The use of moods in Italian is a very interesting problem but also difficult raking into account the complexity of phenomena which must be analysed at the same time. It especially concerns contexts in which different moods can appear alternatively. The aim of the article is to examine contexts in which it is possible to use indicative and congiuntivo moods. The possibility of choice between moods would mean the duality of human nature which hesitates between affirmation and keeping a distance to that what makes the content of an utterance. Employing the research mechanism described by cognitive linguistics that is, among others, notions such as prototype, semantic invariant or scheme and the methodology which is based on relationships existing between recognition, semantics and grammar it seems that the choice of moods is the result stemming from information processing and based on man's cognitive abilities and his knowledge about the world - indicative would reflect loeutor 's responsibility for the truth value ofutterance content whereas congiuntivo would be a language sign of distance position towards that what he says.

With a minimum of necessary theorizing, an attempt is made to introduce a notion of Shakespeare's ellipsis which turns aside its usual overapplicability. From a variety of proposals grows a synthesis thereof, accentuating, it is hoped, a most scientifically attractive strain in the behavior of ellipsis - its contextual dependence. A preliminary look at Early Modem English, and Shakespeare's against it, prompts comments and warnings in the direction of greater relevance to my guidelines for recognizing instances of ellipsis.

The aim of the paper is to explore three apparently unrelated phenomena, i.e. syllabic consonants, vowel syncope and bogus clusters and provide convincing evidence for their intimate relationship. Specifically, it is pointed out that all three phenomena have the same origin and stem from the expansionist behaviour of sonorants, which in turn is a reaction of the latter to a positional weakness. We argue that a unified solution for the three structures is possible on condition that in English lexically present nuclei arc never properly governed even by the strongest governors, that is, realised vowels. As a result the analysis contributes to the postulation of the governing- ability scale for different types of nuclei in English.

There are several nominal groups in contemporary Polish language, which are primarily used to convey information about date as a time of activity. The nominal groups concerned indicate temporal simultaneity of activity and temporal localiser. They include: genitive without a preposition (dnia pierwszego listopada), w+ locative case (w dniu pierwszego listopada), z+ instrumental case (z dniem pierwszego listopada), 1w + accusative case (Zaraz na pierwszego wyłożyli jej na stół pieniądze) and na + instrumental case (Zeszyt grudniowy wyszedł na dniu 31 grudnia). Only one of the aforementioned nominal groups, namely na+ instrumental case, remains to be archaic for contemporary Polish. The aim of the present paper is to determine synonymies of the aforementioned constructions and their mutual relations when expressing the meaning of date.

The subject of the paper is cultural transfer. It is transfer of native culture interactional norms and social values. It involves also transfer of the strategies of self- and other-face maintenance. Although cultural transfer, unlike pragmatic transfer, is very difficult to detect, it can effect L2 learners' communication in L2 culture setting. The aim of this study is to analyse some cases of negative transfer of Polish face-maintenance strategies in the production of Polish learners of English as a second language. From the early childhood we are told how to behave, what to do or not to do. We learn how to perform even the most simple conventional acts, such as greeting, introducing oneself, or expressing gratitude, by observing how others do it, by listening to those others as models, and by noting the reactions of others to our performance and changing our behaviour accordingly (Corson, 1995). In this way we acquire the knowledge of interactional norms operating as regular modes of interaction in our culture.

The paper studies the use of participle constructions in Polish and Swedish narratives. The data consist of narratives elicited by means of a picture book "Frog, where are you?" by M. Meyer. Twenty eight speakers ( 14 in each language group) were recorded while telling the story. The analysis concentrated on the funcion of participle construcions in a narrative. The data show that the speakers in both languages use this non-finit verb form first of all in order to present the background information, which can co-relate with the use of subordinate clauses in a narrative discource. The analysis furthermore shows that participles in passiv constructions can focuse the figure in the story. The structural differences between Polish and Swedish can also influence the use of participle construtions in the discource.

