Volume 55, Issue 4

In this article, we present a corpus-based analysis of two major types of the Polish Complete Path (CP) construction in which a source-PP, headed by od +GEN, is immediately followed by a goal-PP, headed by do +GEN or po +ACC, as in od jesieni 1920 do jesieni 1921 ‘ from autumn 1920 to autumn 1921’ and od kreskówek po rysunki techniczne ‘ from cartoons to technical drawings’. The aim of the study is to shed some light on the polysemous structure of the CP construction on the basis of its usage patterns. To this end, we used a random sample of over 500 instances of both construction types retrieved from the National Corpus of Polish. The data were annotated for a number formal and semantic features and subsequently explored using hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis. When interpreting the results of several analyses performed on different sets of variables, we gave special attention to three levels of semantic granularity encoded in the data, concluding that, on the whole, all analyses point towards a distinction between the spatial, temporal and abstract meanings of the construction under investigation.

This article is an attempt to investigate theoretically and empirically how the emotion of anger is used in political discourse. The descriptive analysis is centred around the conversational analysis of anger, as present in the verbal exchanges in the UK parliamentary debates, correlated with the variables of power (P), social distance (D), and the concept of valence. The key idea underbracing this article is that affect permeates social communication. The central claims of this study focus on explaining how the socio-pragmatic variables of (P) and (D) weave the fabric of conflict talk and how they constitute the springboard for structuring the affective message in a tangible framework of social practice. The questions that inspire the current paper are the following: (1) How does anger determine the relationships of power and distance? (2) What is the reaction of the Offender and Defender in anger-driven interaction? (3) Are the roles of the ‘Emoter’ and ‘Receiver’ of anger evenly distributed in verbal communication? (4) Are valence and its strength indicators of anger experience? The paper concentrates on three theoretical problems including: (1) anger as an intrinsically threatening emotion, (2) anger as a constituent of context, and (3) anger as a gradable emotion. In addition, this study aims to explore how threats to positive face value in the form of unambiguous literal meaning that convey evaluative load (accusations, criticism, insult, irony, imposition etc.), explicitly provide information on P and D shifts in anger-driven discursive action.