• Linguistische Treffen in Wrocław •

Numerous gravestones written in German-language belonging to representatives of ancient and well-known noble families have been preserved in Lower Silesia. Many of them are in a state of disrepair, so today is the last opportunity to preserve the contents immortalised on them from destruction for the future generations. Many of them have been analysed by historians, but the results of these analyses are often linguistically, translationally and epigraphically so incorrect as to be difficult to accept. A historian who is not a historian of the language – such historians are certainly hard to come by – and who, after all, lacks basic competence in the study of Early Modern High German, the language in which most of the epitaph inscriptions from the early modern period were written, obviously has little chances of a correct linguistic interpretation and successful translation into Polish of a text written in early German language. One of the scientifically neglected epitaph plates is the plate of Adam von Kottwitz, which is located in Konotop (near Zielona Góra). The author of the contribution has set himself the task of examining all the content (verbal and non-verbal) that this record carries. The analysis begins by establishing the correct affiliation of the coat-of-arms symbols to the inscriptions of the genealogical argument of the deceased, which are mostly wrong situated. The author moves on soon to a detailed discussion of the various linguistic planes of the texts appearing on the epitaph. Thus, the author discusses the types of writing used in the record, the spelling of capital and lowercase letters, punctuation and abbreviations used in the text, as well as phraseology, but above all the purely linguistic, even strictly grammatical layer, i.e. the morphological forms and syntactic conditions which characterize the text of the research corpus. A great deal of space is also devoted to graphemes, the study of which is not solely an end in itself, but is intended to lead to shedding some light on the relationship between the graphemes of the written language and the phonemes of the spoken language potentially in use at the time of the monument’s creation.

Each of the round anniversaries of the Queen’s reign took place in a different socio-political climate, reflecting the dynamics of change in the United Kingdom. Elizabeth II celebrated the Silver Jubilee in 1977, the Golden Jubilee in 2002, the Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the Sapphire Jubilee of her reign in 2017 and finally, in 2022, the Platinum Jubilee. Although so much has changed since the Silver Jubilee, the Queen, through the preservation of her stance, has become a symbol of constancy and stability not only among Britons or Commonwealth citizens but perhaps also among people from other cultural areas of the world. All those anniversaries were abundantly and thoroughly reported in various national newspapers. However, the language applied to present the 2022 Platinum Jubilee by the popular press, and the language employed by the quality press to describe the same event differed significantly. The case study presented in this article shows how popular press representatives such as “Daily Mirror”, “The Sun” and “Sunday Mirror” and quality press representatives, “The Guardian” and “The Sunday Times” vary linguistically while delivering the same information to the reader. The case study contains the frequency and choice of idiomatic application, play on words and overall cultural significance.

This paper presents selected results of the dissertation which deals with stylistic peculiarities of German zoo guidebooks. The research was carried out within the framework of the German pragmatic stylistics paradigm and based on an integrative approach (Brinker 2014, Adamzik 2016) and the multilevel model of text description by Heinemann/Heinemann 2002, according to which contextual, thematic, functional and structural features of the text are described and stylistic structure is identified. Language means appear as indicators of themes and functions of the text. This research was based on zoo guidebooks from Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna and Hannover zoos in the period from 1799 to 2013. Zoo guidebooks can be described as an “endangered” text type due to the tendency to abandon zoo guidebooks in favour of information sources in zoos, Internet and apps. Zoo guidebooks have accompanied zoo history since the very beginning, but they had not served as a research object in any linguistic study until the above-mentioned dissertation was written. Zoo guidebooks provide information about animals, objects and entertainment on the territory of the zoo; they also contain other compulsory components of the text macrostructure. In the paper the author analyses specific linguostylistic characteristics of “advertising messages”, “introduction” and “visitors’ regulations (“rules of visitors’ behaviour”) and intertextual relations between these texts.

This work offers a description of the main lexical characteristics found in the Mexican Spanish variety by focusing on the language use of official exclusively male text producers in multiethnic and multilingual Oaxaca de Juárez from 1890 to 1911. Relevant works of Spanish linguistic historiography still postulate the beginning of an “español modern” from the 18th/19th century onwards. But the present qualitative study shows, based on a corpus, that diverse lexical variation was still realized in official documents in the 19th/20th century, as rubio and claro to characterize exclusively foreign sex-workers or as a limited lexeme repertoire to describe nose(shape), whereas a broad repertoire to characterize skin color is conspicuous. Furthermore, the data helps us to consider a variety that is still conspicuously absent in Spanish language history.

