"Buszel", "kombajner", and "rels": Fisiak’s 1961 corpus of English borrowings in Polish fifty five years later

The onset of Professor Jacek Fisiak’s scholarly career is marked by his 1961 Ph.D. dissertation devoted to the lexical influence of English upon Polish. This study, conducted 55 years ago, offers a multilayered analysis and sets the standards of studies on lexical transfer from English to Polish for the years to come. The present article is a tribute to Fisiak’s first scholarly endeavor; it examines the fate of lexical items comprising Fisiak’s corpus in the second decade of the 21st century. More specifically, by conducting searches in the National Corpus of Polish as well as a Google search, the paper checks which borrowings to the Polish language listed and scrutinized by Fisiak gained popularity, which fell out of use, and which underwent semantic changes

Lexical borrowings and calques from African American slang in Polish youth slang – A study based on a selected internet forum

The aim of the article is to present a very preliminary chunk of a wider study of Polish slang, whose aim is to pinpoint lexical influence of American English in broad terms and the usage and understanding among Polish youngsters of various types of borrowings. More specifically, the authors have concentrated on the borrowings of words, phrases and meanings from a sociolect known as African American English to the language of Polish youngsters. To this end, the largest Polish hardcore punk Internet forum has been scrutinized. The conducted analysis points to a discernible, albeit not significant lexical influence of the sociolect on the Polish youth slang, which calls for a more nuanced, survey-based analysis the authors wish to undertake as part of their research project

Dissecting the word: The use of the lexeme 'shit' in selected performances of comedian Dave Chappelle’s stand-up routine

The paper explores the use of the lexeme shit in the corpus of Dave Chappelle’s stand-up specials released between 2000 and 2019. It consists of two parts: theoretical and analytical. The first one presents theoretical and pragmatic considerations connected with stand-up routines, touches upon slang semantics, and depicts the links between Dave Chappelle’s stage persona and the hip hop community. Lastly, it presents the reader with the past and present-day status of the lexeme at issue. In the analytical section of the paper the use of shit in the aforesaid corpus is scrutinized from the semantic angle. The discussion is supplemented with the results culled from the corpus of rap lyrics compiled at the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The paper argues that (i) shit has lost its taboo status and is mainly used in both corpora as a less formal equivalent of stuff, anything and something and (ii) Chappelle’s stage use of shit, even though present in a different context and serving context-specific purposes, corresponds to the use of African American rappers in their song lyrics (assuming that rap lyrics depict African American English, this conclusion can be extended to the sociolect of African Americans)

The fate of mid-20th-century sports loanwords from English in Polish

In recent years, we have observed a huge influx of vocabulary borrowed from English into Polish; these are words either of English origin or borrowed through English. At the same time, the number and variety of scholarly investigations trying to illustrate the extent of anglicisms in Polish and systematise the semantic fields which draw from English the most have increased. Most of them deal with the latest borrowings, often representing professional jargon or spoken language. In this paper we will discuss anglicisms which entered Polish over sixty years ago and remained in the sports lexicon until today. The article is a tribute to the late professor Jacek Fisiak, who offered the first in-depth analysis of sports vocabulary borrowed from English into Polish. His Ph.D. monograph (1961) and the subsequent article (1964) have shown a special place of sports terminology among anglicisms in Polish. The lexical items which Fisiak collected in the early sixties of the twentieth century have been tested not only in terms of their fate, but also the degree of grammatical and orthographic assimilation, as well as semantic changes the lexemes have undergone. The study is based on two large corpora of Polish: the Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego and Odkrywka, comprising texts from the 18th century until the present time

“I remains your ever wisher & so forth”: on the two types of formulaic closings in 19th-century private letters

Although formulaic expressions found in earlier correspondence have drawn scholarly attention, their (un)grammaticality has not been thoroughly researched. The present paper thus focuses on the two types of formulae with the verb remain found in private correspondence: one headed by 1st person pronoun (as in: we remain(s) your daughters), the other one starting with but/so/also/and/only (as in: but remain(s) your affectionate child until death). For the purpose of the study a corpus of 19th-century correspondence has been compiled and analyzed; additionally, the data from Dylewski (2013) have been taken into account. Next to the corpus scrutiny, an Internet search has been carried out to verify whether the use of the formulae at issue goes beyond the 19th century. An analysis from both a qualitative and quantitative angles allowed for putting forth a number of hypotheses concerning the origin of variation between -s-marked and unmarked forms as well as their distribution across letter-types and different geographical locations. The results of the analysis also corroborate the claim that -s on remain in the structures under discussion is neither a “part of the authentic local vernacular nor of authentic contemporary standard English, but part of a specific, localized practice of letter writing, which had its own linguistic rules” (Pietsch 2015: 226)

Polish loanwords in English revisited

The impact of the Polish language on the English lexical fabric, although unimpressive, is worth noticing. However, thus far it has not been a source of interest of many scholars. The present paper aims at discussing Polish loanwords that have found their way into the English language; this is done by means of collecting alleged loanwords from an array of sources (dictionaries, subject literature, and the Internet) which are later verified against, inter alia, such etymological dictionaries as the Oxford English Dictionary. Next, in order to assess their scale of use, selected items are checked in a number of corpora available online. The research concludes that there are 33 direct borrowings from the Polish language (belonging to 8 semantic categories) present in English, and nearly half of them are yet unattested in the OED