The present paper is an empirical, corpus-based study of the Polish translations of Shakespeare’s agentive neologisms in -er in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The inspiration for the analysis was Kalaga’s book Nomina Agentis in the Language of Shakespearean Drama (2016), where the author selects 39 Shakespeare’s agentive neologisms in - er. The paper surveys qualitative and quantitative tendencies of translation techniques adopted by nineteenth and twentieth-century translators occurring in the corpus placed against the context of general discussion on the translation of neologisms. A brief discussion concerning word formation processes with the suffix - er in the current and Early Modern English systems of word formation precedes the analysis.

The paper compares the employment of the definite article in the Gothic version of the Gospel of Luke and in its Greek counterpart which served as the basis for the Gothic translation. Although the Gothic text is usually said to be a word-for-word reflection of the Greek text, we demonstrate that just like in the case of the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John, which were of concern in our previous studies, there are enormous differences between the two languages especially in the domain of the definite article, not only in terms of amount but also in terms of the cases used – nominative, genitive, dative or accusative.

Many legal texts are produced in repetitive and standardised communication situations; they are therefore subject to unification and are consequently characterised by formulaicity. Formulaicity can be regarded not only as a significant but also as a constitutive textual property. The aim of this article is to attempt to present formulaicity as a textual property and descriptive category of legal texts and to describe its characteristics both at the level of text structure and at the level of formulation, using the example of the German text type 'Gesetzestext'.

The article studies the use of linking adverbials (LAs) in English-medium articles by Polish and Anglophone scholars representing medicine and psychology, attempting to reveal discipline- and culture-specific preferences in the choice, frequency and distribution of linkers. The results show that disciplinary and linguacultural constraints impact on LA use. Variation across disciplines reflects differences in the knowledge base and its rhetorical management, as there are significantly more LAs in psychology than in medicine. Cross-cultural variation determines the choice of specific LA (sub)categories in line with the authors’ linguacultural backgrounds, target readers and publication contexts. These findings can raise academic writers’ awareness of culture- and discipline-driven aspects of adverbial cohesion in English academic prose.

This study presents a potential solution to a long-standing question of the phonological representation of short diphthongs. Their mere existence in Old English, the West-Saxon dialect, in particular, has been a matter of great controversy among historical phonologists and beyond. Some attention has been paid to short diphthongs attested in Icelandic by structuralists and phoneticians. Additionally, glide emergence, where a short vowel is expected, seems to take place in the present- day Sursilvan dialect of the Romansh language. What these languages have in common is that diphthongs occur in specific contexts, namely, they are allowed before consonants that are marked by what might be defined as secondary articulation. In this paper, in order to account for the occurrence of short diphthongs in these contexts, I adopt a structural model of phonological representations whereby glide emergence is the result of the interplay between a weak, empty-headed onset and the preceding nucleus.

Among the most important expressions of the cultural identity of the Silesians are the Silesian dialect and Silesian cuisine. The German-Polish cultural and linguistic contacts that have been present in Silesia for centuries are also manifested in the culinary vocabulary of the regionʼs inhabitants. In addition to numerous loan words of German provenance, which have also been incorporated into Polish literary language, many other lexemes are found in Silesian variety that are related to eating and drinking and have only regional distribution. From a contact linguistic perspective, the article focuses on the court terms of German provenance present in the Silesian dialect, mainly addressing the various forms of borrowing.

The article discusses the use of metaphors in the terminology of astronomy and astrophysics. The terminology of these fields is relatively stable, characterized by terminological diversity, thus allowing to draw sufficiently general conclusions. Three cases are to be considered: (a) first, the metaphor as a powerful source of terms, assuming the denominative function, (b) the terminological metaphor which leaves a certain domain and which penetrates into the general language, which is sometimes called determinologization, and, (c) finally, the terminological metaphor migrating from one specialized domain to other terminologies in which it is newly used to denote another concept, this phenomenon sometimes being referred to as transterminologization. The three processes are analysed and documented, using French and Czech examples, excerpted from specialised texts (encyclopaedic dictionary and newspaper articles).