The study shows that the primary function of the pluperfect tense in the corpus of early English correspondence ( I 5th-17th centuries) was the expression of counterfactuality rather than anteriority. Its use to refer to pre-past actions was by no means obligatory, especially if other exponents of anteriority were present. Some attention is also paid to the variation between the auxiliary verbs be and have.

In our paper we intend to present the analysis of the conceptualisation of the feeling of anger that we have done on the basis of selected Polish and Spanish idioms. The aim of our contrastive investigations, carried out in the field of Cognitive Grammar, is to demonstrate the analogy between the conceptual images of anger in Polish and Spanish. The analysis of conventional linguistic units, having both metaphorical and metonymic basis, is done within the dimensions of TIME, SPACE, SIGHT and TOUCH (in the aspect of temperature, pressure and colour). The comparison of conceptual metaphors, which constitute the basis of both Polish and Spanish phraseology, allows one to discern the similarities in the conceptualisation of the feeling of anger in the two languages. Anger is usually conceptualised as SUBSTANCE, LIQUID, CONTAINER, FIRE, the RED COLOUR, an ARMED OPONENT or a RUSHING CAR. Anger generally manifests itself as a negative and harmful feeling, and its connection with how it is experienced and expressed by means of conventional behaviour referring to common cultural, psychological and physiological patterns, testifies to the fact that there is an analogy in the way it is conceptualised in both Polish and Spanish phraseology.

The article provides a brief insight into the position and influence of the so cal led 'significant others' in the learning process. To be more specific, the paper aims at distinguishing an individual who helps the learner to learn a language, presenting the characteristics of the 'important figure', and defining the roles the person plays in learners' lives. The research findings emphasize a valuable contribution and effort the important figures take in order to shape learners' emotional states and attitudes towards learning, the language itself, and the TLC.

The present study looks at the non-native teacher of English as a foreign language at the tertiary level of education (university and college level) and his/her lexical competence. It seeks to demonstrate the connection between that competence and the form of instruction given to language students. The opening part of the paper discusses in general terms the nature of teacher's professionalism (competences) emphasizing both methodological competence (e.g. strategies of instruction and explanation) and linguistic competence (e.g. language awareness and use of metalanguage). In its research part, the study is a partial replication of a pilot project carried out by Zimmerman (200 I), whose main aim was to evaluate awareness of lexical anomalies by native speakers (NS) acting as teachers of English as a second language at the tertiary level. The present study is based on a survey conducted among non- native speakers of English (NNS) i.e. Polish EFL teachers at a college level. The survey consisted of a lexical acceptability judgment test and teachers' comments on lexical instruction. Also a personal data questionnaire was administered to the group of informants (teachers) to ensure the homogcnous character of the group- first of all in terms of their learning history (type of teacher training received) and teaching history (levels, age groups and professional experience). The aim of the study was threefold: 1. To evaluate lexical awareness of the EFL teachers 2. To comment on teachers' instructional and explanatory competence 3. To compare NS teachers (Zimmermann 200 I) and NNS teachers in respect of language instruction. The conclusions of the study are to be implemented in courses of training of EFL teachers.

Idiom (from Greek idios 'own, private': late 16th c.) is most frequently referred to as a string of language whose meaning cannot be pieced together from the meanings of its component parts.1 As such it relies heavily on the interdependencies between formal and semantic levels of language. This makes it a highly complex linguistic phenomenon, if only intra-lingually. What exacerbates the problem with idiom is the fact that the form/meaning relationship should not be expected to be identical across languages, unless these allow for historical, typological or cultural relatedness. That is why idiom is often described as a piece of language which does not translate literally. Although the definition of this type proves highly imprecise in a lot of instances, it properly points to difficulties involved in a largely unexplored domain of idiom translation. It is the key aim of the present study to suggest methods of obviating these difficulties, which is hoped to be achieved by cataloguing viable strategies of idiom translation. as employed in four English-to-Polish translations of Lewis Carroll's Alice s Adventures in Wonderland.

