This paper aims to use the results of linguistic analyses, including corpus studies, and psycholinguistic experiments to present the relation of semantic opposition in terms of the prototype theory of concepts. A synthesis of linguists’ views on the factors defining the prototype of the category of semantic opposition is presented, and an attempt is made to determine the relationship between these factors. The need to distinguish prototypical and canonical examples of the relationship is also indicated. The results of the most important corpus studies concerning the relation of opposition are analysed in order to find ways of delineating the peripheral zones and the boundaries of the relation based on real contexts of use. The particular role of opposition pairs extracted from cohyponymic multi-element sets in forming the boundary areas of the category of opposition is highlighted. It is determined, on the basis of selected studies, which psycholinguistic techniques can provide evidence of the psychological reality of the prototypical nature of the category of semantic opposition, and which may serve as a basis for distinguishing the prototype of the category from the canon. In conclusion, some semantic, corporal, and psycholinguistic criteria are proposed for locating particular examples of the relation within the structure of the category of semantic opposition – that is, conditions for classifying examples as, accordingly: a) belonging to the strict centre of the category, b) lying near the centre, c) located in the peripheral part, or d) forming the fuzzy boundary of the category.

The paper offers an analysis of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production and comprehension of verbal jokes in terms of what relevance theorists refer to as weakly communicated import. While pragmatic analyses of humour emphasize the role of the inferential stages that the audience is intended (or even manipulated, Yus 2016) to go through in processing a joke, the weak communication model presented here focuses on the punch-line effect, exploring the nature of the “cognitive climax” that is created. On this account, a vast array of weakly communicated assumptions, resulting in a cognitive overload effect, rather than incongruity resolution on its own, is identified as the laughter-inducing mechanism underlying verbal humour. The central idea is that universal and culture-specific humour-generating elements in jokes have one quality in common, viz. their potential to cause a cognitive overload effect, which may, and often does, result in amusement. On this approach, what is typically recognized as national or ethnic humour is posited to recruit the same humour-invoking pragmatic mechanisms as in other kinds of jokes, the principal difference lying in the choice of the target being mocked, which must be well-known to the audience for the cognitive overload effect to be brought forth. 

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.