The creation of a good brand name involves many branches of human knowledge. Linguistics is one of them and a very important one. Phonetics, sound symbolism, semantics, word formation and comparative studies of different languages have a considerable contribution to creating a good name of a product. The aim of the research, presented in the article is to apply this kind of knowledge to analyse the names of currently available OPEL cars

The purpose of this paper is the investigation of Proto-Germanic word order. To do such investigation, we needed to collect a number of texts written in the oldest Germanic languages, and to produce a tagged corpus on their basis. Due to the fact that there are no written texts in Proto-Germanic proper, we took into account texts from Old High German (OHG), Gothic and West-Saxon, as well as runic inscriptions. In order to objectivise the analysis, we chose texts whose parallel analysis in different languages would be possible. The best candidate for this analysis was the New Testament. Such procedure also allowed us to make recourse to the Vulgate and Septuagint and make further comparisons. The data that we obtained, mostly confirm the opinions generally held about Proto-Germanic word order, but there are some details that seem to say the opposite. For example, that Proto-Germanic had main clauses that were predominantly VO. Therefore, we venture to claim that Proto-Germanic was a VO language, especially if we take into account the elements V(erb) and O(bject).

The paper endeavours to verify a commonly accepted observation that Polish hornorganic stop geminates are unreleased. Fifteen Polish subjects participated in the experiment, producing stop gerninates in different contexts specified for the place of articulation, articulatory tempo, and voiced-voiceless distinction. The collected samples were acoustically analysed for presence or absence of the release burst. The results do not corroborate a putative unreleased status of Polish homorganic stop geminates. They show, however, that the frequency of released geminates strongly depends on the place of articulation, with dental It, dl released most frequently. Voiceless stops tend to be more readily released than voiced stops, though this tendency is only close to significant. Moreover, a significant impact of the tempo of articulation on the occurrence of the release burst has been demonstrated for both voiced and voiceless stops - longer utterances are conducive to unreleased realisations of geminates.

Cognitive linguistics studies language as a reflection of human mind. Many cases of concept-formation are based on metaphor. Though most of the analyses point out to the presence of metaphor in natural languages, also sign languages involve this conceptual mechanism. Comparative analysis of linguistic expressions and signs for such fundamental concepts as time, support, illness, and others, proves that they reflect the same conceptual metaphors. This, in turn, supports the Generalisation Commitment and the Cognitive Commitment as fundamental hypotheses of cognitive linguistics.

Having accepted Quine's conception of translation, which argues for the necessity of placing the original within the framework of the previously made translation of the ontological theory, within which text functions, the author of this paper defends Searles principle of expressibility, which is only outwardly undermined by the impossibility of a literal translation of concepts expressed in the three Platonic virtues and three watchwords of the French Revolution into biblical Hebrew. Text is sustained through its sense. However, this sense depending on the ontology implanted in the natural language cannot be - as a relational being - exhausted in the never - completed translation.

This paper deals with such sentences as. in English, Mum, H·i/1 you have some coffee', or in Polish, Mamo, napijesz się kawy". The sentences contain appellatives (usually called 'vocatives in the literature)- the words Mum and Mamo - followed by verb forms - will you have and napijesz się. The author claims that appellatives and verb forms are two different things, deserving separate description. The usual division of sentences into those that use a familiar T-pronoun (Latin and French 111) and those that use a polite V-pronoun (Latin vos and French vous) is inadequate for two reasons: a. There are numerous languages in which there are several (and not just two) pronouns on the scale between familiar informality and polite formality. b. English, French, German etc. are non-pro-drop languages. There are, however, numerous pro-drop languages (Polish or Latin, for example), in which the form of the verb makes the use of a personal pronoun superfluous. What is more, a V-form of the verb in a sentence directed at the interlocutor does not necessarily require a formal appellative; example from French: Jean, vous a/fez prendre du cafe? - as against M Dupont, vous a/fez prendre du ca]e? Aside from that, the appellative (for example, in Polish) may be in the vocative or the nominative case, so that different permutations are possible. It is suggested that it is the verb form in the sentence addressed to the interlocutor that we should consider primary. The appellative may or may not be there: there is no obligation to name the addressee. In every language, both appellarives and verb forms in sentences accompanying appellatives are laid out on a scale, stretching from non-formal to formal. The 'non-fonnal' encl includes 'familiar' and even "intimate", while the 'formal' end comprises ·honorific'.

