Od statystyki do metonimii : o tekstach literackich Janusza Korczaka

Abstract

The article deals with literary texts written by Janusz Korczak that are presented against the background of the writer’s works in other genres and compared with samples from the prose of Ignacy Dąbrowski, a contemporary of Korczak. The analysis of the texts relies on statistical methods. The examined aspects include, among others: index of lexical richness, originality of vocabulary, stereotypicality, the role of the most frequent words in building the text, and the share of nouns and verbs in the lexicon and in the text. The generalizations obtained by means of the statistical methods serve as the basis for identifying the linguistic characteristics of Korczak’s literary texts: closeness of the style of the novel to the spoken language that creates a border-line “written–spoken” register. This feature is visible in the use of metonymies. Examples from the novel Król Maciuś Pierwszy [King Matt the First] are used to illustrate the meaning of metonymies and various methods of their creation. It serves as the evidence that Korczak used simple, colloquial language in his novel, and frequently replaced sophisticated words with synonyms that were in agreement with the imagination and expressiveness of a child.