This article presents a text-linguistic analysis of the Description and History of the Town of Friedeberg am Queis (Poland/Lower Silesia) by Johann Gottfried Bergemann, published in 1829. The chronicle is examined as a historical representative of the text type “urban chronicle” within the region of Lower Silesia and is part of a broader research project focused on the diachronic transformation of this genre. The analysis concentrates on internal features such as macrostructure, lexicon, and grammar, as well as external factors including the author’s biography and institutional influences (e.g., Prussian government regulations). The study demonstrates how the chronicle aligns with official requirements while also exhibiting individual stylistic and structural characteristics. Thus, this article contributes to the study of historical text types in the German-speaking world and offers insight into the linguistic shaping of local memory culture in the 19th century.

Statistical learning is a cognitive mechanism that enables humans to identify and learn patterns from sensory input. Language acquisition is one of the processes influenced by statistical learning. This study investigates whether non-native speakers can simultaneously learn different aspects of a new language, specifically focusing on tones and syllables. With the aim of investigating the learning rate of tones and syllables, 26 non-tonal speakers were exposed to Mandarin tone-syllable combinations with varying frequencies. Although the results of the statistical analysis did not show that the difference between syllable and tonal learning was statistically significant, the raw results suggest that non-tonal speakers may be unable to learn tones through statistical learning. This finding contradicts previous research in the field and highlights the need for further investigation.

The subject of this study is the Chinese spatial expression (zài x) shàng and its German equivalents. Following introductory information, the core meanings of (zài x) shàng are examined, with particular emphasis on its function as an expression of spatial relations. Subsequently, the most relevant German equivalents of (zài x) shàng are described, and an attempt is made to abstract the distinctive semantic features of each German counterpart. The following features have proven to be fundamental: contact (ger. Kontakt), connection (ger. Verbindung), adhesion (ger. Anhaftung), coverage (ger. Überdeckung), support (ger. Unterstützung), and containment (ger. Enthaltensein). Based on these findings, the results of the contrastive analysis are synthesized and presented in the form of a table.

Somatic expressions constitute a particularly interesting group of phraseological units, as they not only reflect the meaning of body parts in the mental lexicon of a given language community, but also provide insight into the perception of the human psyche and emotions. Furthermore, they reveal how the image of the body is transferred onto the conceptualization of the world. The aim of this article is to determine what properties are ascribed to the head in German somatic expressions, how the head is conceptualised within metaphor theory, and what metaphorical concepts underline the idioms analysed. Special attention is given to cognitive mechanisms that can be observed in the meaning and structure of these expressions. The analysis is based on the conceptual metaphor theory by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and draws on German phraseological dictionaries. The theoretical section of the article discusses the features of phrasemes, whose characteristics are also relevant to the structure of somatic idiomatic expressions.

The article analyses the use of illustrations in 34 Danish proverb collections from the period 1944-2022. The aim of the analysis is to determine the conventions and illustration strategies from a diachronic perspective. The specific aim is to examine the type of illustrations, their distribution in the macro- and microstructure of the collections, the existing text-image relationships between the illustrations and the proverbs. The results of the study confirm the thesis contained in the title of the article. In the area of formal-syntactic criteria, a tendency towards spatial integration of the two codes and spatial dominance of the illustrations was observed. The study confirms the development of illustrations in terms of their complexity. The evolution took place from the depiction of individual objects or simple situations to image sequences and collages. The study has demonstrated the change in the text-image relationship: From a loose connection of the illustrations with the content of the chapters to direct reference to the semantics of the individual proverbs and their interpretation. Furthermore, the increasing entertainment function of illustrations is noticeable, which clearly draw on the aesthetics of pop culture (picture jokes, comics, collages).

This article discusses the problem of translating metaphorical expressions in a melodic text. In the theoretical part, the author discusses the concept of metaphor from the perspective of linguistics and translation studies, focusing, among other things, on translation techniques and strategies that can be useful in the translation process. In the analytical part, the author focuses on a qualitative analysis of the translation of metaphors in the song “Surface – pressure”, part of the Oscar-winning Walt Disney film “Encanto”. For economic reasons, sound aspects will not be included in the analysis of examples. The author focuses among others on the quality of the translation of metaphors, which, in the discussed text, constitute the aesthetic value of the work to a degree comparable to rhythm and rhyme. Thus, an extremely important issue is their adequate and good quality translation. The starting point for the analysis is the typology of metaphors by Jonathan Dunn (2015), modified and adapted to the described research corpus. Jonathan Dunn divides the analyzed linguistic units into A is B metaphors, verbal metaphors and other metaphors. This article will also highlight noun metaphors, onomatopoeic metaphors, and cultural metaphors, the translation of which can be a challenge in the translation process.

