The term language awareness is often recalled in contemporary works on linguistics. In the Polish language, one can talk about at least five types of definition: normative, descriptive and recording, psycholinguistic, sociolonguistic, cultural and anthropological. A view which confirms the existence of ontogenetic and social (collective) variant of language awareness, gained a wide acceptance.
We suggest to perceive in language awareness people’s capacity to collect and analyse knowledge, judgements and views of a lingusitic nature, with the help of which we regulate processes of verbal communication. Within the various elements of language awareness, three main components can be identified: strictly grammatical knowledge, beliefs about the rules of linguistic behaviour, all other judgements relating to the speech as an emanation of collective life and the product of culture.
The issue of the article is the way of description of lexical Italian borrowings in Erazm Rykaczewski’s Słownik języka polskiego. In further paragraphs, particular elements of entries of units qualified as from Italian language were discussed. I analysed the units which are accompanied by information about the origin with the abbreviation (z włos.) [(from Italian)] and the entries supplied with qualifier indicating two possible languages which pass on borrowings. The entries whose information about the origin has a descriptive character, were also taken into consideration.
They were not taken into account the units whose structure indicates Italian origin and which were recognized as Italian borrowings in other lexicographic studies being not recognized as Italian borrowings by the author of the dictionary. The analysis of the material enables to assume that the entries marked as Italian borrowings do not differ substantially among themselves. The differing element is the order of particular components of the dictionary microstructure. Some elements of the dictionary microstructure reveal similarities to two other lexicographic studies from New Polish era. This could indicate the, widely discussed in literature, dependence of Rykaczewski’s dictionary.
