Volume 52, Issue 1

We present the results of an acoustic study showing that the Polish sibilant system is undergoing changes in the speech of young university-educated women. The results based on the acoustic analysis of 16 speakers’ pronunciation, reveal that the new variants of alveolo-palatals are characterised by spectral peaks at higher frequencies and higher centre of gravity values than their Standard Polish counterparts. In addition, spectral moments, spectral slopes and the formants of preceding vowels differentiate the new variants from Standard Polish alveolo-palatals. We provide the rationale for the development of the new variants by referring to (i) a functional approach involving contrast optimisation in the sibilant system, (ii) a sociolinguistic approach that makes use of a sound-symbolic association between energy concentration in higher frequency regions and smallness and (iii) a speech disorder.

Speech is Homo sapiens’ form of communication par excellence. It has attracted the interest of ancient as well as contemporary scholars investigating human lore (e.g. linguists, philosophers, scholars studying communication, culture or literature). The sparse studies on silence perceived silence as the antonym of all sounds (including speech: non-voluntary: stillness external to communication; symptoms such as muteness as breaks in communication; or silencing) or as background (voluntary paralinguistic pauses demarcating speech as figure).The current article is based on linguistic studies which, having differentiated between the above silences and verbal silence (VS) – unarticulated verbal signifiers chosen by the speaker to signify meaningful content alongside speech – incorporated VS in the linguistic inventory. This article focuses on the contributions to linguistics made by the integration of VS in the linguistic inventory. Insights are offered by the identification, understanding and refinement of linguistic concepts in light of the analyses of VS examples (the zero-sign, ellipsis as signifiers, asyndeton, etc.) drawn from literature, advertisements and spoken language. The major contribution is that the particularity of VSs, as unarticulated verbal signifiers, calls for the re-examination of key linguistic issues, such as figure and ground organizations, universalism, and linearity of the verbal code.

This paper discusses Turkish across-the-board relativization in relation to the two relative clause formation strategies: (i) the empty operator movement analysis of Chomsky (1977), and (ii) the head raising analysis of Kayne (1994). It shows that the across-the-board relative clauses where the head noun is interpreted inside both conjuncts present evidence against the head raising analysis of Turkish relative clauses a la Kayne (1994) due to the fact that ATB relativization does not require that the gaps be in positions requiring the same case. The operator movement analysis of Chomsky (1977), on the other hand, base generates the head noun and renders it free from the case features inside the conjuncts.

The French advertising slogan by L’Oréal Parce que vous le valez bien . and its equivalents in English Because I’m worth it ., in Slovenian Ker se cenim ., in German Weiliches mir wert bin ., in Spanish Porque yolovalgo . etc. represent only one of the international slogans and its equivalents which have moved beyond its original context of advertising and begun to be recontextualised in new contexts and media, either as familiar quotations, fixed expressions or idioms in newspapers, the World Wide Web and everyday language. The present paper explores this phenomenon – which so far has only been observed impressionistically in individual languages – on selected examples of international advertising slogans cross-linguistically/cross-culturally in several European languages. Their cotextual analysis in terms of the categories afforded by an analytical framework based on approaches from contrastive phraseology and pragma-linguistics complemented with a corpus-based and discourse analytic approach shall exemplify how multifaceted cross-linguistic/cross-cultural recontextualisation can be. The article also sheds light on the potential of advertising as a source of widespread quotations.

This paper deals with a puzzling and theoretically interesting case of the adaptation of English /ɪ/ in loanwords into Polish in which the English sound is predominantly nativized as P /i/ in spite of the fact that the expected substitution pattern is E /ɪ/ → P /ɨ/ as the two vowels are phonetically similar. A detailed analysis of this phenomenon shows that the polonization of E /ɪ/ in anglicisms results from a complex interplay of several factors which include perception, orthography, the Polish phonological system, phonotactic constraints and phonological levelling. The collected data are then examined in the light of two major approaches to loanword adaptation, i.e. nativization-through-perception (e.g. Peperkamp 2005) and nativization-through-production (e.g LaCharite and Paradis 2005). Evidence is provided in favour of the nativization-through-production view since the substitution of E /ɪ/ → P /ɨ/ is shown to be phonologically and not phonetically or perceptually motivated.