This paper analyses international collocations, winged words and aphoristic phrases being components of capitalist discourse, which has been intensively adapted by Poles since 1989, such as: wolny rynek (free market), wolna konkurencja (free competition), własność prywatna (private property), kapitał spekulacyjny (risk capital), prowadzić biznes (to run a business), zaciągnąć kredyt (to take out a loan), niewidzialna ręka rynku (the invisible hand), gra interesów (an interplay of interests), raj podatkowy (a tax haven), pracować w szarej strefie/ na czarno (to work in the grey economy / informal sector), wpaść w spiralę długów (to fall into a debt spiral); Pieniądz nie śpi (Money never sleeps), Kapitał nie ma narodowości (Capital has no nationality), Nie ma darmowych lunchów (There is no such thing as a free lunch), Dajemy wędkę, nie rybę (Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime); Gospodarka, głupcze! (It’s the economy, stupid). A broad reception of this type of phrases in the colloquial Polish language and their frequent reproductions in journalistic texts and comments published in recent years on popular Polish web portals have been noticed. It has been proved that experts featured in the media (economists, politicians, lawyers, and journalists) shape the collective mentality by means of collocations, which are to a large extent calques of the corresponding expressions and phrases used in English-language texts, reproduced in the discourse. They serve the purpose of imposing a common ideologically conceptualised view of reality on discourse participants. Hence, the quoted collocations are treated in this paper as carriers of the capitalist worldview and a substantial component of communicative competence of public discourse participants, which fulfils several significant functions characterised in this paper as: nominative (referential), persuasive and evaluative functions.
This paper is dedicated to a complex legal, linguistic and social category, namely obraza uczuć religijnych (insult to religious feelings). Definitions of terms such as uczucia religijne (religious feelings) and obraza uczuć religijnych found in normative acts, judicial decisions and doctrine studies were
analysed and described. Due to the nature of this paper and the social context, the interpretation of the principles of Catholicism was also included in the research.
The aim of the conducted analyses was to determine the meaning of concepts such as uczucia religijne and obraza uczuć religijnych in light of statutory and cultural determinants shaping the secular state of law with Christian roots.
The principles of the linguistic and systemic interpretation were chosen as the methodological basis of the research.
The overview revealed the unstable pragmatic position of the discussed categories. It was established that the main cause of the interpretational instability was the difficulty to adopt a unanimous standpoint regarding the meaning of the lexeme obraza (insult) being part of the term obraza uczuć
religijnych. A correlation between the secular law and the canonical doctrine was identified and described in the course of the examination. This part of the study presents how legislative and case-law texts are connected with Christian values.
The object of this paper is contemporary statements posted on Polish Internet forums, which can be interpreted as confessions.
Its purpose is to check whether the semantic features of the genre of confession, with the corresponding verbal lexeme zwierzyć się–zwierzać się (to confide) and the derived noun lexemes zwierzenie (confession) and zwierzanie się (confiding), described by theoreticians and lexicographers, are reflected in online usages. And whether analysing such contexts will result in the necessity to extend or modify the dictionary explications and definitions.
This is because online confessions differ from the original genre. This gives rise to the question if this results only from the change of the medium of making confessions or they have undergone the process of adaptation based on a peculiar communication situation, as an effect of which the prototypical genre characteristics have lost their significance, being pushed to the background, or the change of the medium has involved so significant genological modifications that the statements can no longer be called confessions and a new speech genre has been created. And it is extra-structural characteristics, namely the communication situation, that have become the indicator of the genre.
