The invention of writing entailed enormous consequences not only for human language but also for human mind. This can be seen, for instance, in the birth and development of the culture of literate thinking. Obviously, both (preliterate and literate) cognitive styles cannot be perceived in static terms, and therefore it is worth looking into the influence of modern technologies on the status of the literate cognitive style in language behaviours of the generation raised on new media. Research shows the process of reversing the vector of changes: from intellectualisation of syntax and punctuation (evolution in the 19th century) to their previous emotionalisation and orality related to the “here and now” of speaking. This “reversed vectors” principle concerns also reverse socialization and reverse adaptation. Both social processes exert also a major influence on the formation of language behaviours.
Differences in the linguistic communication of men and women have been studied since the beginning of the 20th century, with the focus on English. Research on gender issues in Polish has been scarce, with only several published works, usually based on the authors’ informal and random observations of oral communication between males and females [e.g. Handke 1986; 1990; 1995]. There are only a few detailed empirical studies carried out in groups of sociolinguistically homogeneous participants and with the use of reliable research methods.
The present paper offers the first analysis of Polish teenagers’ views and ideas on the language used by the opposite gender on the basis of an innovative language experiment. 20 female and male upper-secondary school students were asked to give a written account of either a party they had recently attended or a school trip. Afterwards, theparticipants were requested to describe the same events from the perspective of a person of the opposite gender.
A comparison of the pairs of texts written before and after the “gender swap” enabled us to identify the major features of male and female language as seen by the participants while an examination of the original stories revealed their genuine characteristics. The obtained results imply that in writing the second version of the text the subjects were guided mainly by gender-related cultural and linguistic stereotypes, which rarely corresponded to the actual properties of the language used by girls and boys in the analysed works.
The aim of this paper is to describe selected word formation structures present in the statements made by Internet users commenting on the events which took place in the Polish Sejm in December 2016. The object of the analysis is primarily new expressions, coined and fully comprehensible in a specific socio-political context, such as: Majdanek, Ciamajdan and koderasta. The author describes their structure and communicative function. Most of the derivatives discussed in the paper are examples of lexical contaminations with the corresponding conceptual amalgams. The analysis combines the structural description of derivatives with some elements of cognitive methodology: R. Langacker’s dynamic model and G. Fauconnier and M. Turner’s theory of conceptual integration.
The knowledge of the frequency of the location of an incorrect spelling of a word is significant in intrasubject integration in teaching Polish. A teacher having such information can introduce spelling exercises preventing the most typical errors in inflectional or morphological units. In order to identify the most frequent locations of incorrect spelling, 250 casual texts of 4th-6th class primary school pupils were used.
Deviations from spelling standards occur more often in inflectional units than in morphological ones and over five times more frequently in the inflectional ending than on the boundary between the inflectional stem and ending.
The most common places of deviations from spelling standards related to the morphological structure of a word is the suffix, the prefix, the boundary between the prefix and the root word, the boundary between the root word and the suffix. Particular attention should be paid to female nouns ending with –ia since there are several places where spelling errors can be made in their inflection paradigm.