The article is a formatted for publication record of a speech delivered during the World Congress of Foreign Languages together with the annual PTN Conference entitled “Language education in the era of global changes - the need for cooperation and new perspectives”, which took place on June 27−29, 2022 in Warsaw under the patronage of the International Federation of Foreign Language Teachers (FIPLV), the Polish Society of Modern Languages (PTN) and the Faculty of Modern Languages of the University of Warsaw. In it, the author draws attention to the problem of underestimating the potential of students in terms of learning autonomy as well as social attitudes and behaviors, which occurs especially in the general education system. This is related to the bureaucratization of the teacher’s work and the misinterpreted philosophy of teaching, deeply rooted in Polish schools, once proposed by Johann F. Herbart (1776−1841), a German philosopher, psychologist and pedagogue, considered to be the founder of the traditional school (cf. Kupisiewicz 1996: 36–40). An equally important factor hindering the development of relations between the teacher and students is the maladjustment of the school space to “new” methods of education, although these have long been verified in experimental education, and have also gained recognition in scientific circles. The axis of reflection is the phenomenon of interaction initiated in the glottodidactic system: between learners and a foreign language teacher (cf. Woźniewicz 1987: 88). The main goal was to recall the key theses of paedocentric pedagogy (cf. Dobrołowicz 2005: 8–10) and to define on this basis such an educational environment in which, in the conditions of the Polish school, it will be possible to include students in the process of managing the class. This is to serve to extend the goals of teaching a foreign language, which today cannot be limited to strictly language knowledge and competence.

This paper presents the methodological approach and results of the European project LSP-Teacher Training Summer School (TRAILs), which aims to develop an innovative LSP teacher training. The training curriculum developed in 2018–2020 and tested in 2021, emerged as a result of identified gaps between existing and required LSP teacher education. The following contribution intends to present the methodical way to identify these gaps. It starts from an analysis of the existing training programmes in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Then, the needs of the LSP teacher in tertiary education are discussed. Finally, a scheme is discussed according to which the comparison between the ACTUAL STATE and the TARGET STATE was made. The discrepancies demonstrated between the LSP teacher training and the actual training needs stated by LSP teachers participating in the project make it possible to define areas of LSP teaching which can be supplemented with concrete contents and activities. They then serve as a starting point for the development of an initial and in-service training curriculum for experienced and pre-service LSP teachers. The scheme presented is universal and can also be transferred to other research projects that aim to update the existing training curricula or introduce new solutions.

The present-day German modal verb dürfen (‘to be allowed to do sth’) is currently undergoing a lexical split in its grammaticalisation. In the subjunctive II, dürfte, it is developing into an epistemic marker of phoric non-factuality used to express a speaker-based judgment of the probability of a given proposition (Politt 2022). Epistemic dürfte thus grammaticalises into the grammatical category mood, whereas its non-epistemic form remains part of a lexical class of modals. While dürfte is known to have progressed quite far on its grammaticalisation path, somewhere between stage 3 and 4, it still shows remnants of grammaticalisation stage 2 (Lehmann 2002, Diewald 2009). The present paper analyses 92 ambiguous sentences of dürfte taken from the DWDS core corpus of the 20th century (Geyken 2007). These sentences are assumed to exhibit critical contexts, which are remnants of grammaticalisation stage 2 (cf. Diewald 2009). They can be interpreted both as epistemic or as non-epistemic. Since the epistemic reading of dürfte is assumed to have developed into the default interpretation for the subjunctive II (Mortelmans 2019, Politt 2022), the ambiguous sentences are analysed in regard to their similarity to typical contexts for epistemic dürfte for three classes of features: (i) features of the subject, (ii) of the verbal complement, and (iii) the sentence context. On the one hand, variation can be found in all three feature classes, indicating that the grammaticalization has not yet progressed fully out of stage 2. On the other hand, a tendency for favouring an epistemic interpretation of the ambiguous sentence could be shown, too, illustrating the developing functional independence of epistemic dürfte.

The town of Križevci in north-western Croatia is located in a region where agriculture is one of the main economic activities. Historically, it is the former Military Frontier established by the Habsburgs in the 16th century to ward off the westward encroaching Ottomans. The presence of the Austrian army in the Military Frontier led to lively German-Croatian language contact, since German was not only the language of command, but was also used as the official language of administration. The dominance of German in the public life of the Military Frontier favored the adoption of many German loanwords into Croatian and played a significant role in the development of Croatian agricultural terminology at the beginning of the 20th century. Professional texts from the agricultural scientific journal “Gospodarska smotra”, which was published between 1909 and 1919, form the template for the research corpus for the following paper. In particular, it was researched how the German agricultural terms are embedded in the Croatian text and which adaptation processes had an effect on the borrowing and integration into Croatian. It was established that when German technical terms were adopted into Croatian, various forms of loan creations were used, with German technical term compounds being replaced by various forms of attributive compounds. Furthermore, many text passages from the research corpus contain reflections and arguments by their authors on the concept of technical language in general and thus offer a valuable source for sociolinguistic and technical language follow-up research.

