In the present paper I analyse propositions functioning in linguistics from the point of view of the criteria of truth imposed on the propositions within the so-called correspondence theory of truth, coherence theory of truth, and pragmatic theory of truth in its sociological version. There exists in linguistic circulation a certain group of propositions which on some assumptions are in agreement with Tarski’s explication. The truth of each sentence from the second group can be predicated only when they are juxtaposed with sentences belonging to a concrete system of propositions. The analysed sentence will be recognised as false in a different system. Some systems of sentences may recognise the criteria of evaluation as inadequate, they are, however, not sufficiently sharp so as to enable to make the final decision about the supremacy of one concrete system of sentences over the others. In linguistics there also exist many sentences which are true in linguists’ view, although they are not coherent with a certain system of sentences – the propositions belonging to this system may lead to different conclusions. It is the last group of sentences that in the eyes of postmodernists constitutes an argument supporting the thesis that in science (particularly in the humanities) we deal only with accumulating narratives. The major objective of this paper is, however, to prove that the propositions which belong to the third group, although frequent in linguistics, do not belong to its centre – they are only a complement of what may be described by the name of linguistic discourse.

The present paper is devoted to the analysis of five arbitrarily selected Spanish etymological doublets in terms of their origin, i.e. the appearance of their constitutional elements in the language: of the learned word (cultismo) and the popular word (palabra popular), and of the semantic changes that arise by comparing the meaning of the Latin etymon with the contemporary meaning of the lexemes. The aim of the paper is to confront the commonly accepted theories on the issue of doublets (the later dating of the learned term and its more abstract meaning) with concrete lexical material. The analysis, although limited by space, shows that learned words are not infrequently contemporary with the popular words, their meaning is not always more abstract, almost all the meanings of the Spanish lexemes are connected with the meaning of Latin words, and their repartition is ruled by a more general principle of the limited number of meanings of the borrowed words.

The paper argues in favour of understanding a certain number of runic inscriptions carved on stones as culture-dependent instances of Scandinavian proto-books, for they fulfill precisely the same functions as contemporary books.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the phenomenon of the allomorphism of the Italian indefinite pronoun nessun and its lack in its French equivalent aucun. Whereas the former appears in the variant forms nessun / nessuno, the latter remains unchanged irrespective of the syntactic function it performs. Having analysed the phonological hypothesis, the author attempts to demonstrate that the alternation is not exclusively limited to phonological conditions, but is also caused by syntactic aspects: the autonomy of the full form and the dependence of the shorter form. It is also hypothesised here that the lack of the form *auque in contemporary French stems from the very nature of the negation process of which the form aucun is an exponent.

The paper reviews the description of the pronunciation of Modern Icelandic as contained in Alexander J. Ellis’ influential treatise on early English pronunciation. This description, first ever attempted in English, is shown to be remarkably accurate in recording phonetic detail even if the system of transcription devised by its author is, from today’s perspective cumbersome and inefficient. The phonetic and phonological regularities contained in the description are reviewed and compared with the views found in contemporary studies of Icelandic. Flaws of the description are seen as basically due to the atomistic and letter-based nature of the approach. Ellis’ concern with the relevance of the Modern Icelandic phonetics for Old English and the history of English in general is taken to reflect his conviction about the universality of the mechanisms of phonological change.

Although African territories constituted, for instance in the 19th c., nearly a half of the Ottoman empire, little attention has been paid to the Ottoman Turkic and other Turkic influences (e.g. the Mamluk-Kipchak ones) in that particular region, and if any, then rather their influence on the Arabic dialects and rarely on Swahili. Yet, it appears to be a very rewarding area of study, as is for instance indicated by the fact that, among others, one can come across mixed Arabic-African languages in Africa, but with a Turkic name, e.g. Turki ~ Turku in Chad or Bimbaši-Arabic (< Ottoman T. binbašı ‘major’) in southern Sudan and in northern Uganda. The present paper reports on the author’s work on the influence of the Turkic languages on the Amharic language. The results of these studies have at present a partly working character, as this is the first work in the world devoted to this subject. Among others, the author discusses the following issues: [1] the history of Ottoman-Amharic contacts; [2] the problems with defining the concept of the “Ottoman Turkic word”; [3] the possible ways in which Turkic vocabulary penetrated the Amharic language; [4] the principles of collecting the lexical material – altogether ca. 300 items – both from the printed sources and the field work in Ethiopia; [5] the division into semantic categories according to the model by A. Kannisto (1925) and a commentary to the obtained results.

