Although the lexicographical description of individual parts of speech is often discussed in metalexicographical literature, the article is rarely given attention. This paper analyses how articles are described in selected German-Polish dictionaries. The description of articles in dictionaries for the language pair German as an article language – Polish as an article-less language requires a different approach than the lexicographical treatment of parts of speech that occur in both languages. The analysis shows that the description of the articles is very different in terms of the overall conception of the article entries, i.e. the choice of items, the number of items and their form. It also turns out that most of the dictionaries analysed failed in their article descriptions, which is disappointing not only from a metalexicographical perspective, but above all from the learner’s perspective.

The phenomenon of vowel length in German has been studied from a new contrastive perspective, taking Wolof as the starting language, in contrast to the method found in German textbooks in Senegal, which advocates learning only German. On many levels, the vowel systems of German and Wolof resemble each other, despite the great difference in genealogy between the two languages. These similarities are not often taken into account in the teaching of German as a foreign language in Senegal, which can sometimes be an obstacle, because the French language, often taken as a starting language, differs much more from German than Wolof in many linguistic aspects, such as the phenomenon of vowel length. On the other hand, other aspects that could handicap the teaching of vowel length are highlighted in this work to better equip both teachers and learners. These include the intrinsic relationship between vowel length and the German syllable, which does not exist in Wolof. It has also been shown that vowel length can be indicated in written German by several written characters that don’t often appear in the Wolof language.

The cognitive linguistics bases its research on media discourse on the thesis that discourse central concepts have the status of mental objects which are construed in and experienced through discourse. In this paper, we present the application of one of the analytic tools developed within the cognitive ethnolinguistics, the cognitive definitions, in the reconstruction of the discourse central concept “Brite” („Briton“) in the Brexit discourse of the “Tageszeitung”. Relying on the assumption that a comprehensive analysis of the discourse construction of mental objects must refer to two types of categories: the discourse central conceptual domains and the linguistic correlates of the defined concept we focus our attention on the second class of categories: the synonyms, hypernyms, and antonyms of the lexical unit “Brite” („Briton“) in its diverse meaning and usage variants in Brexit discourse.

Language activity, and thus broadly understood linguistic communication, occurs on various levels and using diverse linguistic means. One of these tools is metaphor, the use of which helps in better visualization, and subsequently in the reception and understanding of abstract content. This statement also applies to issues within the realm of politics. This article analyzes the role of conceptual metaphor (cf. Lakoff/Johnson 1980), based on opposites (e.g., dark-light, cold-warm, strong-weak etc.), and points out its presence and significance in conceptualizing political struggle. The research material consists of articles from Polish and German online platforms, whose articles address the topic of parliamentary elections in Poland in 2023. The aim of the study is to answer the question of whether concepts expressed in the form of opposites can adequately capture the complexity of this problem. In the theoretical part of the article, we find a characteristic of conceptual metaphor and a description of its functions in press communications.

The article argues against earlier treatments of Bulgarian secondary imperfective verbs in terms of atelicity and Viewpoint imperfectivity. Instead, it offers empirical evidence about telicity and durativity as the two core properties of this type of verbs in Bulgarian aspectual triplets. An analysis is proposed in terms of Rothstein’s (2004) aspectual classes as properties of verbal predicates that captures the way secondary imperfective verbs differ from both their bare imperfective and perfective counterparts. At the same time, the analysis captures the intrinsic semantic relationship between the triplet members and accounts for the role of the aspectual morphology in terms of aspectual operators that shift the aspectual properties of verbal stems.

The article addresses the problem of multimodal relations between language and emojis, based on the postings on Facebook profiles of universities in Poland. It begins with a summary of the current state of research on emoticons / emojis and then proceeds to discuss their functions. The subsequent analysis is grounded on the catalogue of nine functions of emojis, distinguished by Pappert (2017): relationship design, commentary / evaluation, modalisation, framing, structuring, presentation, ludic function, economisation, and decoration. The analysis focusses on 50 postings published on the Facebook profiles of five largest Polish universities during the period from 1st June to 7th June 2022, of which 39 contain at least one emoji. Its results indicate that the most frequent functions of emojis in such postings are structuring, commentary / evaluation and relationship design, whereas the analysed material does not provide any evidence for ludic function. Regardless of their specific functions, the mere presence of emojis in the majority of postings on university profiles may be also perceived from a broader perspective as a consequence of the compromise between the so far rather distant style of communication employed by universities and their social media presence.

