This study examines different aspects of English lexical borrowings in New Persian, their phonetic adaptation, semantic changes, and social attitudes towards them (i.e. tensions between the prescriptive stand of language purists and the community, especially the young people of Tehran). It is based on the corpus of c. 340 words collected from dictionaries of Modern and colloquial Persian, media, spoken language sources, and data assembled from the Persian Internet sites.
This article covers a complex relationship between the Bible and English literature from, to quote D.L. Jeffrey, ,,the swift Christianization of Britain in 7th CE [...] down to the present 'post-Christian' era". The author concentrates on and discusses the most essential results of more than thirteen centuries of this spiritual insemination, dealing mainly with a depiction of the most essential motifs and themes and occasionally commenting on various works' generic and technical aspects. Although we see that almost every writer explored biblical allusions in one way or another, emerging as the most significant developments are Anglo-Saxon poetry, Medieval drama, works of the Metaphysical poets as well as those of J. Milton, J. Bunyan and W. Blake. Having reached this peak, literature seems to have started losing interest in the Bible, or rather instead of the mission to evangelize, it preferred filling the old purport with new words and ideas, the most notorious 'deconstructionists' being Blake and his Romantic followers, decadent Swinburne and such modernists as D.H. Lawrence or J. Joyce.
On the basis of corpus-derived data, the present paper examines the collocational patterns of the singular and the plural forms of a pair of etymologically and semantically related quantifying nouns (QNs), namely English heap and its Polish equivalent kupa ‘heap’. The primary aim is to determine their respective levels of numeralization, operationalized as the frequency of co-occurrence with animate and abstract N2-collocates in purely quantificational uses, in an attempt to establish whether, and to what extent, the addition of the plurality morpheme bears on the grammaticalization of a nominal of this kind into an indefinite quantifier. Following the observations arrived at by Brems (2003, 2011), the hypothesis is that pluralization should yield a facilitating effect on the numeralization of nouns referring to large quantities by amplifying their inherent scalar implications. The results demonstrate that whereas heaps indeed exhibits a higher percentage of such numeralized uses than heap, kupy ‘heaps’ has turned out to be grammaticalized in the quantifying function to a markedly lesser degree than kupa ‘heap’. It is argued that this apparently aberrant behaviour of kupy ‘heaps’ can nonetheless be elucidated in terms of the specificity of numeralization in Polish, since at its advanced, morphosyntactic stage, the process in question affects solely the singular (accusative) forms of QNs.
Notes on Foscolo and the English language (1816–1827) – Foscolo never managed to master his host country’s language during his years of exile in London (1816–1827). The vast production of his English years consists almost entirely of works intended to be translated by other people and thus to be considered as provisional drafts. In this paper, the relationship between Foscolo and the English language is analysed and discussed, focusing in particular on his interactions with his translators and on his linguistic vision.
The paper presents the results of a study into lexical substitutions found in the Old English gloss to psalms 2-50 in the Eadwine Psalter. The major objectives to determine the possible sources of this manuscript, which clearly go beyond the traditional explanation that originally the gloss was derived from a Vespasian Psalter-type gloss, later revised by the corrector based on a Regius Psalter-type gloss. The analysis shows that the affiliation of the gloss is indeed highly complex for such a resource. Moreover, the paper shows that despite its numerous corrections, the Old English gloss to the Eadwine Psalter is in fact a valuable source of information on the twelfth-century scribal practice of the post-Conquest England.
Professor Jacek Fisiak’s outstanding achievements are well known in the scholarly community in Poland and abroad. He was an excellent and widely recognizable scholar, an exceptional teacher and talent-detector, an ingenious science manager, and he was so likeable and cordial! Professor Jacek Fisiak directed the Institute of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań for 40 years. Thanks to his management, English studies in Poznań obtained a leading position among such institutions in Poland and in the world. Professor Fisiak also cared about other English departments in Poland. On the one hand, he supervised 61 (!) PhD students who continued their academic careers throughout Poland, on the other, he supported English studies as well as the humanities and research in general as Minister of National Education and member of numerous influential bodies. I am grateful to Professor Fisiak for his guidance in my academic work, starting with my M.A., through the doctoral and post-doctoral degrees and the professorial title, my function as his deputy director for 3 terms, up to the ‘take-over of the command’ of the Institute and the creation of the Faculty of English. His opus survives and will last.
The article is concerned with methods of translating V. Shukshin’s occasionalisms into English. The study material has been extracted from translations done by A. Bromfield, K.M. Cook, R. Daglish, W.G. Fiedorow, J. Givens, G. Gutsche, G.A. Hosking, D. Illiffe, L. Michael, H. Smith, N. Ward. Based on the analysis of the material the following means of conveying V. Shukshin’s occasionalisms can be distinguished: translation by substitution, translation by means modifying idiomatic expressions, applying semantic calquing, using a descriptive method to recreate occasionalisms, as well as lexical and grammatical transformations. Two of them can be considered fully equivalent ways of recreating the writer’s occasionalisms (translation by means modifying idiomatic expressions, semantic calquing), the rest, however, should be regarded as only partially accurate.
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.
The present study is the first attempt at examining the perception and evaluation of 10 internationally known political and religious leaders’ English pronunciation. 40 Polish students’ assessed their speech samples in terms of the degree of foreign accentedness, comprehensibility and acceptability. We examine whether the following factors affect the assessors’ judgements: their personal attitude to the speakers, the students’ level of English proficiency and the genetic proximity between between the speakers’ and the listeners’ L1s combined with the raters’ familiarity with foreign accents of English. It is demonstrated that the listeners’ attitude to the speakers has no impact on the ratings of the samples’ comprehensibility and accentedness, but plays an important role in their evaluations of acceptability. The participants’ level of English proficiency is crucial for their assessment of comprehensibility, but not accentedness and acceptability. Finally, the genetic proximity between the involved languages and the listeners’ familiarity with varieties of foreign-accented English are shown to be relevant for all the presented accent jugdements.