Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis. 191. Studia Anglica 5

Abstract

The volume we have the pleasure to introduce will give the reader an opportunity to become acquainted with recent developments in areas of theoretical, applied, contact and socio- linguistics. All of these centre around problems which ordinary users of language are likely to encounter. We could venture to say they all adopt a use/usage oriented perspective. Among papers dealing with language theory and language use are those by Joanna Podhorodecka, Agnieszka Gicala, Artur Świątek and Anna Ścibior- Gajewska. The first of these deals with the verb see and its passive usage, where the author supports a corpus based study with statistical validation. Agnieszka Gicala looks at the usefulness of practical grammar knowledge in the skills of the translator or interpreter, on the example of a poem, the poetic force of which is related to carefully selected grammatical structures. Artur Świątek investigates aspects of the semantics of the definite article in English. Anna Ścibior-Gajewska writes about the importance of the attribution of semantic roles in acceptability judgments and investigates their relationship with arguments affected by errors. Two papers (those by Ewa Kucelman and Andrzej K. Kuropatnicki) take up the subject of neologisms. Kucelman discusses the strategies applied by a Polish translator when rendering the neologisms introduced by Joanne K. Rowling in her Harry Potter series into Polish. Kuropatnicki introduces a creative neologiser, who is very much utilitarian-oriented – the Renaissance author of medical works, Sir Thomas Elyot, and his novel formations. Languages in contact is the broad label under which we categorize the next set of papers. Anita Buczek-Zawiła offers a survey of tendencies observable in the adaptation of Anglicisms to the prosodic systems of selected European languages, with specific focus on placement of word-stress. Jacek Rachfał compares morphology and creativity in the translation of architectural terms related to Gothic art in English and Polish. Problems of communication are the topic of the last two papers which are by Agnieszka Strzałka and Edyta Rachfał. Strzałka focuses on ways complaints are expresses in the English of used by multi-national users, advocating an EFL approach with diversity of expression rather than following the conventional standards. Edyta Rachfał, working within the discipline of Crisis Communication, explores the effect of selected grammatical stance markers in crisis response and their influence on the to alter the stakeholders’ perceptions with regard to people and events connected with the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World. The volume concludes with two review articles. The first one discusses the strengths and weaknesses of an academic handbook for English pronunciation training, while the second presents a fairly recent discussion of the approach known as Construction Grammar as applied to English. Interestingly, the latter book, in the opinion of its reviewer, also easily lends itself to academic uses. It is our sincere hope that the rich variety of material and subject matter in this volume will give the reader much pleasure and intellectual stimulation.