The present study – divided into two papers – provides an analysis of the semantics of the Vilamovicean verbal system within a cognitive and grammaticalization framework. On the one hand, the author offers a detailed description of the entire semantic potential of all the verbal constructions available in the language and, on the other, provides an explanation for the senses conveyed by each one of these forms – more specifically, it is demonstrated that the semantic sphere of every gram can be explained and, hence, unified by making use of typologically common evolutionary scenarios, viz. paths. Consequently, the author shows that the entire Vilamovicean verbal system can be modeled as a recursive process of grammaticalisation “waves” whereby older and newer forms evolve along a set of identical paths. This article constitutes the first part of the series. It includes a discussion of methodological issues and an empirical study in which the semantic potentials of all the Vilamovicean verbal grams are determined.

The paper discusses an 18th c. dictionary entitled Linguarum totius orbis Vocabularia comparativa Augustissimae cura collecta (…), which contains the equivalents (in ca. 200 languages and dialects) of more than two hundred Russian entry words. The multilingual counterparts are a transliteration (and at times what might be called a phonetic transcription) in the Russian alphabet. The principal objective of the paper is to describe the French (and Old French!) equivalents of the entry words, at the same time not only indicating the simplifications and inaccuracies, but also the historical value of the recorded forms.

In the modern era the use of English has become very widespread, the language being used more and more by non-native speakers in a variety of contexts. The objective of the paper is to explore the use of the English language as a second and as a foreign language by bilingual Polish-English and Hindi-English speakers in the medium of Computer Mediated Communication, represented in the following study by the social network context, in order to demonstrate differences in the use of the language by the two groups, stemming from the status of English in the two respective circles, the Outer and the Expanding. The particular aspects of analysis include the frequency of the use of English, the length of the English posts and, notably, the phenomenon of code-switching, its typology and the functions which the respective languages typically perform in the switched elements.

The paper discusses a little known manuscript dictionary dating from the beginning of the 18th c. that is stored in the manuscript division of the Jagiellonian Library (Ms.Slav. Qu. 28 Lexicon slavo-rutenicum). In actual fact we are dealing with a trilingual (East) Slavic-Latin-German dictionary, which is unfinished (barely reaching the end of letter “o”), and consists of 746 pages in quarto format. The author is thought to be French polyglot and orientalist, Mathurin Veyssière de La Croze. The primary objective of the paper is to discuss the typological-etymological and functional-stylistic typology of the East Slavic vocabulary included in the analysed lexicon. A preliminary overview of the Slavic lexis in the Slavic-Ruthenian Lexicon suggests that the dictionary of the past is worth publishing, so it would become available to a broader group studying the history of East Slavic languages.

This article discusses the place of modality as a pragmalinguistic phenomenon in communication and the implications of such an investigation for contrastive discourse analysis. It proposes an alternative three-dimensional model of modality, the construction of which is possible through the addition of the affective load of an utterance as a separate variable related to speech modalisation and the assumption that dynamic modality is, in fact, correlated with deontic modality, at least on a prepositional level. The article also discusses the problems when contrastively analysing modality realisation. It highlights that the large number of cross-cultural nuances found in modal devices reflects the enormity of analytic difficulties with which a researcher is likely to be faced.

The Yukaghir language as a member of the Nostratic family of languages

The article deals with the treatment of Yukaghir languages (Tundra-Y., Kolyma-Y., Chuvan, Omok) by several prominent Nostraticists (H. Pedersen, V. M. Illič-Svityč, J. H. Greenberg, A. R. Bomhard, K. H. Menges, V. Blažek, A. B. Dolgopol’skij). The author gives an overview on their attempts of different quality to relate the Yukaghir languages with the Nostratic family and sketches some omnicomparativists’ hypothesises on macro-families such as “Uralo-Yukaghir” or “Eurasiatic”.