The article presents a study of culinary advertising from the press of the Free City of Danzig of the 1920s and 1930s and briefly discusses the preliminary results of the research. The author of the article will discuss how this kind of text can be researched from the text-linguistic perspective and the perspective of communicative studies, and what conclusions such an approach will lead to. Advertisements – as products of contemporary activities of linguistic communities and artefacts of a particular culture – are seen as a mirror of social and cultural conditioning. The author of the article will consider what information about the cuisine, culture and the society of those times advertising provides us a century later and how advertisement processes national and international contemporary events on regional and local levels.

The confusion of „Elektronischer Datenverarbeitung“ and „Elektrischer Datenverarbeitung“ (Englisch: „Electronic data processing“ and „Electric data processing“ EDP) as correct and incorrect full forms oft the initial word EDV is the starting point for an investigation of the motivation and interpretation of several other initial words used in German language. Frequently the context prevents misinterpretation, but especially semantically demotivated short forms, which have not clear components cause misunderstanding. The obscurity can also allow multible use with different meanings like PS for „Pferdestärke“ and PS for „Post-skriptum“. Likewise homonymy of morphologically and semantically not related words can arise like VV as „Vollversammlung“, „Verkehrsverein“ and „Verwaltungsvorschrift“. The aptitude of different interpretations can go so far that short forms are used as well as homonymous and polysemous words. For example AA designates „Auswärtiges Amt“ in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the German federal government, also each „Arbeitsamt“ and support groups for „Anonyme Alkoholiker“. In place of context making clear what is meant sometimes the full form accompanies the short form. Apparently this is not felt as an unnecessary redundancy: „Ich war als Schüler in der Schülervertretung (SV) tätig“ (Frankfurter Rundschau, 17.11.1999, S. 29). Sometimes thr full form added to the initial word as an explanation is modified, not by ignorance or error but intentionally, whereas the iniotial word remains unmodified. Since the German „Bundeswehr“ was established in 1955 there is a department „Psychologische Kriegsführung (PSK)“ (Rhein-Zeitung, 24.9.2019, S. 19). Someday people realized that they didn’t like to think about “Kriegsführung“ (warfare) connected with the Bundeswehr, if need be about „Kampfhandlungen“ (combat operations). So PSK was renamed: „die Bundeswehrschule für Psychologische Kampfführung (PSK)“ (Die Zeit, 9.2.1968, S. 28). If you once have found pleasure in renaming initial words you can use this procedure for a joke by interpreting normal lexemes as initial words and giving them cute meanings: Ehe = Errare humanum est (Latin) ‚Irren ist menschlich‘. – Team = Toll, ein anderer macht’s.

The aim of this article was to analyze the semantic representation of German phrasemes containing the lexical item Kreuz, to determine their linguistic modality, form, and the communicated message. The conceptual apparatus of axiological linguistics was applied in the study to examine the relationship between phrasemes, values, and the qualification of values. The analyses of phraseological material revealed that the lexical item Kreuz functions mainly as a metaphor which, by making a reference to Biblical associations with the suffering and death of Christ, defines and expresses various life adversities and problems of human existence. This lexeme was also preserved in German phraseology in an anatomical sense (bottom of the spine, the sacrum), and as a representation of two perpendicular lines which denote conflict, strife, experience of defeat and criticism in a metaphorical sense in selected expressions. It was also found that German structures containing the lexical item Kreuz have an axiological potential by communicating judgment explicitly or implicitly. The normative axiological dimension has a clearly anthropocentric character, and it generally propounds negative judgment. The analyzed phrasemes have assertory or imperative modality, and the intensity of the axiological load is determined by, among others, the type of modality, the extent to which these phrasemes carry metaphorical meaning and have lexical connectivity. However, their axiological potential is represented mainly by the wide range of communicated meanings which are described in the Conclusions section.

This paper aims at identifying the most common constructions that realise metaphor in a group of commonly used Jordanian Arabic proverbs. The metaphorical instances in the data were identified using the Metaphor Identification Procedure (cf. Pragglejaz Group 2007). The analysis of the data focused on the form of the linguistic metaphors in Jordanian proverbs as this aspect of analysis has been paid less attention for favour of idea-content aspect of metaphors since Aristotle. It was found that metaphor is mainly realised by the constructions: genitive, grammatical metaphor, post-modification, pre-modification, and sentence metaphor. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data showed that the most common types of metaphor realization were sentence metaphor and grammatical metaphor. A future paper with a larger size of data might show further constructions that realise metaphor in Jordanian Arabic.

The main aim of the article is to determine which neologisms were created in the German language at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic in the field of education. The choice to focus on education and school concepts is based on the fact that it is considered one of the fundamental areas of people’s lives. Since schooling is compulsory in Germany, this topic affects every citizen. The structure of the article is as follows: first, the pandemic-related changes in the field of education are briefly discussed. Next, the term neologism is explained in more detail, as well as the functions and the types of neologisms that can be distinguished. The core of the article is the presentation and discussion of the results of the empirical analysis. 81 neologisms from the field of education created during the coronavirus pandemic were subjected to the analysis. They refer to various branches of the education system and name, among other things, periods of time, but also persons and school concepts, which is why they were assigned to eight semantic categories: Change of the education system, evaluation of learning outcomes, character of learning and teaching, description of a particular period, description of individuals, feelings, support and final evaluation. Within the groups, antonyms and synonyms could be found. The article also explains the reasons for the creation of the neologisms.

