This paper analyses ten-odd linguistic reviews from a number of periodicals from the period 1895-1937 for the purpose of separating the characteristics of this academic genre. The following determinants are identified: dialogism, evaluation, various types of metatextual indicators, use of impersonal forms, orientation on the recipient, polite forms, terminological lexis, erudite elements.
The reviews pursued different textual patterns: a review-report, a critical review, a review-study.
The primary aim of this paper is to determine general rules governing the selection of phraseological material. The analysis of idioms related to the art of horse-riding provided the bases to make a statement that units with obsolete archaic and historical lexis are becoming established in Polish. The status of permanence is also enjoyed by those idioms which have lost cultural motivation and have become prone to reinterpretation.
The majority of phraseological units concerned with horse-riding have been forgotten because the surrounding reality has changed. However, explaining the loss of phraseological units with changes in the reality only is insufficient. A significant role has been also played by other factors: the loss of metaphorical senses by lexical components of the units or the strong phraseological synonymy/variance. Apart from that, the fate of some phraseological units was sealed by an accident.
This paper presents the manner of reconstructing the nominative form of nouns used in such established expressions as nie mieć równia in dictionaries of Polish. The analysis included entries from dictionaries recording units of language at various stages of its historical evolution, from dictionaries of historical Polish, to the 19th- and 20th-century dictionaries, to the most recent ones. The N sg form was reconstructed there in the three following manners: rówień (sb m), równie (sb n) and równia (sb f). It turns out that only the texts originating from the period when an additional characteristic differentiating vowels was their quality provide convincing arguments on the noun paradigm to which the form G sg rowniå belongs. The close vowel in the grammatical ending of the case was characteristic exclusively of a certain group of neuter gender nouns, so the nominative noun should be równie. Additionally, Słownik polszczyzny XVI wieku (Dictionary of the 16th-century Polish) recorded a form that is homonymic to the nominative form A sg rownie and the noun nierownie together with declension forms certifying the word’s grammatical gender.
Upon the disappearance of close vowels, the genitive ending was deprived of clarity and therefore the form równia has become homonymic to masculine and neuter nouns. This probably contributed to reconstructing the nominative noun in the form of the masculine noun równień, and hence to shifting the lexeme to a different grammatical class of nouns.
