This paper addresses the issue of the development of FOR DREAD THAT – a negative purpose subordinator in the history of the English language. The theoretical foundation of this work are the mechanisms of grammaticalisation suggested by Heine and Kuteva in many works of theirs. The gathered material shows that the development of this relatively rarely used subordinator constitutes a case of a typical grammaticalisation whose rise might have been the result of analogy with FOR FEAR THAT.

Communication with authorities belongs to a field of research with a long and intensive research tradition. The present paper focuses on the process of understanding in oral institutional communication. It will present some mechanisms by which common understanding is achieved by using different resources. In contrast to the numerous papers dealing with written institutional communication, little work has been carried out on conversations in the administration. Based on Becker-Mrotzek’s (1999, 2001) classification of oral institutional communication into three different types: discourse on con-sultation, objection and application, the present paper focuses on data collection interviews or application discourses (Ger. Datenerhebungsgespräche), which form “the major part of citizen-administration-discourses” (Becker-Mrotzek 1999: 1399). Despite the frequency of these types of discourse, they are the subject of remarkably few studies.

During the Brexit campaign, both those who opted for Britain leaving the EU and those who wanted to remain in the structures of the Union referred to William Shakespeare to support the rightness of their preference. The question of how Shakespeare would have voted was raised by numerous journalists, writers and politicians who either tried to present Shakespeare as a national bard promoting British isolationism or a staunch adherent of England being an integral part of the European continent. The paper scrutinizes some aspects of Shakespeare’s plays which indicate the writer’s attitude towards the relations between England and Europe.

The descriptions of characters’ eating habits recurring in Michel Houellebecq’s novels make a complex system of signs functioning at the textual and intertextual level as well as in reference to the extratextual reality, i.e., the situation of the Western society at the turn of the 21st century. The aim of this article is to identify the key points of this system and determine the possible directions of interpretation of these culinary motifs. For contemporary decadents from Houellebecq’s novels, lone feasts are a new kind of ritual, which – unlike the traditional “ceremonies of eating” – does not help maintain interpersonal relationships but only provides temporary relief and helps them forget about problems.

The article addresses the relation between the grammatical gender and the linguistic encoding of sex distinction (natural gender). Our goal is to problematize the category of gender as a multipart and multifunctional linguistic phenomenon operating in diverse dimensions of a language. The analysis of Italian and Polish languages illustrates that grammatical gender – whose main function is to signal syntactic relations between text constituents – and natural gender – whose main function is to encode information about the sex of a referent – are in principle autonomous and independent linguistic phenomena which are however strongly interrelated in a linguistic system through a morphological and syntactic interface.

This essay concerns the fiction works of some Polish writers who made their literary debuts after 1989 (A. Stasiuk, P. Siemion, W. Kowalewski, Z. Kruszyński, K. Varga). Analysis of the urban space in their novels and tales based on three chronotopes (Bachtin) – center, street, road – serves to define certain characteristics of the hero and of the literary narrative mode. In the Polish literary city of the post- -socialist era, there is now no trace of the flâneur: replaced with the figure of a wanderer or fugitive, the hero of Polish literary fiction is lost in urban centers that take on the unique characteristics of the labyrinth. In this can be sought the reason behind the revived popularity of the theme of travel in the new Polish prose.

The paper takes under scrutiny Michael Köhlmeier’s novel Abendland, which portrays the history of the twentieth century in the form of oral family stories based on the biography of the main protagonist of the work, Carl Jacob Candoris, written down by his godson Sebastian Lukasser. Authentic historical events and actual characters are intermingled with fictitious figures and events. The article poses questions on individual and collective memory as well as the significance of oral history in the life of an individual.

Se non la realtà, published in 1960, collects travel stories written by Tommaso Landolfi during the 1950s. Among the texts contained in the collection you can find stories, articles, micro-reports on various – also less known – Italian cities. The writer chooses alternative routes to mass tourism, which he strongly criticizes. Anti-tourism practiced by Landolfi is also reflected in his literary style, adopting strategies unusual for travel literature, such as combining literary and non-fiction fiction, numerous allusions and quotes, and esoteric illuminations. Unlike other authors of travel reports from the 1950s, such as Pasolini or Piovene, Landolfi criticizes the euphoria associated with the development of Italy during the economic boom, anticipating some of the topics of Guido Ceronetti’s Un viaggio in Italia.

This paper examines the discursive means by which authors of scientific texts in the humanities and social sciences take a critical stance on the theses of their colleagues. Focusing on controversy rather than polemics, and using a corpus in French and English borrowed from Language Science, translation and didactics, the paper presents rhetorical figures and linguistic structures that maintain conversational propriety despite the emotionality of disagreement.