The paper presents a selected lexical material concerning urbonyms of the city of Eskişehir in Turkey. Examples of names of all the districts (77), selected communication highways (941) as well as commercial and service centres (775) are analysed. The work uses the material collected in the course of the author’s fieldwork and from cartographic sources. In each of the three groups of urbonyms a division into types of the name structures as well as the semantic and grammatical distinction of components of those names were made. For each urbonym a translation into Spanish was suggested. Within each of the groups a classification into names stemming from proper names and from common names was introduced. The concluding remarks contain the interpretation of the data as well as an outline of the naming tendencies within the Turkish urban toponymy.

The Old (eighth cent.) and Classical (ninth–twelfth cent.) Japanese verbal noun, in contemporary Japan called ku gohō , was formed by means of a word-final suffix which can be presented in the general shape of -((u)r)aku / -ke1ku. Having a nominalising function, the morpheme transformed verbs and adjectives into action or state nouns of a wide spectrum of meanings: ‘doing something / being something’, ‘the fact that (he) does / is’, ‘what (he) does’, which – if accompanied by a suitable postposition – could also serve as predicates in subordinate clauses.
The nouns under consideration fell into disuse before the mid Classical period, only a dozen or so having survived up to the present day as petrified derivatives. The present article aims to examine the productivity of the suffix in some of the oldest extant texts, as well as the details of its disappearance.
In the “Man’yōshū” (after 771) the verbal noun is very frequent, combining both with verbs (of virtually all conjugations) and with adjectives, and showing no sign of restriction by any word-non-final suffix. In the fifth book alone, which comprises 114 poems, it appears as many as fifteen times – this amounts to an average of one form per 7.6 poems, and confirms the full vitality of the noun in the eighth century.
The “Taketori monogatari” (ninth / tenth cent.) also attests the morpheme in question rather abundantly, but added to three verbs only and without any word-non-final suffix interposed. All thirty-three occurrences are used to introduce quotations, often coupled with another form of the same verb which closes the direct speech – a pattern common in later texts too.
In the “Ise monogatari” (early tenth cent.) the verbal noun appears fifteen times, almost exclusively in the verse portions, and is invariably, with the exception of two fossils, represented by either of the following constructions: -(a)n-aku ni ‘since / when / although (he) does not’ – ten times, or -(a)m-aku fosi- ‘(he) wishes to’ – three times.
The first imperial anthology of poetry, “Kokin (waka) shū” (905–914), despite its relative variegation of the noun under discussion, is but a shadow of the “Man’yōshū”’s splendour, and most of these forms should rather be regarded as linguistic relics. In the beginning five books, constituting one fourth of the whole and comprising 313 poems, one finds the suffix sixteen times, but the forms’ absolute homogeneity is more than striking. Ki no Tsurayuki in his “Tosa nikki” (around 935) used the said morpheme with economy, adhering to the established derivatives. One combination, however, namely if-ik-er-akuhere is what she said,’ stands out as long unseen and was perhaps taken over from some older text. The diary contains eight examples of the suffix altogether. Murasaki Shikibu’s “Genji monogatari” (around 1004–1011) seems an excellent touchstone of the productivity of the verbal noun at that time, due to both its considerable size and the profusion of dialogues. Unfortunately, in the novel’s fifty-four lengthy chapters the suffix can be located merely three times, always being a part of some petrified form. Thus, any further quest becomes futile – the verbal noun must be pronounced dead. On the basis of the above material, the frequency of the suffix’s occurrence in the selected Old and Classical Japanese texts (or their parts) can be summarised in the table presented in paragraph 5, where the number of pages (A) and the number of attested forms (B) are brought together to show the average number of forms per one hundred pages ((A / B) × 100). The process of the disappearance clearly divides into three phases:
– until the end of the eighth century: virtually unlimited productivity and common use (at least in poetry; for prose appropriate texts are missing),
– ninth and tenth centuries: usage mainly restricted to the verbs of speech (in prose) and to the negative construction -(a)n-aku ni (in poetry); the frequency decreases slowly but steadily,
– since the early eleventh century: only lexicalised derivatives persist.
From the eleventh century on, it is solely the form if-aku (vel sim.) ‘here is what (he) says / said’, introducing a quotation, that still appears quite often in texts, although some other form of a verb of speech is used to close the sentence too. This is probably to be explained in part by the relative attractiveness of such a pleonastic construction, which can be observed in languages of different types: Classical Mongolian, Old Turkic, as well as Old Polish. With time, however, even this one lost its popularity. Nevertheless, despite the thousand years that have elapsed since the extinction of the verbal noun, over a dozen of its relics are still encountered in Modern Japanese – amazingly strong resistance indeed.

