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Hélène Włodarczyk,
Andrè Włodarczyk : About the pragmatic nature of predication (or about meta-information in linguistic predication)
This paper is an attempt at presenting the long
and complex history of the concepts of subject and
predicate both in logic and linguistics in a nutshell in
order to shed light on the pragmatic apprehension of
these concepts proposed recently in the metainformative
centering (MIC) approach. Although this
new linguistic theory revisits notions belonging to
a language philosophy tradition that is more than two
thousands years old, it takes modern neurolinguistic
and artificial intelligence research, especially results
concerning the importance of attention sharing as
well as the idea of knowledge sharing, into account
and applies them to linguistic communication.
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Jadwiga Linde-Usiekniewicz : Elusive to. A side note to Derwojedowa and Kopcińska’s paper On non-nominal subjects
The paper addresses only one issue raised in
the study by Derwojedowa and Kopcińska, i.e. the
surface-syntactic representation of sentences bearing
the segment in question, e.g. Grać w brydża, to gram,
ale tylko z bratem w parze (roughly: I do play bridge
but only with my brother as a partner). According
to the Authors, in such sentences to is a dependent
of the verb and the dependency relation is that of
modification. In this paper I argue that the so-called
topical (or thematic) to (featured in the example above)
shows semantic, syntactic and information structure
properties that distinguish it both from the so-called
focal (or rhematic) to, e.g. To w brydża gram z bratem
w parze. (It is bridge that I play with my brother as
a partner) and from topicalising expressions, such
as jeśli chodzi o… (as to…). It is argued that topical
to should be seen not as a modifying (single place)
particle, but as a kind of connecting word, which
joins the sentence rheme with the sentence theme,
with the latter presented as emphatic one, i.e. one
that excludes another potential and semantically
similar themes.
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Mariola Wołk : Non-physical hunger – on the meaning of expressions: głodny [czegoś] (hungry [for something]), spragniony [czegoś] (thirsty [for something]) and żądny [czegoś] (greedy [for something])
The paper focuses on the adjectives głodny
(hungry), spragniony (thirsty) and żądny (greedy),
which appear in contexts which are not typical of
their common usage. While sentences like On jest
głodny/spragniony (He is hungry/thirsty) with the
adjective as a predicative expression, and adjectival
phrases such as głodny/spragniony wędrowiec
(hungry/thirsty wanderer) are instances of typical
usage, głodny czegoś (hungry for something),
spragniony czegoś (thirsty for something), żądny
czegoś (greedy for something), are untypical, and the
last expression appears only in such a form.
Tentatively, the author perceives the analysed
adjectives as indicators of the will of the experiencer.
The phrases are units of language (as defined by
Andrzej Bogusławski, see Bogusławski 1976) different
than one-segment expressions głodny and
spragniony, although historically they refer to words
such as głód, pragnienie, żądza/żądanie (hunger,
thirst, greed, respectively). However, acknowledging
the lexical independence of the units does not mean
that the analysed units, as regards their content, are
set apart from the expressions from which they
are derived. The research is aimed at characterising
their semantic properties, as well as determining
relationships among them (deciding whether they are
equivalent in meaning), establishing their relationship
with the semantically simple verb chcieć (ktoś chce
czegoś) (to want (someone wants something)), and –
as a consequence – making an attempt at explicating
their meanings.
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Natalia Zemlanaja : On the semantic relation between the expressions zdarzenie, wydarzenie, event (words meaning incident, occurrence, event) in contemporary Polish
The author of this paper aims at analysing the
semantic relation between the Polish expressions
zdarzenie, wydarzenie (words meaning incident,
occurrence, event) and the borrowing event. The last
of the enumerated expressions, according to the
chronological data derived from NKJP (the National
Corpus of Polish), occurred in the Polish language
in the mid-1990s. Polish has been familiarising
with this expression: it has assumed the Polish
inflection paradigm, it also proves to be active in
terms of word formation. In numerous contexts, event
replaces its Polish dictionary equivalents: zdarzenie
and wydarzenie. In the research process, semantic
analysis methods were applied, including in
particular the method of making hypotheses and
verifying them with contradiction tests. It was proved
that the language units zdarzenie and wydarzenie
are not synonymous, and the former one is simpler
in terms of semantics. The borrowing event can be
deemed a lexical counterpart of none of the analysed
Polish expressions as its meaning is much more
specialised and its main semantic characteristic is
‘being organised by someone for someone for a
purpose’.
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Celina Heliasz : What can be heard in one’s voice? The metapragmatic relation of vocal activities
The object of this research is a prosody of
utterances as vocal activities as well as utterances
about the realised or possible utterances which are
formulated in the natural language. The method
applied to the research was the theory of language
units, cf. Bogusławski (1973, 1988, 2008), as well as
the principles of metalinguistics, cf. C. Caffi (1994:
2461-2466), J. Lucy (2004), W. Bublitz and A. Hübler
(2007: 1-26). Two types of expressions forming
metapragmatic relations of vocal activities were
distinguished. One is speech act verbs. The other is
adverbial qualifications of the voice (or the tone of
voice).
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Monika Jabłońska : Prepositional structures as one of the manifestations of the Polish language analysation
The object of the analysis presented in this paper is
five pairs of structures, composed of a correct
synthetic structure and a corresponding analytic
structure, which is disapproved of in terms of
prescriptivism yet occurring quite frequently in
utterances by contemporary language users. Due to
subtle semantic differences between the synthetic
and analytic forms, the latter one is beginning to win
the speakers’ approval and is slowly being absorbed
by the language system. The process is evidence
of the intensifying tendency for analysation of the
Polish language, which was observed already in
the 16th-century texts and is a source of the
increasing number of syntactic synonyms today.
