Kolokacje rzeczownikowo-przymiotnikowe w dwudziestowiecznych tekstach konstytucji państwa polskiego

Abstract

The subject of this linguistic reflection are nominal collocations, i.e. syntactic structures from the border line of syntax and phraseology. Belonging to the passing-line of what is grammatically regular, thus refers to categories, and irregular, thus individual, lexical, collocations represent a type of syntactic structures that have some regular formal, grammatical, phraseological and textual features. The research material are two-componential nominal and adjectival collocations excerpted from the 20th century texts of the Polish constitutions, i.e. the Constitution of March 1921, the Constitution of April 1935, the Constitution of Polish People’s Republic of 1952, and the Constitution of the Republic of Poland of 1997. Such a choice of the material basis resulted front many reasons, among other things from a unique character of the texts and the meaning of a constitution as a legal act itself, from the amount and representativeness of the most important laws of the State in the 20th century as well as from the historical perspective of 84 years that elapsed from the time of the passage of the bases of the social and political form of the Second Republic of Poland. Before analyzing the material the notion of nominal collocation was explained on the basis of famous Polish and world-wide linguists' theories. The analysis was conducted in three directions: 1. of frequency, 2. of syntactic productiveness, 3. of distribution. In the analysis a share of nominal and adjectival collocations in structures of legal texts (constitutions) was shown with an observation of constant and changing linguistic and stylistic features of the texts. It was ascertained that the following structural features belong to constant discriminants of a constitution as a genre: 1. the relation of mono-frequency to multi-frequency of collocations that was stated on the level of 70% : 30%; 2. the proportion of mono-productive to multi-productive nominal lexical items stabilized on the level of 60% : 40% and the proportion of adjectival mono-productive to multi-productive lexical items stabilized on the level of 64% : 36%; 3. the occurrence of repetitive multi-productive lexical items in the texts; 4. the saturation of the texts with so called constitutionalisms, i.e. with multi-distributional collocations. On the other hand changing structural features that appear in the particular twentieth century constitutions make the following register: 1. the occurrence of collocations of multi-frequency the characteristic of which is the highest frequency; 2. the occurrence of non-repetitive multi-productive lexical items the characteristic of which are maximum values; 3. the changing interdependence between mono-distributive and multi-distributive collocations; 4. the occurrence of not identical lexical and semantic categories as well as nominal and adjectival collocations. These stable structural (text-constructive and compositional) features fix the genealogical characteristic of a constitution, which allows to set it against other genres of official style. On the other hand the changing features serve as means of stylistic individualization of each of the four constitutions, works of political and legal thought of the past century. The undertaken studies of frequency, syntactic productiveness, and distribution confirm both general and individual way of applied text functioning in a historical process.