• Linguistische Treffen in Wrocław •

The limits of knowledge in the analysis of natural human languages are due to both properties of language systems as subject of analysis and properties of the human awareness as instrument of cognition. Though the human awareness can follow its own activities by conceptualizing them in symbolic forms, the pre-phase of linguistic competence cannot be reconstructed. The second problem is connected with the time factor, i.e. the compulsive and decisive influence of time which enforces language change independently of partial causes of concrete language change in question.

The article describes a corpus research with its theoretical background. The basis of our research is a press corpus with 27 million tokens, where the epistemic terms are annotated. The grammatical and lexical epistemic expression are consistently kept apart on the basis of the relevant literature. The next step is to investigate with a fully automatic method which expressions often occur together in a text. Semantic subclasses of epistemic expressions are defined on the basis of these quantitatively proven solidarities. Finally, concrete examples illustrate how the epistemic expressions structure the text.

This paper addresses the image of Greeks in the German press in the summer 2015. During this time, the main topic in European politics was the Greek crisis, which was accompanied by a significant number of stereotypes about Greek and Greece. A linguistic recognition of stereotype refexrs to the interdisciplinary character of this concept, so especially politics plays a major role in this description. One main focus of this study is the question of which stereotypes we can find. It allows an insight into the contents spectrum of stereotypes. The second issue concerns mechanisms of stereotypes, i.e. how they are constituted, transported and consolidated.

Guided by Discourse Linguistics and Linguistic Discourse Analysis, the aim of this article is to provide a corpus-based analysis of names for people who have moved from Africa and Asia to Europe since 2015 to find a new home here. Quantitative investigations should detect statistical peculiarities of lexemes that are used for explicit designation. First of all, the usage of the word Flüchtling should be determined by means of qualitative investigations. In the first place, explicit themes are taken into account, which in many cases point to the controversial nature of the use of the word. All in all, it is the knowledge, the ways of thinking and the evaluations conveyed by the analyzed lexemes that should be made transparent.

The press language is defined as a special functional style, which is a combination of various language and stylistic forms.When analyzing the language of particular press titles, one can point to the preferred linguistic means that characterize it.This article is an attempt to analyze the language of the German tabloid “Bild” in terms of forms of linguistic (im)politeness. Base material is made up here of the titles of articles published in the “Bild” tabloid in September 2012. The choice of press titles as the object of the analysis is dictated by the thesis that headings, as compressed texts about texts, largely reflect the choice of linguistic means used also in the content of articles.

The article discusses femininity in the political discourse. There is defined the concept of speech genre of interview, the concept of femininity, lexical markers of femininity in the political interviews of women politicians of Germany are highlighted. One of the most common forms of political communication becomes an interview. Women-politicians occupy leading positions on the world political arena, so it seems us interesting and relevant to consider the linguistic expression of feminism on the example of interviews of women politicians of Germany. The analysis of the interviews of women politicians of Germany with the aim of identifying markers of femininity at the lexical level is appears at the article.

Political communication is traditionally called anthropogenic agonal communication which shows a distinct manipulative specificity. The paper attempts to single out typical masculine and typical feminine means of verbal argumentation in ritual political speeches. It states that extralingual component of political speeches is dominated by feminine features, while verbal component has masculine character.

The following contribution presents the results of a written survey, in which students of German were asked to reflect on their rhetorical skills. The survey focused on student presentations (‚Seminarreferate‘) in German, which are an area of competence required of all students of German as a foreign language at Polish universities. The discussion examines the results against the background of the Bologna Declaration and considers the competencies required in academic training as well as the central importance of competence in the spoken language as part of social interactions.

The aim of the article is to describe the communication strategies that are used to establish the lecturer-listener relationship in spoken academic discourse in German and Polish. The GeWiss corpora (https://gewiss.uni-leipzig.de) are the empirical basis of this research. The analysis is focused on metacommunicational and metatextual phenomena (including some addressative forms), which influance the cohesion and the coherence of the conference talks and also affect the means that are used by the speaker to somehow identify with the audience.

The text analyses the problem of the pronunciation of [e], [o] and [y] by Polish learners of Dutch. Next to a simple substitution of the three tense Dutch vowels by – respectively – Polish [ɛ], [ɔ], [i] or [u] it can also be noted that sometimes an extra glide [j] or [w] is being added after the Polish vowel. It can be seen as an attempt to imitate tension as tension is not a distinctive feature in Polish. The analysis shows that frequency of the vowel+glide combination differs (it is the highest in the case of [e]) and that the epenthesis of glides is correlated with learners‘ Dutch language level. More precisely, around the A2 level, having learned to distinguish Dutch tense and lax vowels, learners try to imitate them using articulatory solutions their mother tongue provides. The occurrence of the vowel+glide combination can therefore be seen as a positive step in the development of auditory and articulatory abilities.

