This paper is dedicated to the presentation of research on bilingualism, biculturalism and identification of foreigners living in Poland. Interest in this area results from the need to know the foreigners who form – together with us – a multicultural society and from curiosity of the processes of becoming/being bilingual and bicultural.
The research was conducted in a group of 28 persons. Interview with elements of questionnaire survey and identity interview was applied as the research technique.
What follows from analyses of the collected material is that the most common type of bilingualism found in Polish immigrants is incomplete and dominant bilingualism. It is combined with biculturalism in the case of the majority of the respondents. As a result of functioning in the second language and the second culture all the time, the respondents’ identity and identification are subject to changes.
The rich repertoire of Catholic holiday and celebration names provokes the following question: “Do contemporary users of the Polish language know the names and use them?” In order to answer it, I applied two research procedures: the corpus method (analysis of the National Corpus of Polish – NKJP) and the questionnaire method.
However, I begin my paper with explaining semantic relations between the terms uroczystość (a celebration), święto (a holiday) and wspomnienie (a memoir). I treat them both as units functioning in the general variant of Polish and as specialised terms. Afterwards, I briefly recall names of the major holidays pointing to their rich synonymy. In the further part of this paper, I present figures obtained from the analysis of contexts excerpted from the NKJP and then I discuss the questionnaire data regarding the respondents’ familiarity with the holiday names. What follows from the NKJP is that the discussed vocabulary is present in Polish although its frequency is not too high. Familiarity with the lexis with which I am concerned among the responding students is significantly poorer, which I consider an effect of civilisation and social transformations. The research conducted with both methods lead to the conclusion that the most commonly known names are: Boże Narodzenie (Christmas), Wielkanoc (Easter), Wszystkich Świętych (All Saints Day), Trzech Króli (the Feast of the Three Wise Men), Zaduszki/Dzień Zaduszny (All Souls’ Day), Boże Ciało (the Feast of Corpus Christi), Niedziela Palmowa (Palm Sunday) and Środa Popielcowa (Ash Wednesday).The analysis of the linguistic material is aimed at identifying the types of consciously used innovations occurring in comic transformations of set phrases and units of language. The aim of the carried out research is related to noticeable changes in using such units, i.a. the decreasing resource of paroemias used nowadays and their simultaneous – usually comic – modifications.
The adopted research method relies on a compilation of the analysed examples (coming from the Heca hecą column printed in the weekly “Przekrój”) with their canonical forms derived from selected studies and their division into groups representing modification types (the groups were distinguished based on a classification of phraseologism modifications presented in works by Stanisław Bąba and Grażyna Majkowska).
Comic transformations of set phrases are lexical in nature; these are normally developing and replacing innovations, less frequently – contaminating and shortening ones. A formal change does not always cause a semantic modification; innovative meanings can, in turn, refer to the original ones (have the relation of antonymy with them, weaken their figurativeness, cause intended ambiguity) or not (transform them towards pure nonsense, create new meanings).