Code-switching or code-mixing in spoken language is quite common. Can code-mixing also occur in a written form of a language, such as in a newspaper article, in a short story, or in a translation? This paper examines the use of code-mixing in the translation of a German short story into Marathi. Marathi is an Indo-European language that is recognized as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. The article analyses whether code-mixing is used in the Marathi translation of the German short story when no other equivalents are available in the target language i.e., in Marathi or is it more of a thoughtful choice even if equivalents exist in the target language. With relevant examples, this empirical analysis further investigates the role of code-mixing in the Marathi translation of the German short story, “Der hellgraue Frühjahrsmantel” written by Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1962). The title of the translated text reads “राखाडी स्प्रिंगजाकीट” (rākhādī springjākīṭ, 2017). With this analysis, the article presents some remarkable characteristics of both the Indian language Marathi, its linguistic context and culture. The analysis can stimulate interest in Marathi and could also be useful in further research in the areas of code mixing or code switching in translation.

The article explores issues pertinent to the formal and semantic assessment of statements made by early school-age children of Ukrainian and Russian origin, who have been raised in Poland for at least a year and are enrolled in Polish schools. This matter has gained relevance due to the increasing influx of foreign language-speaking children in Poland, who are accommodated in Polish-language schools and psychological-educational counselling centres. However, teachers and specialists often grapple with assessing these children’s language skills and identifying which speech development abnormalities should raise concern. In the first section, the benefits of examining the syntactic subsystem are detailed, and a method designed by the author for scrutinizing this subsystem is introduced. The second section presents an analysis of the individual sentences gathered during the research, particularly those used in describing situational images crafted expressly for the study. This analysis adheres to structuralist principles. Special focus is directed towards utterances that were deemed incorrect due to real-textual or formal reasons. Statements exhibiting clear language mixing and interference are emphasized as well. From the analysis of this section of the data, the stages of sentence construction where difficulties were most prevalent are identified, and the most common errors are discussed.

This article describes the concept of a research project carried out by the “Młodzi Frazeolodzy” (Young Phraseologists) working group. The project aimed to create a handy lexicon containing the idioms most frequently used in informal speech by the academic community at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The entries included in the collection represent units that are familiar to most members of the academic community. The keywords were provided with a definition of the idiom, possible variants, a style marker, an etymology or motivation, examples of use, a phonetic transcription, illustrations and equivalents in English, German, Ukrainian and Russian. Access to such a lexicon can support different groups of people who have come to Poland for specific reasons, e.g., to educate themselves. The lexicon can also serve people who want to improve their language skills or delve into the field of metaphorical language. The paper describes the research steps undertaken and the preferred methodology. The characteristics of the units we describe – idioms – are also mentioned. In addition, specific examples of dictionary entries are given, which are complemented by graphics. To illustrate the information collected during the research, statistical data are also provided.

This study has emerged from the research on telecinematic discourse and corpus linguistic studies. The aim of this paper is to provide a socio-pragmatic analysis of swear words in the dialogues of the Season 1 of the TV show “BoJack Horseman”, on the basis of the Bojack Horseman Corpus, prepared and compiled by the author. Lemmas such as crap, fuck, shit, damn, ass, dick, bitch, and suck are analysed, as well as their grammatical forms and functions they serve. The findings illustrate the importance of foul language employed by the show-writers and uncover the sociopragmatic aspect of the distribution of swear words in this particular TV show. The language used by the characters of the show depicts, to some extent real-life conversations, and swear words in them are used alike. The swear words in the dialogues function as an outlet for extreme emotions, a form of catharsis, or an extra emphasis added to the utterance. The offensiveness of swear words in “BoJack Horseman” is described as mild and moderate, but the swear words do occur in nearly every episode of the show. However, they are used not only to carry a negative impact (such as an insult or provocation), but also to convey positive information (the sense of social bonding or camaraderie).

The aim of this article is to deal with the topic of German as a foreign language by considering German in the context of the other languages already known to the learners. It is about the positive effects of prior knowledge as well as prior experience in learning subsequent languages, i.e. about language and language learning transfer in the constellation “German after English”, because English is mostly the first foreign language in school today. The goal is to raise awareness of the multilingual context of Central Europe and to use it specifically for didactic support of foreign language teaching. After an introduction and an overview of the knowledge on language learning and the didactics of multilingualism the outlook deals with the use of the research results considering the didactic theory in learning and teaching practice.

