The paper presents a longitudinal study of writing fluency in second language students. The aim was to follow the development of the students’ fluency during a three-year period in which they studied Swedish as a second language. Fifteen Polish university students participated in the study. The analysis shows that fluency develops non-linearly with some peaks in the average developmental curve. Furthermore, we observed both between- and within-individual variability in fluency in text production. The development of fluency is unpredictable and no one subject mirrors in their development the average curve. Individual differences were observed at every step of second language development. The analysis shows that writers who are slow at typing are not automatically less fluent and that subjects who develop more slowly can achieve a high level of fluency in writing. In general, writers who were slower and less fluent at the beginning made the greatest progress in fluency during the three-year period, compared with those who were more skilled with regard to both language and typing, who achieved a certain level of fluency faster than their fellow students.

This article is an attempt to establish the time-frame and relative chronology of the š > s and ö, ü > e, i changes that occurred in south-western Karaim. The sample material used for the present article comes from Halych Karaim handwritten prayer books dating back approximately to the second half of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century, and are written in the Karaim semi-cursive variant of the Hebrew script. The final conclusion of the article is that both changes occurred in the final decades of the 18th century.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the phenomenon of linguistic manipulation in the advertising of nutriments and dietary supplements published in Russian bodybuilding magazines. Advertisers use the persuasive capabilities of the language on its various levels in order to create an effective message. Common manipulative methods in slogans include the use of references to the world of sporting values, the recommendation of the product by sports authorities, and the use of evaluative lexis. Also, short expressive syntactic structures loaded with forms of imperatives have the potential for manipulation.

A comparison of two books (GG; JG), newly published by the Harrassowitz Verlag and concerning history of Oriental (mostly Kalmuck and Chinese) linguistic studies in 19th century Europe is presented in this article, along with an analysis of some information on Bernhard Jülg’s studies and scholarly plans during his stay in Cracow.

Drawing on interactional approaches to comment clauses (Stenström 1994; Povolná 2010), the paper reveals the discourse functions of I mean (Part 1) and you know (Part 2) in the context of police interviews. More specifically, taking into account the socio-pragmatic setting of police-suspect interaction, it highlights the context-dependence and the multifunctionality of these markers based on data from two police interview transcripts. Thus, following the spirit of the study by Fox Tree and Schrock (2002), Part 1 of the analysis demonstrates that while the primary role of I mean is that of “forewarning upcoming adjustments” (Schiffrin 1987), the marker performs interpersonal, turn management, repairing, monitoring and organizing functions. This being the case, the study examines the potential of I meanm to modify the ongoing interaction and stresses its contribution to the coherence of the interviewees’ narratives. Attention is also drawn to the syntactic environment in which I mean occurs as well as to listener responses to I mean and I mean-introduced ideas. Finally, the discussion touches upon the issue of power relations and shows the role which I mean plays in the linguistic manifestation of power in an institutional setting.

The following paper focuses on newspaper live blogs. The aim of the analysis is to investigate the structure and discourse properties of this news format. The analysis examines the basic conventions concerning the form and content of these text types, including structural components of live blogs, multimedia, quoting and linking patterns, as well as discourse strategies used to underline “liveness”, interactivity and evaluation. The analysis proves that the discourse of live blogs constitutes an example of open structure news discourse, and reflects a blending of discourse properties typical of blogs as well as of broadcast and newspaper reporting.

The paper presents and examines -ing formations used in Polish. It also addresses the notion of productivity in morphology and discusses the growing productivity of the English derivational -ing suffix in contemporary Polish. To address the issue of productivity all -ing formations must be divided into foreign loans and derivatives that have been coined in Polish. One of the two forms of analysis of the research material used for the present study is based on the typology of contact-induced innovations; the other involves a synchronic morphological and semantic analysis of -ing formations coined in Polish. A thesis concerning the appearance of English -ing in Polish and its becoming an independent suffix and a productive word-formation rule is proposed.