In this paper I will present an analysis of semantic-syntactic interdependence of resultative verbs with an adjective as a resultative complement in Modem Chinese. Within a wide range of semantic-syntactic correlation of resultative complement compounds there is one category worth analysing closely, since it possesses distinctive semantic features typical of an attributional group. This category is that of stative verbs. These resultatives carry both attributive and manner information, conditioned by their interrelation with the nominals or the verb in the sentence. In the traditional approach to such a compound verb, which is formally composed of a verb in combination with a postverb, the V, implies an action or a process and, broadly spoken, the V2 extends the action/process of the verb V, towards some kind of resulting state. There are verb-result forms where the second element possesses neither an action nor a process information and thus has nothing to do with activity or inducement. Commonly known as a stative verb, it expresses a state or a manner. Although both a verb and a stative verb act in Modem Chinese as a predicate, the distinctive behaviour of adjectives, in fact acting as intransitive verbs complementing transitive/ intransitive verbs, is to be analysed with respect to the relation to the nominals.

The present paper aims to investigate whether the selected monolingual dictionaries of German as a foreign language can be treated as bridges between cultures. First, we discuss the significance of culrure in foreign language teaching and in lexicography (with special reference to pedagogical lexicography), and then we analyse the front matter, the back matter as well as the middle matter of the seven reference works. As results from the analysis, only some dictionaries (LDaF, PBDaF) in fact provide the user with information on the culture of German-speaking countries. A fully-fledged assessment of the dictionaries, however, can only be arrived at following a more comprehensive study that would take into account other elements of lexicographic description, primarily definitions and illustrative examples.

This article presents the results of a study carried out at the English Department of the University of Silesia among students in their 41 1; and 51 1; year. They learned English (L2) and German (L3 for the majority of them) in a translation group. Some of the students have also learnt another foreign language or other foreign languages. The study focused on lexical techniques used by the learners for the acquisition of German vocabulary. It shows that the students find out a word's meaning, memorize and retrieve it with the help of various semantic techniques, such as contextualization, visualization, association, translation into Polish or English, repetition, structuring, connecting, differentiation, learning by doing and multimodal acquisition. The data confirm the hypothesis of the author that experienced language learners organize their learning process in a highly individual way and try to make it more efficient by using different learning strategies and techniques.

The article presents the results of research into borrowings from English in a corpus of Polish hip-hop lyrics comprising ten recent albums. Classifications of encountered traces of English influence are supplemented with a quantitative analysis and a discussion of the various roles Anglicisms are hypothesised to play in this context.

This article critically analyses various current methods of teaching foreign languages involving work with L2 lexical items. In the first place the author discusses the didactic tendencies in German speaking countries. The analysis shows strong and weak aspects of the described teaching concepts and tries to answer the question if there is one especially effective method which helps learn foreign vocabulary. The author comes to the conclusion that such efficient teaching approach cannot be found. A complex and individualized structure of the cognitive processes of foreign words acquisition is observed in some teaching methods, especially in the recent ones. Therefore the best solution to the problem at hand here could be seen in the application of various teaching techniques, the activation of learners' cognitive abilities, the use of their experience in other foreign languages and in the development of the learner autonomy.

One of the fragments of the system of temporal meanings in Polish is a so-called distribution time. The draft proposed herein opens a series of articles devoted to Polish temporal constructions which express a meaning of distribution. The present paper includes general characteristics of distribution time and its concrete meanings as well as an overview of linguistics means which express the said meanings.

The paper presents the characteristic of the quantity category in verbal groups in Russian. There are three basic types of the plural situations: multiplicative, distributive. and iterative. This paper provides a description of the verbal and non-verbal lexical means of conveying the accurate meanings of the category of verbal discreteness. This study also addresses the issue of deploying aspect in the contexts of limited and unlimited iterativity. We adopt a modified version of V Chrakovskys classification of the semantic plurality situation-types presented in his monograph Typology of Iterative Constructions.

My main aim in this paper is a semantic analysis of Polish reflexive constructions conducted within the framework of Langackers ( I 987, 1991) cognitive grammar with a view to showing that the great diversity of such constructions is only apparent as, at a more abstract level of conceptualization, they all function as contextual realizations of certain basic schematic notions. The analysis focuses on four ofWilczewska's (1966) twelve classes of Polish reflexive verbs: directly reflexive verbs, passive-resultative-spontaneous verbs, passive verbs, and reciprocal verbs. In the analysis I show that whenever Polish speakers make use ofa reflexive construction, they convey one of the following three types of information: an entity acts on itself, two (or more) entities act analogously on each other (one another), and an event seemingly happens on its own. Furthermore, I claim that it is the relational reflexive marker się, which, by dint of its several profiling options, brings different elements of a transitive-construction action chain into focus and makes the above-enumerated information types possible to be communicated. Consequently, I postulate three broad senses of Polish reflexive constructions: those expressing (I) reflexive relationships, (2) reciprocal relationships, and (3) seemingly spontaneous events-each constituting a separate, though closely related, grammatical category. In turn, these three senses/grammatical categories are said to form a crucial part of the schematic network model of Polish reflexive constructions.