The concept of a comfort zone, most often defined as a psychological space of safety that sets boundaries for our day-to-day functioning, can also find its reference in the process of learning a foreign language. The experiences of the pandemic distance learning show that the turned off camera is the basic element constituting the comfort zone of students during synchronous language classes. The status of the camera often becomes a bone of contention between teachers, who perceive it as a tool that allows for building a positive relationship and contact with class participants, and students who identify it with a lack of a sense of security, freedom or privacy. This paper will present the results of an online survey conducted among teachers (13) and students (36) of Dutch philology, made of 13 questions concerning the function, reception and purposefulness of turned on / off cameras during remote classes. The collected data was subjected to qualitative and quantitative analysis, which revealed that an on-camera in remote language classes evokes mostly negative emotions in students, while an off-camera evokes mostly positive emotions; for teachers, the relationship is largely reversed. However, for both groups of respondents, the predominant belief is that there is a positive correlation between the camera being on and effectiveness of the class.

The purpose of the study was twofold: to examine terminological similarities and differences between three samples of specialized texts representing the same genre – business appraisal standards and to present a method extending the Keyword and term extraction function of Sketch Engine, a tool in corpus linguistics. The standards selected for the analysis were ASA Business Valuation Standards 2009, IBA Professional Standards 2015 and NACVA Professional Standards 2017. The character of the study was synchronic – the texts selected for the analysis were standards in their latest possible versions and thus applicable for use at around the same time. The study was carried out in two steps. First, text were compiled into separate corpora and automatically POS-tagged with the use of Sketch Engine corpus software. Then, the multi-word terms were automatically extracted from each text, based on their relative frequency against the preloaded reference corpus English Web 2020, providing the total number of 737 terms in ASA, 373 terms in IBA and 367 terms in NACVA. Next, the data were compiled using Excel spreadsheet functionalities. The results showed a considerable terminological overlap between the NACVA and the IBA standard (366 terms occurred in both standards) as well as a significantly different pool of terms in the ASA standard (with 219 terms occurring in all three standards and the same number shared by ASA and IBA and by ASA and NACVA respectively). A tentative conclusion would therefore be that much greater similarity is to be expected between the IBA and NACVA standards also on other levels of description.

The purpose of this article is to present the workflow of the group translation of the Spanish play “Siglo mío, bestia mía” performed by a Student Organisation of Literary Translation based in the Institute of Applied Linguistics of the University of Warsaw, as well as the educational outcomes of the endeavour. Moreover, the paper aims at highlighting the need of including group projects, which would simulate the environment of a translation office, in the curriculums of translation training university courses. The paper discusses the definitions of a project and the most common approaches to teaching translation. Later, it combines those two aspects and determines the importance of project-based learning in the field of translation, which is shown by the example of the translation of “Siglo mío, bestia mía”. The article introduces the author of the play and presents a brief summary of the text. Afterwards, the workflow of the group is presented in detail, explaining the roles of particular participants, the challenges they faced, and the outcomes of such a form of translation. In the conclusion, the article emphasises the necessity of including project-based translation activities in the curriculums of translation training university courses.

This paper aims to investigate three genetically (un)related languages – Indonesian, English, and Javanese – on the taste noun metaphor in classical literature. The article provides a general evaluation of the selected data based on its historical background and the “taste” lexicon from each language. The data was collected from randomly chosen works of classical literature from the 1900–1950 era. The size of the collected corpus is around 250,000 words for each language. The main analysis reveals that there are three general conceptual metaphors (physical experience is taste, emotional experience is taste, cognitive experience is taste) that can be specified into sub-metaphors. The results show that the Indonesian language uses taste words more productive than the two other languages, which is also reflected in how the language applies the taste noun in metaphorical expressions for conceptualizing bodily and beyond bodily sensations. Javanese appears to apply the three general conceptual metaphors in a similar way to Indonesian, though not as productive as in the Indonesian language, while English, which shows less occurrence of the ‘taste’ noun, uses it only in expressing non-bodily experiences (emotion and cognition). The findings overlap with the general statement from Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claiming that idea is food and cognition is perception.

The connection between music and images manifests itself in symbolic and semantic interactions, therefore music and images contain different signs and meanings in different cultures. Not only do the films deal with music and images, but also with diverse resources of signs. Therefore, these resources of signs lead to a multimodal analysis of songs and scenes in selected Indian and German films called “Gulaal” and “Gegen die Wand”. The paper investigates the semantic role of music and images and analyzes the cultural elements in the songs and tries to explore how the music and images are multimodal linked in the films and what feelings they can trigger among people. The aim of the paper is to examine the dialectical unity of music and images in selected films and to find out the symbolic meanings of images with music in both cultures and films. Moreover, this offers the opportunity to understand the verbal images as well as the poetic language of folk music in both films. The language used in the songs proves to be critical and emotional in the German film “Gegen die Wand”, whereas ideological and political in the Indian film “Gulaal”. In both films, sign modalities carry as codes and music and language not only serve as a sign of forewarning by directly or indirectly warning the protagonists of disaster, but they also serve as signs of love, grief and anger.

