The purpose of this paper is to investigate some of the formal characteristics of the genre of the short text message, with a special focus on the concept of language economy, which typically underlies the use of this mode of communication. The subject of analysis are text messages in two languages, English and Polish, which are compared in terms of the methods of text shortening used by the two language systems. The elements studied include word clippings, vowel deletion, word-letter substitution, word-number substitu­tion, spelling simplification, and pronoun deletion. The aim is to establish the preferred options in the two languages and identify reasons for such choices.

The article discusses the results of a longitudinal study of how modality, as an aspect of spoken discourse competence of selected thirteen advanced students of English, developed throughout their three-year English as a Foreign Language tertiary education. The study investigated possible factors determining the development of three aspects of modality: (1) epistemic modality, (2) specific modality, that is those modality expressions that are both characteristic of natural English discourse or are underrepresented in L2 discourse, and (3) modality diversity. The analysis was carried out in relation to a number of variables, including two reference levels, one represented in English native discourse and the other observed in teacher talk in actual Practical English classes, language type exposure, as registered by the subjects of the study on a weekly basis.

The following short article deals with an unpublished comment W. Bang wrote on a passage from “Des Minnesangs Frühling”. Bang was sending this short note for a journal edited by E. Schröder who used it for his own comment of the same passage but without referring to Bang.

Contemporary text linguistics once again faces the necessity to ask itself a question about the object of its study. The reason for it is the existence of new definitions of text in which text is understood as a process and not as a product, as well as the developing studies of discourse and its social, political, cultural, and ideological determinants. In the present article I attempt to defend the traditional understanding of text as a product, not at the same time negating the necessity of studying communicative and pragmatic processes of discourse determinants. In order to achieve this I use three concepts which, when treated as different aspects of the same phenomenon, may help to grasp the complex object of text linguistics, which is text treated holistically as an integral phenomenon generated in the process of language communication embedded in a broad cultural context. These three concepts which I treat as a unity, and at the same time as three aspects of defining the object of text linguistics are: text, utterance, and discourse.

After endeavouring to examine the grammatical descriptions published in the literature to date and to reconstruct the sound system of the south-western dialect of Karaim as it was presented in the literature, it can certainly be concluded that the matter is far from clear. This is for the simple reason that these works contradict each other at various points. The reason for such discrepancies should be sought in the historical and linguistic backgrounds of the two main centres of the south-western Karaim population, i.e. Lutsk and Halich. Even though these two centres were always in close communication with one another, and the language that was spoken in them originates beyond any doubt from one common root, they remained for centuries under slightly different linguistic influences as a result of the Slavonic languages surrounding them. The present paper aims to present and, where possible, clarify the differences which follow from the studies on the Karaim sound system we have at our disposal. An attempt is also made to identify some differences between the Lutsk and Halich subdialects of south-western Karaim, and explain their origin. Since the grammatical descriptions we are dealing with here and the written sources we are able to work with concern the end of the first half of the 19th century at the earliest, the time scale of our interest is limited to the second half of the 19th and the first four decades of the 20th century.
 

The problem of the origin of the Sabellic perfects (in the older literature called Oscan-Umbrian) has been discussed at length very often in Indo-European linguistics ever since the 19th century and the monumental work of Robert von Planta (1892–1897). Still, to this very day it remains a mystery. Various hypotheses have been proposed but none of them explained everything clearly and without problems. Especially intriguing is the fact that the multiple formations of the perfect found in Sabellic languages (reduplicated, simple, -f-, -tt- and -nky-perfects) perform essentially the same function of the preterite tense, being the syncretism of both the Proto-Indo-European aorist and perfect, similarly as in Latin.
In the present article the author seeks to present the compelling hypotheses of the origin of the formations of the perfect in the Sabellic languages, evaluate them according to their supposed probability and present the most probable solution to the problem. The Sabellic perfects are classified into groups and each group is discussed as to its origin and development with the Indo-European background in mind. This is followed by some reconstructions underlying the attested forms. The Sabellic formations treated in this article are the reduplicated perfect, long-vowel perfect, s-perfect, simple perfect, -f-perfect, -tt-perfect, -k-perfect, -nky-perfect and the Sabellic future perfect with the characteristic -us- suffix. The discussion is closed by conclusions and the appendix with the complete list of the attested forms of the perfect.

Our article presents not just a review of the traditional month names in the Chulym Turkic dialects, but also its analysis from a lexical, etymological, semantic and ethnographic point of view.

The paper deals with the orthographic cluster ‹ggw› in Gothic and the question if it denoted both /ngw/ and /ggw/ or only the former. The paper concludes that internal evidence only points to /ngw/ and that external evidence cannot be used to support double pronunciation of the cluster.
 

This paper argues that automatic phonetic comparison will only return true results if the languages in question have similar and comparably lenient phonologies. In the situation where their phonologies are incompatible and / or restrictive, linguistic knowledge of both of them is necessary to obtain results matching human perception. Whilst the case is mainly exemplified by Levenshtein distance and Russian loanwords in Dolgan, the conclusion is also applicable to the approach as a whole.

Even if the derivation of the meaning ‘scamp, scallywag, imp’ < ‘will-o’-the-wisp’ is generally imaginable (albeit not self-evident) it is assumed here that this change is actually based on addition of a foreign meaning to a German one, rather than on semantic evolution.

Morphological categories of Siberian Turkic numerals are particularly complex and therefore deemed to be especially advantageous to areal investigations. The aim of this paper is to see whether (at least some of) the suffixes of collective numerals can readily be used as isogloss connecting Yakut and Dolgan with Tuvinian and Tofalar or, maybe, also some other Turkic languages.

The paper deals with the identification of proverbs in a literary text, which is believed to be the initial stage in the analysis of paremias in literary context and part and parcel of any paremiostylitic analysis. Proverbs manifest themselves in what the author calls a paremic locus. Paremias are present in a text on the formal level, where a particular proverb is signalled by its structure, either canonical or modified. Proverbs can be identified as well on the semantic plane, although in this case their presence is impossible to ascertain in objective terms. The author analyses the ten novels by Salman Rushdie, which all provide ample evidence of paremic loci.

The study concentrates on the phenomenon of user-generated content on the internet. The article presents an introductory analysis of various rhetorical strategies used by the authors of commentaries on one of the popular user-contributory sites, i.e. www.iReport.com. The analysis of this site shows that there exists a range of diverse means of expression used by the enthusiasts of broadcasting online, involving the submission of written articles, live video commentaries, audio files and cartoons. The study shows that users shape the features of the content in different manners and resort to the use of a variety of rhetorical devices. To the main properties of discourse belong personalization, interactivity, use of figurative and vivid language.

Both cognitive linguists and relevance theorists are developing original approaches to metaphor. Both shed new light on old debates and suggest fruitful directions for research. Although there has so far been little interaction between the two approaches, Raymond Gibbs and Markus Tendahl (2006, 2008) have recently begun to compare them and consider how they might be combined. This paper is intended as a contribution to that debate. After outlining some parallels and differences between the two approaches, I will discuss how they might fit together to give a fuller picture of the role of metaphor in language and thought.