The following article is concerned with an analysis of the translation of the church song “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” by Martin Luther from German into Polish, which was included in the Masurian cantional. Firstly, the history of the Masurian cantional’s origins is described in detail. Secondly, the most important factors for the translation of the church song are listed: the theological contour of the text, its poetic structure, its musical texture and its reception. Briefly mentioned are the features which should be taken into account when translating church songs. Finally, on the basis of these factors, a contrastive analysis of the original text and the target text is carried out, enabling an assessment of the quality of the translation and its impact on the Masurian community.

This study explores conspiracy-themed T-shirts as multimodal artefacts that disseminate conspiratorial narratives. A corpus of 70 T-shirts sourced from Etsy is analysed addressing three research questions: the linguistic and visual characteristics of multimodal coherence, the emotional responses triggered by language and design, and the types of arguments embedded in the verbal and non-verbal elements. Relying on the multi-level model for multimodal coherence as presented by Stöckl (2019), the analysis examines how visual and textual elements on T-shirts interact to shape meanings, evoke emotions, and convey arguments. The findings highlight the perceptual dominance of the visual component in T-shirt designs, yet underscore the anchoring role of text in leading the conspiratorial line of reasoning and shaping audience interpretation. Additionally, comments are made on the role of intertextual references and typographic conventions. Above all, concentrating on the genre of T-shirts, this research contributes to broader discussions on multimodal communication, and it stresses the significance of these everyday consumer items as potent tools for commodifying misinformation and fostering distrust in institutions.

This paper investigates the psych reflexive alternation in Ukrainian and Russian with a focus on the EO/ES (Experiencer Object / Experiencer Subject) alternation. Building on previous cross-linguistic research, we examine whether this alternation constitutes a subtype of the causative/anticausative alternation (CAA) or represents an independent phenomenon. Drawing on data from Ukrainian and Russian, as well as comparative evidence from Greek, Romanian, Brazilian Portuguese, Serbian, and Polish, we propose a three-way classification of psych verbs based on their morphosyntactic properties. We demonstrate that these classes differ systematically in terms of case marking, argument realization, as well as their compatibility with instrumental NPs and causative prepositional phrases. The analysis reveals that while some EO/ES alternations in Ukrainian and Russian share surface similarities with CAA, their syntactic behaviour and interpretation often diverge in crucial ways. Our findings support the view that the EO/ES alternation in these languages should be treated as a distinct psych verb alternation rather than as an instance of the causative alternation.

This study examines the vocabulary used in textbooks for Teaching Polish as a Foreign Language from a diachronic perspective. The analysis is based on the premise that contemporary vocabulary lists, which aim to reflect the lexicon essential for everyday communication, may serve as an indicator of the pedagogical priorities and assumptions underlying textbook design. The corpus comprises selected TPFL textbooks published in the United States and the United Kingdom over a 60-year period following World War II. For the purposes of analysis, only those segments of the textbooks explicitly intended to expose learners to the target language were included, yielding a total of 112,246 word forms. The vocabulary of each textbook was compared against the list of word families proposed by Seretny (2011). The findings are: (1) The proportion of high-frequency vocabulary in a textbook is largely dependent on its total textual volume. (2) No distinct groupings of textbooks can be identified based on the ratio of high-utility to low-utility vocabulary. (3) Three main lexical strategies can be observed: (a) extensive use of core vocabulary accompanied by a substantial amount of peripheral lexicon, (b) a limited selection from the core vocabulary, which nevertheless represents a significant proportion of the textbook’s overall lexicon, (c) a balanced approach, with moderate representation of both high- and low-frequency vocabulary.

The aim of this article is to survey the strategies of translation of proper names in Polish renditions of Roald Dahl’s (1964) novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. We assume that names are meaningful. Therefore, we aim to decipher how much information, in literature written for children, a name can reveal about an individual’s personality, hobbies, or looks, and hence, which strategy of rendering proper names is more likely to appeal to a child reader. The book under discussion, written in English, was translated into Polish four times: by Tomasz Wyżyński in 1998 as “Karol i fabryka czekolady”, as well as by Jerzy Łoziński (2005), Magdalena Heydel (2015), and Michał Rusinek (2021). The last three translators decided to give it the title “Charlie i fabryka czekolady”. The major objective of this paper is to study two different strategies of translation, i.e. the rendition by Wyżyński (1998) and the one by Heydel (2015). To be specific, the aim is to analyse Wyżyński’s (Dahl 1998) domestication and Heydel’s (Dahl 2015) foreignisation of proper names of the five child protagonists in Polish renditions of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, following Venuti’s (2001) theory of domestication and foreignisation.