One reaches for euphemism whenever s/he wants to avoid unpleasant word or topic. This is our shield against everything that is, in our view, bad and may hurt our interlocutor or us. We just try to improve imperfect world around us. Hence it is not surprising that our grey professional life should be coloured a little. The best way to do it, without going on strike, is to create unusual names for our professions. This paper focuses on euphemistic names of professions in English and Polish giving some interesting examples and showing ways of coining them.

In language acquisition literature, the closeness language may have to its immediate context of situation is referred to as contextualized or situated use of language. In this sense, contextualizationlsituatedness is characteristic of spoken language and its corresponding type of consciousness/cognition, which may be called situated- immediate. Such situated cognition is understood as the closeness cognition may have to the immediate physical and social situation of the thinker. However, the term situated has in fact much broader meaning and is typically used to characterize all human cognition. Thus, it does not mean closeness to our physical-social situation in the sense of our immediate interaction with it, because human cognition/ consciousness is frequently displaced. Written language calls for such a displaced mode of cognitive operation. The paper offers an analysis of a problem an EFL student has with a writing assignment. The analysis is based on the distinction between immediate consciousness, (characteristic of oral use of language) and displaced consciousness (typical of literate use of language and associated with an increase in metacognitive control). The analysis presented here can help us design better writing tasks, which are more adequate for developing advanced/academic literacy skills of our students.

In the present paper we describe the consecutive phases - the planning phase, the collection of material, the selection of data, and the construction and arrangement of entries - in the compilation of an English-Polish glossary of lexicographical terms, which is part of a larger dictionary project. In doing so, we address some of the issues that made the compilation procedure methodologically difficult. On theoretical grounds, the main dilemma was whether lexicographical or terminological principles should be followed, inasmuch as they result in conflicting features, i.e. different coverage, organisation and description of data. The most pertinent practical problem that we faced was, on the one hand, the variability of terms in English lexicographical discourse and, on the other one, the incompatibility of English and Polish terminological frameworks. For the glossary to be used successfully in text reception, we thus needed to determine the complex semantic relationships between intralingual terms and, even more importantly, the various levels of equivalence between interlingual terms. The issues discussed here have been illustrated with selected English-Polish contrastive material.

A guarantee of the right of ships of all flags to travel in the Pilawska Strait has become one of Poland's aims as a result of the lack of agreement on the part of the Russian government to open the strait for international shipping. In December 2004, however, a Polish project was presented for an agreement between the Republic of Poland and the government of the Russian Federation concerning shipping in the Vistula Lagoon and through the Pilawska Strait. The project proposes that the Pilawska Strait should be designated an international strait, in which shipping is only subject to Russian law and not to international law. The author of this essay does not agree with the official position of the Polish Ministry for Foreign Affairs in the matter of recognizing the Pilawska Strait as an international strait. He also does not agree with the international legal argument justifying Poland's claim to use the Pilawska Strait and the opening of the Strait to international shipping.

This article may provoke interest in Poland's activity in connection with the potential extraction o f natural wealth from the sea bed. The international concern Interoceanmetal Joint Organization (IOM) was set up in Szczecin in 1987. Poland has been a member from the very beginning of IOM. To this day Poland is involved in conducting exploration of a specific sector. The sector is in the area of Clarion-Clipperton in the Pacific, and it has a surface area of 52,300 km2. Registration as a pioneer investor made research, rather than exploitation, possible (1991). The exploration of the submarine area allocated to Poland became possible in 2000.

The obligation of states to guarantee the sustainable use of the natural resources of the seas and oceans is a result of the regulations of international law. Above all, these emphasize the necessity of linking the process of managing those resources with protection of the marine environment in which they occur. Less attention, however, is paid to the social consequences of not fulfilling the duty to use resources sustainable. The subject of this article is the heterogeneous scope of rights and duties of individual states to use marine resources, dependent on the geographical localization of these resources. Attention will also be given to the central role which is fulfilled, in the context o f the law of the sea, by the whole set of legal principles, according to which states using resources should be guided with the aim of ensuring the sustainable exploitation of those resources.