Positioning Theory represents a useful approach for studying cultural conceptualizations and patterns of language use. The notion could also be implemented in cross-cultural research, for example in contrastive discourse studies. Nevertheless, cross-cultural studies of positioning are rare. The aim of this paper is to elaborate foundations for further methodological considerations and practical applications of the Positioning Theory in contrastive discourse studies. It gives theoretical considerations, reflects existing literature where the notion is implemented in discourse studies and presents examples from a pilot study conducted to analyse the cross-cultural potential of positioning. By doing so, it identifies the possibilities and methodological challenges of the notion that arise when it is implemented in contrastive discourse analysis, beyond its initial role in Interaction Analysis. The implementation of Positioning Theory in contrastive discourse studies seems useful to shed light on specific cultural positions as well as formal and functional patterns of discursive positioning practices and resources. A contrastive discourse analysis that aims at cross-culturally comparing positioning activities requires extensive reflections on the analytical and methodological as well as theoretical levels. A requirement for the design of such studies is the use of operationalizable categories as analysed objects. Further challenges emerge regarding implicit positioning and the need to include cultural knowledge.

The text analyses the problem of pronunciation of Dutch diphthongs and vowel sequences by Polish learners of Dutch. In the theoretical part the articulation of both diphthongs and vowel sequences in Dutch is described and compared with rather limited ways to combine vowels in Polish to foresee the possible interference/transfer. The discussion follows to give a detailed evaluation of the wide range of errors the Polish speakers make pronouncing the Dutch diphthongs and vowel sequences. The text closes with an attempt to use the results of the error evaluation in the pronunciation training.

Currently there are numerous studies on the category of fluency, both on speed parameters and on the respective hesitation/delay phenomena that come into play in less fluent or non-fluent speech. This article deals with the complexity of fluency in the context of foreign language teaching and learning. First the definition of fluency is addressed. In a further step, the concept of fluency in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages will be discussed. Following this, the results of a pilot survey will be presented, one of the aims of which was to record foreign language learners’ perspectives on this category.

Lessons in phonetics and phonology are not always fun for learners and students in German as a Foreign and Second Language and in German Studies Abroad. In an interdisciplinary conceptual sketch, the artist Stefan Reiss and the linguist Oliver Herbst want to react to this problem. The aim of the two authors is to make the lessons more illustrative and more thrilling for learners and students. Therefore, they want to visualize sounds in colour. Under the title “Colour Alphabet”, Stefan Reiss has been working since 2015 on how he can translate linguistic sounds into hues and chromatic values. In the exchange of ideas of both, Oliver Herbst had the idea that the artist’s work could be used for teaching. Visualizing sounds in colour should support listening and speaking training. The learners should recognize the importance of accuracy in pronunciation. Maybe a valuable Colour Alphabet designed according to artistic criteria will motivate the group to discuss which colour could stand for which sound. Concerning the considerations for teaching, an interactive digital e-learning platform in the form of an app would be conceivable. The learners could also create their own colour concept of sounds. The platform could focus on pronunciation exercises – with a special role for the minimal couples. Regional and contrastive aspects could also be integrated into the concept.

The research, conducted in 2021, constitutes a part of the dissertation I am preparing. I surveyed forty Polish high school students, twenty of whom are from Belarus and twenty from Ukraine (ten from eastern Ukraine and ten from western Ukraine). All the students were just beginning their education in Poland and their knowledge of Polish was at a basic level. The respondents repeated specific words after the teacher and independently read aloud sentences containing words that appeared in the first part of the study. In the first part of the article, I briefly describe the similarities and differences occurring in the segmental plane between Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian, specifically between the pronunciation of the sounds [ɔ], [w] and [ʈ͡ʂ]. The second part of the article focuses on the most conspicuous results concerning the differences between the pronunciation of the sounds [ɔ], [w] and [ʈ͡ʂ] in Polish depending on the background of the respondents. I compared the results of respondents from Ukraine and Belarus, as well as the results of respondents from eastern and western Ukraine. Whether the words in question were repeated or read by the respondents was also an important factor. The main aim of the presented research is to help teachers of Polish as a foreign language to better understand the process of acquisition of Polish pronunciation by Slavic-speaking groups learning Polish depending on their country of origin, as well as to explain the reason for the pronunciation mistakes made by students coming from Ukraine and Belarus. The conclusions of the study are also intended to help in matching the appropriate teaching methodology for specific Slavic-speaking groups.

