Alicja Witalisz

In recent decades, Polish has experienced an unprecedented influx of English-sourced borrowings, both overt (loanwords) and covert (calques). This linguistic influence echoes the social, technological, environmental and ideological transformations, with these changes reflected in the Polish lexicon. The paper describes a lexicographic project aimed at updating the Słownik zapożyczeń angielskich w polszczyźnie (A Dictionary of Anglicisms in Polish) that was published in 2010. We discuss the theoretical assumptions, the content and the sources of the data for a new, corpus-based dictionary that is in the making, and illustrate the lexicographic solutions we adopted with regard to both well-established and the most recent direct and indirect Anglicisms. We also address the issue of the frequency and the usage of the latter in present-day Polish.

While electronic corpora may not seem adequate sources for anglicisms retrieval, since despite promising attempts they still lack readily available and efficient tools for foreign loans identification, they are indispensable in a systematic verification of the use of preidentified loans. The article offers an assessment of an electronic corpus of Polish in reference to its usefulness for the study of English loans. Though we test a selected corpus and its tools, and use Polish anglicisms as exemplifications, the findings presented in the article pertain to other large corpora and anglicisms in other languages. Corpus tools allow for a multidimensional analysis of loans, yet they fail to meet the requirements of more in-depth analyses of anglicisms, related to their semantics and structure. The limitations of corpora tools will be illustrated with authentic attempted-but-failed corpus searches.

While English-Polish language contact results chiefly in English lexical loans, the influence of English on Polish in recent decades has not been limited to lexis and semantics. English penetrates deep into the structural patterns of Polish, and English N+N compound loanwords and loanblends become models for Polish structural neologisms, whose coining may be seen as a violation of native word-formation rules or, at best, as the boosting of a native potential yet non-productive word-formation pattern. It is argued in the article that the increasing productivity of the word-formation rule for deriving right-headed interfixless N+N compounds in Polish is a by-product of intensive lexical borrowing from English. The article explains the mechanism that is responsible for the contact-induced increased productivity (or perhaps the adoption) of a word-formation rule in the recipient language and illustrates it with corpus-sourced material. Most of the newly coined contact-induced N+N formations in Polish are hybrid creations formed in series by analogy to English structural models. The identified formal features of the analysed N+N compounds place them outside of the traditionally recognized types of Polish compounds.

The paper examines the different ways in which English linguistic material is borrowed and adapted by two varieties of Polish, Standard Polish spoken in Poland and American Polish used by the Polish diaspora in the US. The aim of the study is to compare the factors that determine the type and range of loans in both varieties of Polish. The comparison of the ways in which Standard and American Polishes are influenced and shaped by English embraces three main areas: 1) types of loans as products of the borrowing process (such as loanwords, semantic loans, loan translations, syntactic calques, etc.), 2) adaptation of loanwords with reference to phonological, graphic, morphological and semantic adaptation, and 3) semantic fields that are most heavily affected by the borrowing process. The findings of the analysis help to identify the reasons for the discrepancies in the treatment of the English language material in the two varieties of Polish.

Didżej and didżejować appeared in Polish due to language contact and loanword assimilation processes; the former is the English noun DJ in graphic disguise, the latter is a Polish verbal derivative that conceals the English etymon. The article focuses on discussing and exemplifying the multiple ways in which English acronyms and alphabetisms are assimilated and integrated in the Polish lexical and grammatical systems. Part 1 of the article concerns loanword adaptation processes that have been identified for English lexical loans in several European languages. The linguistic outcomes of loanword adaptation processes, which both occur during the borrowing process and follow it, serve to support an observation that intensive lexical borrowing from English is a change-provoking and development-motivating process that leads to linguistic diversity rather than linguistic homogeneity. An illustration of contact-induced linguistic diversity with corpus-driven data is preceded with a brief discussion of English abbreviations, which, in Part 2, are contrasted with their “polonized” versions that undergo formal, semantic and pragmatic changes in the recipient language.

Didżej and didżejować appeared in Polish due to language contact and loanword assimilation processes; the former is the English noun DJ in graphic disguise, the latter is a Polish verbal derivative that conceals the English etymon. The article focuses on discussing and exemplifying the multiple ways in which English acronyms and alphabetisms are assimilated and integrated in the Polish lexical and grammatical systems. Part 1 of the article discusses loanword adaptation processes that have been identified for English lexical loans in several European languages. The linguistic outcomes of loanword adaptation processes, which both occur during the borrowing process and follow it, serve to support an observation that intensive lexical borrowing from English is a change-provoking and development-motivating process that leads to linguistic diversity rather than linguistic homogeneity. An illustration of contact-induced linguistic diversity with corpus-driven data is preceded with a brief discussion of English abbreviations, which, in Part 2, are contrasted with their “polonized” versions that undergo formal, semantic and pragmatic changes in the recipient language.

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.