In the following article an attempt is made to use the etude as an exercise form by the pronunciation training, therefore to justify the introduction of phonetic etudes to the didactics of the phonetics, they have the potential to be useful und effective after all. The ‚etude‘ was originally thought as an instrumental musical composition, usually short concentrating on a technical problem, which often repeats and appears in sequences, designed to provide practice material for perfecting particular skills by playing musical instruments. However using etudes to exercise is recently not confined to the area of music,but it is expanded on the other fields of artistic creation, for example in the dramatic art as scenic etudes, in the painting as painted etudes or artistic etudes, in the cinematicart as film etudes or even in the literature as literary etudes.

The aim of our research is to propose a pronunciation syllabus suitable for Japanese learners of German at universities, and to develop teaching and learning materials with phonetic explanations and exercises. The theoretical possibilities and the empirical data we have got so far provide the basis for a pronunciation syllabus for Japanese DaF learners. This consists of those phonological and phonetic features which seem to be crucial as safeguards against breakdowns in communication. Concentrating on these items is likely to be more effective than attending to every detail of German pronunciation. In this paper we explain the process of determining the “core items” (“Kernmerkmale”).

The linguistic landscape in which we live is shaped by various kinds of texts. Such determined frames of a given space have an invariable influence on the kind and type of communication, and the space itself influences the functions of texts that are in it. The aim of the article is to indicate the assumptions and research possibilities within the Linguistic Landscape. They will be discussed on German and Polish examples of real space co-formed by texts in both cultures.

The language used by modern dancers in dance workshops and/or lessons is an understudied research area for several reasons, e.g. lack of developed analysis methodology, insufficiently deep awareness of one’s own body indispensable for understanding of motion descriptions, linguistic diversity of existing dance schools, multimodal nature of the dance itself and lack of conventionalised and objective vocabulary. Thus, considering the two latter points the aim of the paper is to analyse a small corpus of motion descriptions used by the teachers and students of the Lublin Dance Theatre. Drawing on the cognitive linguistic methodology we conclude that the analysed expressions are used figuratively and divide them into three metaphor groups: conceptual metaphors, frame-based metaphors and metaphors pertaining to the prominent role of space in a dance situation.

In spite of the frequent calls for internationalization, video game developers do not seem to be willing to create titles completely devoid of cultural references. As a matter of fact, it might be even impossible to produce an utterly acultural product. For this reason, whenever a video game is planned to be published in a different market, it might have to undergo cultural alterations for this target market recipients to understand and accept it. This is especially the case when the source and target markets are far apart as far as their cultural conventions are concerned. This article discusses the culture-related problems encountered by video game localization teams and the solutions utilized.

It is difficult to separate trends in a language from trends in the society, just as to fix boundaries between linguistics and sociology. Gender inflection as a systemic tool represents a bridge between the past and the future which can fill in the gap in a language system and particular language areas, such as the field of professions. More and more politically correct gender specifications are required, bringing changes into the language. Those changes are, however, perceived often negatively. Questions to ask are if and how German can systematically cope with the new distribution of roles in the (professional) society. The aim of this paper is to explain the phenomenon from the sociolinguistic point of view.

The paper discusses ways of expressing the temporal relations of simultaneity in adverbial clauses with als and wenn in the German language. Although the relations can be expressed by participle phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases and infinitive phrases, the adverbial clause is the most frequent means of expressing the relations. The temporal adverbial clause has an almost unlimited range of application which stretches from vaguely hinted relation to absolute necessity, and from general statements and clarifications to definite emotionally motivated utterances. Wherever there is an obvious connection between facts, events, actions, relations as well as personal will and feeling, it can be expressed by means of a temporal structure.

Focus particles are distinctively characterized by their capability of changing positions in a sentence. Any change of the position involves a change in the sentence intonation and meaning. In German, focus particles can, as a rule, be attached to any type of the XP phrase, such as DP, PP, AP, VP, or CP. What can be identified as the domain depends on the structural integration of the particle in the sentence. The recognition of the domain is a prerequisite for a correct interpretation of a sentence. The present paper, using the findings of research on the focus particle nur, studies the positioning of the particle ‘tylko’ in the sentence and its relation to the domain based on the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP).

The subject of the considerations of the article is the specificity of concessive relations expressed by the use of connectors in the texts of scientific discourse. The function of connectors is performed by linguistic structures, specifically by conjunctions, adverbs or particles whose aim is connecting both on the grammatical and semantic level of the text. My focus is on the semantic level whose concessive relation is not only the reflection of a specific acceptance or admission despite the existence of adversative factors. It is frequently a rhetorical device serving to express distance with which the author of the text refers to a certain stance or state of affairs.

The present paper is concerned with the synchronic, quantitative analysis of one aspect of adjectival word-formation. The aim of the paper is to explore the word-formation productivity of derivations ending in schwanger and its frequency of occurrence in texts by taking various structure-types into consideration. I will make an attempt to identify and document the current trends in the lexis of contemporary German language by means of corpus-linguistic methods.