This article discusses the problem of translating into German the elements of bird speech that appear in Julian Tuwim’s poems for children. The analysis will therefore focus on onomatopoeias, or longer passages of a sound-mimetic nature, which by their sound are meant to imitate the sounds made by birds. The main purpose of the article is to classify the difficulties involved in translating this type of text passages and to show what solutions the translator proposed in each problematic case. At the same time, the analysis is intended to illustrate the extent to which the characteristic sound effect used in the original was preserved in the translation of individual onomatopoeias. The basis for the analysis are two poems by Julian Tuwim that both at the level of content and language describe and vividly depict bird speech – they are “Ptasie Radio” (“Vogelradio”) and “Mowa Ptaków” (“Die Sprache der Vögel”). At the same time, it should be emphasized that the sound plane – above all, the onomatopoeia - comes to the fore in the case of the aforementioned poems and significantly affects the entire organization of the text. Onomatopoeic elements not only enrich the stylistic layer and poetic expression of these texts, but also imitate through linguistic means the sounds made by birds, thus attracting the attention of (especially the youngest) readers and stimulating their imagination. It is because of this fact that an in-depth translational analysis of the aforementioned phenomenon appears to be an extremely necessary task.

The aim of this paper is to investigate selected word forms (infinitives and certain verb forms in the present tense) in terms of their morphemic structure in the dialect space of German dialects in Moravia and Silesia. The description of the state of the art enables conclusions to be drawn regarding the dialectal affiliation of individual dialect areas. In the foreground of our interest were those verb forms that were not the subject of description in the „Atlas of German dialects in the Czech Republic (2014–2020), Volume V Morphologie, 2020“ / „Atlas der deutschen Mundarten in Tschechien 2014–2020, Band V Morphologie, 2020“. The research showed that the language islands in South and Central Moravia (Brno language island, Vyškov language island, Jihlava language island) are strongly influenced by Bavarian dialects. North Moravia (Austrian Silesia), which is characterised by the presence of East Central German elements, can be described as a counterpart. However, it cannot be said that the dominance of East-Central German features is absolute in the area in question, since in some localities there is an increase in Central Bavarian linguistic features. The Hřebeč region (the largest language island in Moravia) occupies a special position, attracting attention with its numerous East Franconian phenomena. A typically Hřebeč dialectal symptom is the diphthongisation of the Central High German ´i´ and ´u´, which is not found at all in the German dialects of Bohemia and Moravia, except in Hřebeč (Schönhengst). Very often this diphthongization is attested in personal pronouns (see Muzikant 2014: 120–135). In our material, diphthongs appear in the 1st and 3rd person sg. of the verb sein.

The aim of the article is to examine the presence of Rusyn in the current linguistic landscape of the Lower Silesia region. Rusyn is the native language of Lemko, an East Slavic ethnic group that at first inhabited the Polish-Ukrainian-Slovak borderlands in the Carpathians. Various political events have repeatedly provoked migrations of Rusyn people. Today there are Rusyn settlements in many regions and cities in Europe and North America. In Central Europe, the most important include Ruski Krstur in the Serbian Vojvodina, Ştiuca in the Romanian Banat, small villages in northeastern Hungary, around the Slovakian Prešov and Ukrainian Užhorod as well as many places in Poland. In both Vojvodina and Slovakia, the institutional and political situation of the Rusyn language community is the most favorable, which results in a relatively rich presence of the language in public spaces even within their settlements. The current presence of Rusyn-speaking Lemkos in Lower Silesia is primarily the result of an expulsion campaign from 1947. On the one hand, they live in larger centers such as Wrocław or Legnica, where they cannot form closed groups, and on the other hand in small villages in the west-northern part of the region, where they are the absolute majority of residents in villages like Patoka or Michałów. However, the presence of the Rusyn language in the public spaces of the local linguistic landscape is very limited, which is determined by several sociolinguistic factors. The cemeteries in Modła and Zimna Woda occupy a special place in this landscape, where not only Rusyn lexis is manifested in the grave inscriptions, but also orthographic instabilities and hybrid forms that illustrate the Rusinian-Polish or Rusinian-Ukrainian language contact can be recognized.

This paper attempts to present the concept of a text- and workbook for German phonetics and phonology intended in the first place for Polish students. The starting point for the considerations is – on the one hand – the reference to a phonetics survey among students and – on the other hand – a brief overview of selected textbooks and workbooks for German phonetics and phonology which have already been published. Another starting point is my didactic experience in teaching phonetics and phonology at the university level. All of this provides a basis for developing a concept of this text- and workbook. Finally, its assumptions and suggestions for an exercise typology including examples are presented.

The purpose of this article is to present a book on teaching the phraseology of the Polish language, addressed to foreign students studying at Polish universities. This publication is a phraseological dictionary (glossary), compiled by a team of students, edited by Joanna Wozniak, Elzbieta Dziurewicz and Agnieszka Pasik: “Ubierz to w słowa – studencka frazeologia praktyczna dla uczących się języka polskiego jako obcego / ‘Put it into words’ – student practical phraseology for foreign learners”, published in 2023 in Poznan in the Rys publishing house, also available online on the website of this publishing house. This article discusses the assumptions of the presented publication and its content in the context/perspective of glottodidactics in comparison with previous phraseological research. The book consists of two parts: an introduction and a lexicographical study, which includes a description of 120 phraseological units that are used today by students in their everyday communication. The scheme of lexicographic description of phraseological units, developed by the authors of the glossary, is of a model nature. The research procedures used (criteria for the selection of material, determination of the number of headwords and their ordering) yielded results of great cognitive value. The dictionary presented here is a successful result of cooperation between students and academics, and is also a valuable teaching aid, supporting the teaching of Polish phraseology.

