This paper undertakes an analysis of the connotative meanings of Polish diminutives excerpted from different types of literary texts including children’s stories as well as dramas, stories and poems addressed at adult readers. The author attempts to demonstrate that in the above-mentioned texts connotative meanings are more frequent than denotative ones. At the outset, some theoretical aspects of diminutive meanings are discussed. Firstly, the prototypical meanings of the diminutive are presented. Further on, the notion of polysemy is clarified, and the classification of diminutive meanings on the basis of Taylor’s (1995) work is given. It is followed by Jurafsky’s (1996) proposal of a universal structure for the semantics of the diminutive and Heltberg’s (1964) classification of diminutives into three types. In the main part of the paper, the meanings of Polish diminutives found in the texts are analysed, focusing on connotative meanings.

This paper provides an analysis of four neoclassical morphemes super, ekstra, mega and hiper, both as prefixes and as free lexical items, in contemporary Polish as represented in the Polish National Corpus. The collected data containing instances of the morphemes have been analysed so as to define their syntactic functions and to obtain quantitative results, i.e., to determine the exact number of instances of the morphemes occurring as free lexical items and as bound morphemes followed by a hyphen as well as integral unhyphenated morphemes. Another aim of the study has been a quantitative analysis of the data, i.e., to record all the instances of the use of the morphemes, including rare uses. The semantic analysis has been aimed to assign the exact meaning to each occurrence of the morphemes and to make general conclusions concerning the frequencies. Still another purpose has been to measure the morphological productivity of the bound morphemes (prefixes) in question based on Baayen’s (1992: 109–149) measure of productivity and Bauer’s (2001) measure of the profitability of a morphological process. The results of the present study contribute to a better understanding of recent phenomena in contemporary Polish.

Only Polish words from Marcin Paszkowski’s “Dictionary” have been published up to now while their Turkish equivalents have never been edited although two scholars (Ananiasz Zajączkowski 1938 and Stanisław Stachowski 1989) intended to do so. In this article the reasons for this situation are discussed and explained, as well as a solution is suggested as to how the source can be useful