The academic environment is a place, where the future elites of a country are educated. All the more significant is to research, which trends in politeness are to be observed at universities in Poland. The aim of the article is to try to find an answer to the question, what are the students today’s expectations concerning courtesy towards their colleges of the opposite sex as well as to reflect the male and female politeness standards at the academy.

The article presents and analyzes ham names in the Polish language. In Polish (possibly Slavic) onomastics, the names of products are the subject of chrematonomastic research and are called chrematonyms. These are names that on the one hand identify the product and on the other hand are often of advertising character, and their aim is to arouse the interest of the potential buyer. The article focuses on naming process of product names. At first glance, it can be seen that producers exhibit enormous creativity in this area to evoke specific associations in consumers. We also try to answer the question of how much the name of the product underlines its value. In this perspective, the names of goods become part of the marketing strategy of producers.

Cultural keywords should be perceived as content-rich concepts. They consist namely of a significant surplus which applies to the given culture. They reflect the identity and the mentality of people very well. Therefore, cultural keywords can be referred to as cultural mediators. This view is illustrated in the article on the example of the selected culture-specific lexemes of Swiss German.

The two best-known languages used by British author J. R. R. Tolkien in his novels about the Middle-earth world are Quenya and Sindarin. In my contribution I deal with the possessive pronouns which occur in Elvish languages. In this regard, I try to compare their formation and use, and I use that analysis to determine which of the two languages is more analytical and which more synthetic.

The present article aims to present the “Vong-language” as a relatively new language creation of German Internet-based communication, its origin, development and main features. The orthographic and grammatical features of this language phenomenon are based on the fact that spelling and grammatical errors are committed intentionally and according to certain regularities. Linguists present the “Vong-language” as an instrument of criticism and language play that satirizes the language misuse of some Internet users.

The results of an extensive study on the familiarity of Croatian proverbs, which was conducted in 2014 with 867 informants from all over Croatia showed that young people aged 11–20 (adolescence) provided in 79.30% ratio the wrong answer to the questions about the familiarity of the most common Croatian proverbs. The aim of this paper is therefore to test the hypotheses of previous researches and to answer the following questions: To what extent are the most common proverbs to informants in this age group actually known? Are there differences between the adolescents in Germany and Croatia, and why? The survey has been carried out with native speakers aged 11 to 20 in the German and Croatian language area using a questionnaire.

Reception and translation deal not only with world languages and literatures but also with their cultural peculiarities. The article focuses on the analysis works by prominent Ukrainian writers of the 19th century in terms of freign cultural heritage.

Reception literature made a relevant contribution to the development of historically belated German literature to the national literature in the German language in the 17th century. The example of Martin Opitz, who had been the first to establish German as the language of poetry, was soon followed by other, not only Silesian, poets. Silesian poet Benjamin Neukirch, whose work involves original, purely creative forms, as well as translations and critical texts, has particular relevance to the process of emancipation of German literature in view of the polarity of his artistic activity.

The article focuses on biographical and literary affinities between two of the most important authors of twentieth-century German literature. This can also be of interest to an English reading public, as both of them are very widely translated into this language, Schmidt even with his “untranslatable” monster Bottom’s Dream (German original Zettel’s Traum) (which, though, remains outside of the scope of the present paper). So do not hesitate to read the above essay if it is not beyond your linguistic capacities. Important parallels are: Both were born in now no longer German-speaking regions in the East. Both were averse to main-stream literati and literary-traditions. Both wrote in uncommon, experimental style, Schmidt underlining this attitude by typographical experiments. Both were able to transform ordinary reading matter into important complex texts, establishing them as modern classics.

Extracurricular work in the Ukrainian language and literature is an integral part of the school’s organized educational process. In view of recent trends in educational reform, when some of the linguists express the idea of integrated studies, in particular the idea of uniting Ukrainian, foreign (world) literature and the Ukrainian language, works of e.g. Lesja Voronyna serve as examples of such integration.

The phraseologisms are used very often in our everyday life. They are present in our talks, although we don’t even thik about the using oft hem. The basis for my work is the Kühn‘s deffinition of phraseodidactics (Kühn 1993:58). The aim of this article is to pay attention to the shortcomings in the syllabus program in Poland. I decided to try to write a few exercises to remedy that lack of merial.

The idiomatic expressions with the vulgar components seem to be a insufficiently researched field of modern phraseology. This is also clear from the fact that there is only a few studies, which deal with this interesting subject. The main purpose of this paper is to show and analyse idiomatic expressions with the vulgar components for both languages − German and Polish. The idioms are excerpted from German and Polish dictionaries and various web sources.

Vulgarity, swear words and interjections are a large part of our everyday use of language; they act as much as insults to another person, as an abreaction of the emotional state. They are also very frequently used in German and Polish rap and rock lyrics. In the article, I analyze the corpus in respect of occurrence and role of vulgarisms in song lyrics. The analyzed material contains german and polish vulgarisms: Arsch/ dupa, Hure/kurwa, scheißen/srać, which are extracted from 200 song lyrics. The aim is to analyze in which kind of structural units these lexemes are most often found in the song lyrics.