This paper reports the results of an acoustic study concerned with deletion of intervocalic [w] in contemporary Polish. The data for analysis were obtained by asking twenty monolingual native speakers of Polish, ten males and ten females, to tell the story of  a film or a book whose protagonist was female. The results revealed that approximately 25% of the sound combinations in question were reduced phonetically to a vowel geminate. In cases of deletion, the formant trajectories of the examined sound sequences either did not show any signs of the glide or the expected drop in formant frequencies throughout the glide section is so slight that it is rather unlikely to produce an auditory impression of a [w] sound. Importantly, in the analysed recordings, w-dropping affects only the glide elements found in various verb forms, while intervocalic [w] appears to be resistant to deletion in the few cases where the glide constitutes an element of the stem, e.g. in the nouns skała ‘rock’and szkoła ‘school’.

The paper aims at demonstrating the creative perlocutionary potential of interdiscursive production and interpretation of conceptual metaphor used in socio-political persuasion, simultaneously interpreted as mental phenomenon and discursive practice that is historically entrenched and highly ideological.

The Critical Metaphor Analysis model is used to investigate the interdiscursive application of two PLAGUE metaphors (COMMUNISM IS A PLAGUE and LGBT IS A PLAGUE) as an example of deliberate transcending of genre boundaries in the increasingly intertextual and interdiscursive world of both socio-political and religious discourses. The empirical part provides a qualitative study of the historical background, structure and persuasive effects of the rainbow plague metaphor (Pol. tęczowa zaraza), publicly used by the Archbishop of Cracow, Marek Jędraszewski, in reference to the LGBT community in Poland, conducted in relation to the original text on which it draws, namely the more historically entrenched red plague (Pol. czerwona zaraza) metaphor made popular by the Polish poet Józef Szczepański in his poem composed during the Warsaw Uprising 1944.

Pronominal clitics in South Slavic languages have been shown to manifest the strict/sloppy reading ambiguity effect. In this paper I examine Polish object pronouns from this perspective, observing that even though they are not clitics, they can still be compatible with the sloppy interpretation if the right type of context is provided. The data speak against an ellipsis-based approach, aligning with the view that the sloppy reading is not a viable test for ellipsis. I thus pursue an alternative analysis on which the strict and sloppy readings are associated with a structural difference in the composition of the pronoun (PersP vs. NumP respectively), offering along the way additional evidence pointing to the importance of pragmatic distinctions in investigations of the interpretive properties of different types of nominal elements. From a more general point of view, the discussion suggests that the empirical picture related to the sloppy interpretation is highly complex, making an investigation of a broader spectrum of languages and contexts indispensable for disentangling all the relevant factors and developing an optimal theoretical approach.