In the sixth volume of the Karaim journal Karaj Awazy Aleksander Mardkowicz (1875–1944) prepared a six page long article containing reminiscences of the loft in kenesa in Łuck (Mardkowicz 1933b) and a transcription of seven letters found there (Mardkowicz 1933a). Detailed comparison of five of those manuscripts with their transcriptions (we do not know what happened to the remaining two manuscripts) shows that Mardkowicz’s readings are not free from certain shortcomings and errors. Besides a few obvious printing errors, one can find not only erroneous readings, but also a considerable number of changes that had been made intentionally, fragments that had been passed over, translations of Hebrew fragments that had not been noted, and words that exhibited evident Troki or Crimean Karaim phonetic features but which had been transcribed in such a way as though they had been written in Łuck Karaim. The reason for these intentional amendments to the text of the original manuscripts can probably be ascribed to the fact that Mardkowicz – who played a vital role in the Karaim language purism movement – tended to use “normative Karaim” in his journal, even at the price of modifying the content of the letters. The examples of these misrepresentations have been grouped into the following categories: 1) intentional amendments concerning phonetic, morphologic and phonotactic features and dialectal affiliation of the word forms; 2) erroneous readings of Karaim words and Hebrew abbreviations and, finally, 3) translating Hebrew fragments without noting it. The article does not deliver a full critical edition of the manuscripts, as this is going to be the subject of another, much more comprehensive, study, where the facsimiles of the letters will also be published.

Out of the two forms of genitive plural of the Ukrainian noun stat't'a ‘article’, namely stattej and statej, the former has been assumed to be purely Ukrainian, whereas the latter a Russified one. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the relationship is not necessarily as simple, moreover, that such an interpretation does not altogether answer the question of why only the form of genitive plural, and why of this very word, would have become the object of a stronger Russification.

The article aims to contribute a genre-based description of the realisation of Concession in EU judicial discourse. The analysis has been carried out on a corpus of judgments issued by the EU court of last instance, i.e. the European Court of Justice with the intention to identify the patterns and markers of Concession in judicial argumentation. In the analysis the author used the concept of Concession developed by Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson (1999, 2000) following the assumptions underlying Interactional Linguistics. The results revealed the most frequent patterns and markers of Concession in judicial discourse. At the same time, they led the author to the conclusion that the interactional model of Concession developed for analysing the spoken mode of language may successfully be applied in the examination of written data.

The opposition ptw'si" ojrqhv (eujqei'a) / ptwvsei" plavgiai, which with time began to express the contrast between the nominative and the oblique cases (casus rectus – casus obliqui) in the grammatical tradition, first appeared in the Greek reflection on language most probably in the circle of the Stoic doctrine, where it was used to determine the meanings of nouns perceived from the point of view of their constituting elements of the predicative-argumentative structures which formed propositions (ajxiwvmata). What justifies this statement is the fact that in the framework of the Stoic dialectics concepts denoted by terms ojrqhv ptw'si" and plavgiai ptwvsei" were unambiguously situated in the sphere of the linguistically expressed content (ta; shmainovmena, ta; lektav) and used consistently in connection with the concept of kathgovrhma (‘predicate’), that is the predicative content expressed by the verb. The analysis of the preserved records demonstrates that the term ojrqh; ptw'si" had a meaning of the subjective predicate argument (disregarding the value of the case of the noun which denoted it), whereas ptwvsei" plavgiai had the meaning of the non-subjective arguments implied by multi-argument predicates. Therefore, in the Stoic dialectics the opposition ojrqh; ptw'si" / plavgiai ptwvsei" reflected the hierarchical differentiation of the status of the content expressed by the nouns perceived as arguments of the predicate within the proposition. These terms gained the meaning of the nominative and the oblique cases, respectively, only in the circle of Hellenistic philologists, whose research and analyses were to a greater extent focused on the formal side of linguistic signs (words). Those scholars used the terminological apparatus of the Stoic school, while introducing there some vital modifications, however. With reference to the issue which interests us here, the modification consisted in the identification
of the Stoic ojrqh; ptw'si" with its most frequent language exponent, i.e. the noun in the nominative, and following the same principle, of the Stoic plavgiai ptwvsei" with nouns in the oblique cases. The Hellenistic philological school should probably also be ascribed the introduction of the term eujqei'a ptw'si" as a name of the nominative synonymous with ojrqh; ptw'si", as there are no sufficient premises on which to attribute the use of the adjective eujquv" as an index of that case already to Aristotle.

Contrary to what the title of the paper implies, the author does not limit himself to the presentation of the current state of research on Phrygian, but also provides his own interpretations and evaluations in many places. The very extensive list of references attached will certainly prove to be useful to the reader interested in the subject analysed.