A specialist in Middle Eastern languages will likely be quick to associate Pol. mamuna ‘an ape-like mythological creature’ with Ar./Pers./Tkc. majmun ‘ape’. It is possible and indeed probable that this name is an Oriental borrowing applied to an ancient native belief, but a closer inspection reveals at least several other possibilities tangled in an ethnolinguistic web of potential conflations and contaminations. This paper presents the ethnographic background and some etymological ideas, though without as yet a definite answer.

The main goal of this paper is to describe some functional and formal similarities in the expression of imperatives and hortatives in various languages which are spoken in the Sakhalin Island. The suggestion is made that such similarities might have been contact-induced language changes that resulted from two common mechanisms: structural (inflectional) borrowing and grammatical accommodation.

The article looks into such features of modern electronic texts as intersemioticity and multimedia nature. Studying these features is essentially a new stage in researching intertextual relations; hence the article first turns to non-electronic texts, presenting on their basis the theoretical grounds of the notions in question, and only then proceeds to electronic texts tracing the evolution of the traditional conception of text. Electronic texts are regarded as multimodal, i.e. resulting from the synthesis of diverse semiotic objects and joining text and media in one syntagm. In order to distinguish the most common combinations of text and media, to explore the reasons why users combine them, and to establish their percentage ratios, the authors have conducted a social and linguistic study, whose results are analyzed in the article.

The study was conducted at the University of Silesia within the group of approximately 100 children from three kindergartens and one primary school where storytelling was applied to teach German. The following paper focuses on the analysis of the applied storytelling technique and gives a detailed description of the results. Of particular importance in the case of the following study is the long-lasting effectiveness of the adopted teaching technique. The article describes how this particular teaching technique has influenced the children’s attitudes towards the target language and culture. It also affords some fresh insights into the process of teaching an FL to children.