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Vol. 9, Issue 2

Volume 9 (2014) Next

Publication date: 01.01.1970

Licence: None

Editorial team

Editor-in-Chief Ewa Willim

Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief Orcid Mateusz Urban

Issue content

Marek Radomski, xw Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowskaxw

Studies in Polish Linguistics, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Volume 9 (2014), pp. 67 - 87

https://doi.org/10.4467/23005920SPL.14.004.2384

Extensive research on native speakers’ attitudes towards foreign accents and their users carried out in immigrant-receiving countries such as, for example, Great Britain, the United States and Australia (e.g. Kalin and Rayko 1978; Lippi-Green 1997; Munro et al. 2006), has allowed specialists to formulate several cross-cultural generalizations concerning the perception and evaluation of accented speech. For instance, according to Lindemann (2002, 2010), the listeners’ attitude towards foreign speakers, shaped by cultural stereotypes and prejudices, plays a crucial role in comprehending accented speech. It is also often claimed (e.g. Said 2006; Lev-Ari and Keysar 2010) that a heavy foreign accent has a negative impact on the listeners’ assessment of speakers’ personality traits, such as credibility, intelligence and competence. Moreover, this negative accent-based social evaluation, as shown by Lippi-Green (1997), might even lead to various kinds of foreign speakers’ discrimination. 

Contemporary Poland, where Polish-speaking foreigners are still a relative rarity, constitutes an interesting and yet unexplored ground for testing the universality of claims concerning the relationship between the listeners’ cultural prejudices and their evaluations of foreign speakers’ accents, as well as personality traits. In this paper we report on an empirical study in which 40 Polish university students assessed 11 samples of foreign-accented Polish, both in terms of accent features and personal characteristics ascribed to the speakers, in order to find out whether these judgements are affected by Polish listeners’ attitudes towards the speakers’ cultural background and knowledge of their nationality. 

The results of the study indicate that, on the whole, the speakers’ nationality does not significantly affect the participants’ evaluation of foreign speakers’ accent features (i.e. comprehensibility, foreign-accentedness and acceptability). Such relationship can, however, be found in the attribution of personal characteristics to foreign speakers, which, to some extent, is influenced by the information concerning their nationality and listeners’ cultural prejudices.

 

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Jan Wiślickixw

Studies in Polish Linguistics, Vol. 9, Issue 2, Volume 9 (2014), pp. 89 - 110

https://doi.org/10.4467/23005920SPL.14.005.2385

Among a number of formal grammatical accounts especially two of them, the grammatical triple account and the partial algebra account, seem to attract the attention of linguists and philosophers of language. The main difference between the two lies in the fact that it is only the triple-account where the material form of an expression is directly taken into consideration. This turns out to be an all-important factor that opens up an interesting path for both theoretical and methodological analysis. The aim of this paper is to argue against the algebraic account and to give a stronger and more explicit version of grammatical triples. The offered approach is more general than the standard one in that it leaves room for non-oral forms of speech and allows defining the lack of material form as a grammatically informative argument.

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