This paper aims at sketching a theoretical framework permitting a more satisfactory approach to the controversial notion of loose, or nonrestrictive. apposition in Polish. The solutions which it proposes have been arrived at on the basis of the corpus from the Polish edition of Newsweek magazine.' The appositive constructions have been characterized by the criteria for apposition usually assumed in the previous studies on apposition.

The subject of this paper is the nonverbal realization of selected polite "speech" acts. The aim of this paper is to analyse nonverbal facework strategies observed in Polish culture. The main theoretical assumptions of the two theories, Brown and Levinsons theory of politeness and Ting-Toomey's face-negotiation theory, serve as a theoretical framework for the analysis.

One of the areas in which medical simultaneous interpreting is becoming predominant is the setting of medical (international) conferences. The current paper aims at highlighting certain suggestions and observations made by 5 medical practitioners who participated in the conferences where the simultaneous mode of interpreting was employed. The suggestions provided by them as well as the suggestions of the author who is a medical interpreter himself are believed to facilitate the process of simultaneous interpreting from a purely practical point of view. They are hoped to throw light on the problematic issues connected with this specific mode of interpreting and show interpreters (to be) certain ways of tackling difficult phenomena and obstacles that arise in the process of interpreting. Additionally, the paper also pays attention to another meaning of the term medical interpreter which also in Poland has come to stand for any person delivering interpretation in a medical setting usually for the purpose of medical examination of the other person.

The object of the article is to show how semantic grammar theory can be applied as a first step to describe natural languages. Taking into account that neither purely syntactic criteria nor the application of cognitive semantics as the only method allows us to describe any natural language from every point of view, we have proposed to study and research the natural language within the framework of so called (cultural linguistics) (J. Wilk-Racięska a,b). The main purpose of the article is to show the importance of understanding the semantic level in the process of learning and researching.

The present paper aims to discuss the concept of concession and the various senses in which it has been used in the literature. The fact that the term concessive has acquired many different senses is not to mean, however, that we have been dealing with a terminological chaos but rather that the understanding of concession has been undergoing a continuous development paralleling the development of new linguistic theories and the emergence of new fields of linguistic studies.

The theory of politeness formulated by Brown & Levinson ( 1987) seems to be the most extensive and detailed model, covering a wide variety of issues contributing to the linguistic expression of the phenomenon. It has been successfully used by many authors (e.g. Sifianou, 1992) to account for the strategies used by communicators in a variety of contexts. The model has been developed to cover mainly the interpersonal, spoken type of communication. The present paper investigates the applicability of the theory to the description of the advertising discourse. As a special form of communication, with an untypical assignment of roles of the sender and the addressee of the message, and the predominant persuasive function, it is expected to reveal different tendencies in the use of politeness strategies, both in the communication between the characters appearing in the commercials, and along the sender-addressee dimension. Frequent application of stereotyping in the construction of advertising messages is another possibly significant factor. For the illustrative purposes the study uses contrastive samples of data, in the form of British and Polish advertisements, in the hope to discover certain tendencies prevailing in the advertising communication within the Polish and English environment.

The present paper investigates the lexical process of conversion of verbal participles into adjectives in Polish and English. While Bresnan ( I 995) treats all premodifying -i11g and -ed elements in English as participles converted into adjectives (e.g. sen! in the recently sen! book), it is argued here (in agreement with Laczkó 200 I) that some prenominal -ing and -ed forms in English should be regarded as verbal participles. I show that a similar situation obtains in Polish, where pronominal participle-looking elements are either verbal participles or departicipial adjectives derived through conversion (e.g. dokładnie zmielone mięso '(lit.) carefully minced meat' vs. mielone mięso 'minced meat'). Difficulties are highlighted in delineating borders between verbal participles, departicipial adjectives, and other deverbal adjectives. Formal properties of the process of participle-to-adjective conversion are briefly compared to the characteristics of other conversion processes.