The review article discusses the book of Aleksandra R. Knapik and Piotr P. Chruszczewski “Kreolingwistyka w zarysie. Językowo-kulturowe mechanizmy przetrwania, rozwoju i dezintegracji”, which is the first introduction to Creolingistics written in Polish. It should be however emphasized, that the book under review is also a valuable overview of contact linguistics and anthropological linguistics. The paper begins by drawing attention to the importance of research on endangered languages as well as on the formation and development of new languages, which come into existence, when two or more language communities meet. In the next part of this paper individual chapters of the book are discussed. In the first chapter, the authors outline the broader background of the research, defining the place of creolinguistics within contact linguistics, which in turn belongs to the field of anthropological linguistics. The taxonomy of language anthropology is very clearly explained, and the main concepts of anthropological linguistics are presented. Next chapters of the book under review focus on pidgins (chapter 2) and creoles (chapter 3). Both types of contact languages are described in detail in terms of their definition(s), characteristics, and possible classifications. In the last chapter of their book the authors deal with endangered languages. They discuss causes and mechanisms of linguistic and cultural changes, that lead to their disappearance and analyse the factors of language vitality. In the concluding part of the review article some general remarks on the book under review are presented.

The history of Faroese writing only begins in the 18th century with the writing down of dance ballads, while the first grammar was written in the middle of the 19th century. As a result, the history of Faroese lexicography is much more modest compared to other languages. For the Danish-Faroese language pair, the list of dictionaries has recently been enriched by the first bilingual pictorial dictionary “1001 færøske ord” (København 2021) with Danish as the source language. Its macrostructure is onomasiologically structured and includes a good 1000 thematically ordered entries at level A1. The access to lemmas is either via the table of contents or via the Danish or Faroese alphabetically ordered keyword index in the final chapter of the publication. A weakness of the dictionary is the grammatical minimalism in the design of the microstructure of the keywords. One of the advantages of the publication is the illustration: the large and colourful illustrations of various types visualise the intended denotation in an exemplary manner. In this respect, the publication represents a solid editorial work. The didactic value of the publication is enhanced by the table with an overview of the phonetic system and some pronunciation rules of Faroese. The picture dictionary is primarily suitable as a didactic tool for the first encounter of Danish-speaking recipients with Faroese to learn the vocabulary at a rudimentary level.

Collocations as fixed syntagms of a conventional character prove to be a valuable subject of study in numerous scientific disciplines. A large number of publications focus primarily on linguistic and didactic aspects of this phenomenon. The acquisition of foreign language collocative units is a complex and multi-layered process in which several parameters and categories must be taken into account. In her monograph „Die Entwicklung der Kollokationskompetenz im DaF-Unterricht am Beispiel des Erwerbs von Substantiv-Verb-Kollokationen“ Joanna Targońska examines the question of how and with what results collocation competence can be promoted among Polish German studies students through the use of various measures.

Experimental research in phonetics is used for detailed and objective analysis of linguistic data, providing a complete description of the data at the articulatory, acoustic, and auditory levels. Instrumental analysis is used in both descriptive and normative research because it involves updating and verifying previous findings. An example of this is the monograph by Anita Lorenc entitled “Wymowa normatywna polskich samogłosek nosowych i spółgłoski bocznej”, published by Dom Wydawniczy ELIPSA in 2016. The reviewed work is the result of a comprehensive and globally innovative study of the pronunciation of Polish nasal vowels and the lateral consonant [l], using devices that allowed synchronous recording of three types of signals: articulographic, acoustic, and visual. The complexity of Anita Lorenc’s experimental research makes it possible to redefine and update the description of the realization of Polish nasal vowels and the lateral consonant in the context of the Polish pronunciation norm.

In the language of the respective country or language community, many mathematical components can be found, which are often used in the form of stable expressions. They are used in various areas of everyday life, often with different meanings than those primarily attributed to such units. But what is the relationship between language and mathematics? This question is at the forefront of the volume „Mathematics in European Languages. Linguistic Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives“ by Magdalena Lisiecka-Czop and Katarzyna Sztandarska, who has already been published by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag. The volume brings together studies in which mathematical terminology and its linguistic relationships are discussed from various perspectives. These are phraseological, lexicographic, lexicological, semantic, pragmatic, semiotic, cognitive, translational and didactically oriented analyses, often contrastive. The volume opens up new interesting research perspectives and raises many questions that will hopefully be answered in further scientific studies inspired by the volume.