected in relevant procedures aimed at analyzing corpora consisting of millions of words. Such an approach will make it possible to establish a model that comprises more than just individual language uses. As far as dictionary definitions are concerned, the most frequent, widespread and thus typical linguistic units should be primarily considered to be normative. Typicality, determined by frequency, as well as textual, social and territorial conditions, is the most important category.

Parę uwag dotyczących leksemu subsumpcja i wyrazów pokrewnych

The aim of this article is to present different views on the forms of the lexeme subsumpcja (‘subsumption’) and some cognate words found in Latin lexicons, the most influential dictionaries of the Polish language, Polish etymological lexicons and dictionaries of foreign words as well as The Oxford English dictionary. It is concluded that the correct form of the word is subsumpcja and it is of Latin origin.

Terminologia związana z tłem konwersacyjnym w opisie modalności językowej oraz propozycja jej przekładu na język polski

The article aims at bringing the model of the semantic field of modal expressions presented by Angelika Kratzer to the attention of Polish-speaking readers. The framework consists of three domains: modal force, modal base and ordering source. The last two are conversational backgrounds. The duality of the modal base also allows for a binary typology of modality. In addition, the paper proposes Polish equivalents of English-language terminology.