The study compares educated Poznań speech on the basis of a study byWitaszek-Samborska (1985, 1986) and a corpus compiled thirty years later. Thefeatures of Poznań speech, examined on 14 speakers from the corpus, include:voicing of obstruents before heterolexical sonorants (okszyg emocji), realizationof word-final ‹-ą› as [-ɔm] (idom tom drogom), realization of /stʂ tʂ dʐ/ as /ʂt͡ʂ t͡ʂ d͡ʐ/ (szczelać), the presence of the velar nasal [ŋ] before a heteromorphemic velarplosive /k/ (okienko), realization of word-final ‹-ej› as /-i(j)/ or /-ɨ(j)/ (lepi(j)), presenceof prothetic [w] before word-initial /ɔ/ (łojciec), presence of voiced /v/ in clusterswith preceding voiceless consonants (trwały), and realization of ‹-śmy› as [ʑmɨ](słyszelˈiśmy). The results suggest a change in Poznań speech and point towardsdialect levelling.

In many American films actors and actresses, native speakers of English who impersonate foreign characters, make an attempt to speak English with a foreign accent. The present paper is the first attempt at analyzing imitated Polish-accented English in two well-known Hollywood productions. It examines, compares and assesses the most salient phonetic properties of the accents employed by two American stars: Meryl Streep appearing as Zofia Zawistowska in Sophie’s Choice(1982) and Jessica Chastain playing the role of Antonina Żabińska in The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017). The major goal, however, is to study the perception of the two accents in order to establish whether they can be regarded as cases of genuine Polish-English speech. The analysis is carried out by means of a three-step procedure. First, a list of typical features of a Polish accent in English is established in consultation with several specialists in Polish English pronunciation. Next, both actresses’ accents are examined with regard to these properties. In the third stage their speech and two samples of a genuine Polish-English accent are assessed by a group of 100 participants (66 Polish students and 34 native speakers of English) in a perception study. The obtained results show that M. Streep’s accent is more accurate and contains more features of authentic Polish English than J. Chastain’s, which is reflected in the Polish listeners’ credibility judgements. Nevertheless, native English listeners view the two actresses’ accents as Polish to a similar extent.

The paper, from the field of broadly conceived text studies, focuses on those aspects of the visual arts that bear a storytelling potential, on analogy to verbal texts. My interest lies mainly in the field of artistic semiotics, that is in the texts marked with aesthetic qualities. The attention will go mainly to figural painting and sculpture due to their potential to show events as evolving in time. Thus, I intend to consider the manner in which narrativization as a widely recognized cognitive propensity of the human mind to impose structure upon reality and best realized in verbal storytelling is applicable to pictorial representations and how it takes part in the construction of visual possible worlds/visual text worlds. This article is thus a contribution to semiotic research in intermediality and transmediality in interart relations.

The paper collects some Yiddish words which do not lend themselves to easy translation and investigates the way they are rendered into Japanese. This is done with the example of the 1999 Japanese translation of Yitsk hok Katsenelson’s Song of the murdered Jewish people. Japanese renderings of selected fifteen lexemes reflecting the culture, religion and everyday life of the Yiddish speakers are gathered, analyzed as for their structure and compared with their German, English, Spanish, French, Polish and Russian counterparts.

Section 9 deals with variation, i.e. words that are used in different combinations, section 10 with the sequence of the elements and possible reasons for the sequence (phonologic, semantic, translational), and section 11 with the relation to Lydgate’s Latin source. Section 12 traces Lydgate’s relation to Chaucer: It is well known that Lydgate was a Chaucerian, i.e. an admirer and follower of Chaucer, but perhaps not so well known that he also used many binomials which Chaucer had used. Section 13 lists the binomials that can be regarded as formulaic, and section 14 singles out a pair of binomials where the first binomial is apparently learned, while the second states the same fact in more popular terms. Section 15 provides a conclusion, and Appendix I lists all binomials that occur at the beginning of Lydgate’s Troy Book. The figure in Appendix II shows the Primum Mobile and the seat of God according to the Medieval world picture (as discussed in section 14).

Although academic book reviews have been extensively discussed in a number of languages and in terms of a variety of factors, there is at least one point that has not yet been taken into consideration, namely the authorship factor (i.e. the number of the academic book authors) and its possible influence on evaluative language of the review. This assumption has given rise to the present study, which centres on a corpus-based analysis of one hundred linguistic book reviews with a half written by a single author and the other fifty being a collection of more than two authors. The investigation rests on Giannoni’s (2010) typology of academic values, from which three values, i.e. goodness, novelty and relevance and their lexical evaluative markers have been subjected to manual and automatic analyses with the aim to comparing and contrasting variation in value distribution in two corpora. Furthermore, the overall research findings have been presented in the form of the chi-square test in order to determine whether there exists any statistical significance between the selected categorical variables, and comment on accordingly.