"Poszukiwany property locator" - the use and abuse of English constructions in Polish press and internet advertisements

Abstract

It is beyond doubt that nowadays English exerts a strong influence on many European languages, including Polish. It is only natural to expect that the changes in the Polish language will be most readily visible in the area of vocabulary. As Arabski asserts, “Polish borrows from English several new lexical items every week” (ARABSKI, 2007: 16). However, other areas, such as semantics, syntax, morphology or even pragmatics are not free from the influence of English, either. Consequently, we can distinguish various types of borrowings (cf. Section 2). The aim of this study is to describe the overall influence of English upon Polish used in press and Internet advertisements. Similar publications have naturally appeared in the past (cf. e.g. CHŁOPICKI and ŚWIĄTEK, 2000; ZABAWA, 2004, 2007), but most of them concentrated on the lexical influence only, with the exception of the one written by CHŁOPICKI and ŚWIĄTEK (2000). Their book is, however, as they themselves admit (page 16), not meant for linguists, but for general public. The structure of the paper is as follows: first, some theoretical preliminaries will be given, followed by authentic examples quoted from press and Internet advertisements.