In the article, the author discusses several important newspapers’ features which are of a special value to a linguist.
It has been pointed out that newspapers are an irreplaceable source to the studies of thematic fields and lexical layers (special, vernacular, environmental). Particular attention has been paid to the process of borrowings’ polonization, especially Anglo-American. The most striking feature of the newest and latest borrowings excerpted from the press and Internet texts is their level of spelling variance.
Press texts which shape public opinion through announcing and explaining current events and phenomenons, give linguists the ability to work out and improve study methods of text function, especially limits among their informative, persuasive and manipulative function.
In dictionaries people rarely search for ideological or world-views essence. The research on sex stereotypes in Nowy słownik poprawnej polszczyzny PWN shows that examples of word usage can be a very rich source material to this kind of analysis.
In the article I tried to prove that stereotypic perception of a man and a woman and their roles in a family is still deeply ingrained in people’s thinking – even now when it is significantly different from reality. Examples from the dictionary show that a woman’s domain is her private sphere and a man’s a public one. It is simplified and somewhat misrepresented view of the world. Admittedly, one cannot expect from dictionaries to fight with stereotypes because that is not their role, but it is good to be aware of such a problem and try to minimalize it.
I have reached for content and discourse analysis i.e. for methods from linguistics and social studies. They enable to study short, separate utterances as a uniform narration and show that there emerges a coherent, surprising linguistic portait of differencies between women and men.
