The article deals with French words coming from Latin diminutives. The corpus, based mainly on the Reino Hakamies’ work (Étude sur l’origine et l’évolution du diminutif latin et sa survie dans les langues romanes, Helsinki, 1951) that has been verified and completed, includes 184 terms. It is shown that diminutives lose their original meaning, taking the sense of the primitive which has not survived (e.g. soleil ‘sun’ ← *sōlĭcŭlus, aiguille ‘needle’ ← *acūcŭla, while sōl and acŭs → ø). Sometimes they have been preserved next to the primitives, but with a particular meaning (e.g. chapelle ‘chapel’ ← cappella, chapeau ‘hat’ ← cappellus, while cappa → chap(p)e ‘cloak’). The purpose of the article is to point out some examples of Latin diminutives inherited in French and to characterise not only their historical development from the semantic and formal point of view, but also the evolution of their non-diminutive primitives.

In language, a metaphor has an ambiguous status. On one hand, it is considered to be a free speech procedure, largely ornamental, resulting from a random assembly of words, not assisted by use, and therefore exposed to interpretation and ambiguity. Consequently, its presence in specialized languages, governed since Wüster approach by requirements of discourse neutrality, objectivity and precision, would seem to be inappropriate. On the other hand, the metaphor is recognized as an effective neological process that contributes to lexical enrichment; even more, in light of recent cognitive studies, it is regarded as element which guides our perception of the world, structures our thinking and helps to conceptualize unknown areas. Reflection on the role of terms which take the form of metaphors, the ones that participate in the denomination of concepts, list its classes and examine semantic motivation in metaphorization process, has dominated the analysis undertaken in this paper; analysis, the subject of which was the French and Polish terminology in the field of the individual retirement plans.

The article deals with the reduplications in Latin and in Romance languages. While in Latin there were only reduplications of monosyllables, Romance languages have a lot of polysyllabic (mostly disyllabic) reduplications. This development could arise due to a bigger expressivity of vulgar Latin mixed with vernacular languages and to their contacts with other languages: Germanic (mostly English and German), Celtic, Slavic, Turkic and Hungarian, in which the polysyllabic reduplication is the most common.

The aim of this article is manifold: first, to present a fragment of a work little or nothing known in the Hispanic world: Waaren-Lexicon in zwölf Sprachen by Philipp Andreas Nemnich, published in Hamburg in 1797. Then, to analyze a lexical group documented there (names of precious and semiprecious stones) in order to deepen knowledge of the Spanish lexicon of the time. Finally, to encourage all interested in the history of Spanish lexicon to discover the sources hitherto investigated for being them a very promising source of new linguistic findings.

The purpose of this study is to show the basic semantic as well syntactic similarities and differences of predicates of psych verbs in Spanish and Polish.