The objective of the paper is to argue against a common denotation for Walenty Wróbel's sixteenth-century translation of the Psalter into Polish and its printed version prepared by Andrzej Glaber. It is customary to treat Glaber's interventions into Wróbel's rendition as purely editorial and, in effect, consider the printed version of the Żołtarz to be the work of Wróbel. On the basis of Glaber's treatment of one syntactic phenomenon (the placement of the possessive pronoun in an NP), the paper shows that Glaber's involvement into Wróbel's text far exceeds what Glaber is usually credited with. Therefore, the paper claims that the two works –the manuscript and its printed edition –should be classified and discussed as distinct productions.

The article refers briefly to the development, over the last half-century, of the sub-discipline of literary linguistics called literary semantics in anglophone tradition (mostly British), pointing out its roots in other scholarly paradigms (among others Russian formalism and the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics) and its close connection with cognitive poetics. The author mentions also a development of studies on artistic language in contemporary Polish linguistic theorizing. Conceived by Trevor Eaton as a broad linguistic approach to literary texts, interdisciplinary in nature, literary semantics – in a natural way – enters into dialogue with translation studies in the area of research called comparative stylistics. The author discusses the notion of semantic dominant, introduced into linguistics by Roman Jakobson in 1976 and into the Polish critical theory of translation by Stanisław Barańczak (2004) to designate the most salient element of the poem’s complex structure, acting as a clue to its interpretation and translation. The examples provided by Barańczak, voiced as metalinguistic comments on the construal of his own translations of selected English poems as well as critical evaluation of other translators’ output, lead us to the conclusion that the concept of semantic dominant should be re-named stylistic dominant, the term that better reflects a peculiar characteristic of a multi-level and often multimodal nature of meaning in poetic texts (plurisignation, after Wheelwright 1954/1968). What’s more, we should talk about sets of stylistic dominants (rather than their single occurrences) that act as keys to complex semantics of poetry. An important dominant remains figuration (troping in particular) but the orchestration of the poem (the totality of its phonetics and versification) and often its graphic layout are of no less import in meaning construction.

Akin to stereotype, gossip is a transmission mechanism which fulfils persuasive functions, but which does not seek to answer questions about the genuineness of the transmitted information or its anchoring in reality other than the reality created during the communication process (Wagner 2006: 39). Such is also the case with online celebrity gossip, in the case of which writers recruit various strategies to vary the epistemic strength of their assessments and to claim or disclaim responsibility for the accuracy of the provided information. Given the foregoing, basing on English and Polish linguistic material, this article investigates elements of epistemological positioning (Bednarek 2006) which underlie the construction of online celebrity news in two languages lacking grammaticalised systems of evidentiality. To this end, the study outlines the main strategies related to the communication of knowledge and identifies the resources used for the construal of (un)certainty in this type of discourse. The sources of evidence analysed in the study include: ‘Perception/Inference,’ ‘General knowledge,’ ‘Proof,’ ‘Obviousness,’ ‘Unspecified,’ ‘Hearsay’ and ‘Mindsay,’ based on which diverse English and Polish EP markers are discussed. As the findings expose, rather than offer solid evidence, the authors of both sets of articles rely chiefly on perception, inference and hearsay, showing little epistemic commitment and decreasing the informative value of their reports.