Leksyka ekspresywna w historii języka polskiego : kulturowo-komunikacyjne konteksty potoczności

Abstract

The main issue dealt with in this work is the presentation of Polish vocabulary marked emotionally in the dynamic aspect. The main aim of the author is to describe and interpret the problem of the historical aspects with respect to the functioning of the expressive lexis in Polish language. The conditions of the scientific observation of the phenomenon, as well as semantic, formal, cultural, and partly pragmatic and stylistic manifestations of the lexis in question in the history of Polish language were taken into consideration. The work consists of three theoretical and three empirical chapters. Chapter I explores the problem of the research perspectives concerning the historical studies on lexis. The key-issues here are inspired by the chaos theory within the humanistic research, and time as the basic category for the history of the language. Chapter II focused on the problem of colloquialism and expressiveness, characteristic of the process of thinking and conceptualising the world manifested in language. The following chapters (III, IV and V) present the research area, i.e. the expressive apelative names of people understood as the names of man motivated by willingness to manifest emotions involving a characteristic and evaluation of the object being named, based on the colloquial means of conceptualizing reality. Chapter III concerns the methodological solutions related to the studies on the lexis marked emotionally, based on a wide range of the language material. Here, the contextual indicators seem to be of special importance as the word marked emotionally can be most evident in its closest environment. Therefore, the observation involved the micro-contexts of the lexeme usage in order to indicate the signs of its expressiveness. Chapter IV constitutes a semantic-cultural characteristic of the expressive apelative names of people as a selected lexical macro-field. The basic semantic categories and their formal interpretations were indicated. The analysis was presented in the aspect of cultural determinants of the lexis.Chapter V presents the data concerning the stability and changeability of the expressive lexis. Among other things, the types of semantic transformations of the expressive apelative names of people and the selected factors determining the dynamics of the lexis were discussed. A supplement to this work is Chapter VI which discusses the problem of the function of the expressive vocabulary within the selected communication type in the popular literature of the 15th to 18th century. Here, the language material constitutes not only the names of people, but all word units marked emotionally present in the analysed texts. The aim of the work is to indicate the semantic features and function of a selected word fragment. It turns out, among other things, that the observation of a given lexical macro-field allows for a semantic-cultural characteristic of the vocabulary it includes, taking into account its dynamics. It allows for a reconstruction of the conceptualizing base form closed in a word fragment under observation. As the results show, the opinions on sudden and quick changes in the Polish lexis are founded, providing some restrictions are made. The language observation from the perspective of its long-lived transformations, however, enables us to treat the problem with reserve influencing the objectivity of our judgements. From this point of view, the changes within the scope of vocabulary do not seem to be either sudden or spectacular. Besides, both disappearance and appearance of new lexical units, due to the abundance of the language material and its incompleteness, etc. do not hinder the research of that type. The most important, though, seems the observation of the nominative models and their stability as well as changeability with time. The lexeme omission does not influence to a great extent the final outcome of the research on question. What is still at issue is the answer to the question on the order in which lexis considered to be a chaotic language area. It seems that there are several factors determining the order at the lexical level. They are: 1. The communicative and cultural community performing a major role in the process of conceptualizing the world contributes to a great degree of stabilization decisive in the nomination process. 2. A fairly important stability of the name-making models within the scope of a given semantic macro-field, reflecting the stability of certain cognitive processes. 3. The universality of the functions performed by the expressive vacabulary, both in the colloquial and literary (artistic) communication process, indicating the cultural continuity of the communicative community.