For more than three decades now an increase in the productivity of the feminative category has been observed in Polish-language communication practices and, consequently, an increase in the number of female personal names in Polish. The lexicographic team of the Formation of Feminine Names Research Unit, operating at the Institute of Polish Studies at the University of Wrocław since 2010, has been registering those changes and is currently working on a new edition of the “Dictionary of Polish Feminine Nouns”. Its corpus includes, among others, about 150 of the newest feminine lexemes created after 1989 and based on English roots. The article presents their lexico-semantic typology and juxtaposes it with earlier typologies of feminine names, thus showing which areas of activity of contemporary women are filled with innovative nominalizations. It also proves the compatibility with the Polish language system of the analysed hybrid feminine names, which, despite showing a varying degree of orthographic, phonetic and morphological adaptation, are generally accepted by young people, as attested to by a survey conducted among students of Polish Studies at the University of Wrocław. The discussion on internationalization of feminine forms – one of the ways of filling the semantic and lexical gaps in the naming of women – is set against the background of the political, cultural and communicative changes which have taken place in the Third Republic of Poland.

The aim of the paper is to discuss CLIL and non-CLIL teachers’ language fossilisation in terms of speaking. Firstly, there is a brief overview of fossilisation, focusing on its definition and scope. Secondly, the spoken discourse of CLIL and non-CLIL teachers in the classroom is described. Thirdly, there is a discussion of current research and the data collected through a questionnaire conducted among CLIL and non-CLIL teachers in Poland. This shows that slight differences in terms of language repertoire have been found between CLIL and non-CLIL teachers, placing the former at the forefront due to the strategies they tend to use frequently and the language areas they do not consider to be difficult or problematic at all.

The design of the texts that characterise the linguistic landscape of a university is essentially determined by the needs and expectations of the communication participants using the academic space, who today are often characterised by a relatively high degree of linguistic and cultural diversity. It is not unusual to find Polish-language texts in the linguistic landscape of a university in Poland – such as the University of Opole, which is the focus of this study – where the majority of students and employees have a Polish linguistic and cultural background. However, since the UO is located in a region with a diverse linguistic and cultural tradition and is also claimed by people of different languages and cultures as its direct users, it is also nothing unusual that this landscape also includes texts that are realised in languages other than Polish. This raises the question of what forms these texts take and what functions can be ascribed to them and – following on from this – whether a certain connection can be established between the respective languages and the discourse functions of the signs appearing in them. The answers obtained in turn form the basis for considerations on the extent to which the individual languages correlate with the history and present of the university and its current actors.

The article discusses Saami terms for “mouse” (e.g. Northern Saami “sáhpán”, Inari Saami “säplig”, Pite Saami “saahpìek”), explaining them as a common heritage of Uralic origin. It is suggested that the related words are to be found in Selkup Samoyed and Kolyma Yukaghir with the meaning “squirrel” or “flying squirrel”, as well as in Ugric. The present author explains semantic aspects of this comparison and presents similar instances attested in the Uralic languages, e.g. Khanty “aj-ʌanki” “mouse” (originally “small squirrel”). It is additionally concluded that the Proto-Finno-Ugric term for “mouse”, *šiŋirɜ, must be related to Proto-Samoyed *tə̑ rä- “squirrel”.

The present study conducts a comparative analysis of the positioning of non-sentential adverbials in German and Chinese. Considering the specific head-position-parameter, German is regarded as a derived V/2 language with underlying SOV order, while Chinese essentially represents an SVO language. Notably, despite the relatively flexible surface positions of various adverbial classes in German, they typically occupy base positions in the middle field, resulting in a standard sequence. Similarly, in Chinese, different non-sentential adverbial classes/levels can be distinguished by a specific basic sequence. The basic sequences of adverbial classes in both languages are primarily determined by the semantic domains of the adverbials and their semantic connection with the predicate or other reference word. Furthermore, the basic sequences ensure an “unmarked” information structure in both languages, with a focus projection (wider focus) only possible with regular positioning. Context-dependent modifications of the information structure lead to deviations from basic sequences. However, significant differences exist between the two languages concerning the interactions between word order and information structure, particularly regarding topic-rheme structuring, topic-comment structuring and focusbackground structuring.