Volume 65, Issue 4

The present article ties in with an earlier study by Chomsky (1970) on nominalizations in English, which was then refined primarily in the influential work of Jane Grimshaw (1990) and is dealt with in detail in Borer (2013) and in Kosta (2020). In contrast to the English gerundives, which do not lose verbal behavior due to the derivation in the syntax and maintain all grammatical categories and characteristics of verbs, which is why one can speak of a real conversion while preserving the verbal semantics, the situation is somewhat different in Czech. In the deverbal, deadjective and other derivations, the Czech apparently made the transition to the noun with its critical properties, which is shown by certain restrictions in the aspectuality marking of deverbal noun phrases on -ní- , -tí- , which, e. g., do not pass the progression durativity test (Vendler 1967). In passive constructions, as is well known, a valence point in the position of the external argument is reduced compared to the corresponding active sentences, while the external argument position in anti-causatives is also not available in the deep structure. In addition to the syntactic restrictions that are evident in nominalizations in the context of simple sentences of different sentence types (causative, anti-causative, passive) and demonstrate the nominal character of certain types of deverbal noun phrases in the first part of this article, the second part of the essay deals with more complex structures and extends its analytical and theoretical part to the phenomenon of nominalizing subordinate clauses. The aim of the central part of this contribution is therefore to test the nominal properties of embedded conjunctional sentences and of embedded headless relative sentences on the basis of empirical data and thus contribute to the knowledge of whether certain types of relative sentences can (or must) be nominalized.

The paper deals with synchrony and diachrony of phonetics, phonology and prosody of the Čakavian dialect of Susak (Croatia) based on the author’s fieldwork in 2018. The data is compared to previous studies of the Susak dialect. The local dialect exhibits a number of interesting phonological features – e. g. a complex (“Tsakavian”) opposition of postalveolars (/č, ž, š/) to dentals/alveolars (/c, z, s/), centralization of short /i/ and /o/ (in connection to vowel quantity opposition), complex allophonic realizations of the diphthong /i̯e/, etc. – which may be interesting from the perspective of wider phonological theory.

This article reports on two timed cloze-response experiments which examine the impact of context on idiom recognition. Study 1 presented participants with the beginnings of Polish VP idioms without any prior context. Cloze probabilities and response times for idiom continuations were measured to establish the idiom recognition point (IRP) for each idiom. In Study 2, we used the same idioms in two kinds of contexts: (i) supporting a figurative meaning and (ii) supporting a literal meaning. Cloze probability and response times were measured at the IRP and one word before and after it. The figurative meaning of idioms was automatically activated at the IRP independently of the type of context. Additionally, the figurative context did not move the IRP to an earlier position, whereas in the literal context the responses were significantly slower at the IRP as compared to the figurative context condition. Such a finding indicates that, irrespective of the literal context, the comprehenders automatically activated the figurative meaning of an idiom at the IRP, but they had to discard it later. The literal meaning was computed from the literal meanings of idiom constituents stored in idiom lexical representation, which was computationally costly.

This paper focuses on the meaning-making process as embedded in the situation in which it takes place. It puts forward the key question of what kind of knowledge is relevant to understanding. Thus, there are three central notions in the framework discussed: context, contextualization and context change. The paper is formulated against the background of a theory of metapragmatics, and it is in line with interactional sociolinguistics, as well as cultural linguistics. The results and findings will contribute to the on-going methodological discussions on contexts and contextualization and demonstrate that under certain conditions some external factors may prove to be very strong and determinant. Politically loaded perception and construction of meanings may be decisive in foregrounding some meanings. The paper will show that the dominating political viewpoint in a certain period of time and place may act as a driving force which foregrounds certain meanings and manages a certain way of understanding of texts/utterances. Contextualization can go wrong, and misplacing utterances in contexts may lead to social misunderstandings. As a conclusion, it is stressed that further investigation of context change is a valuable heuristic approach in the metapragmatic and discourse sensitive dimension in linguistic analyses. Conclusions about the samples under discussion can also motivate a deeper consideration of social effects of misunderstandings to protect us from conflicts.

The conventional reading of the “ancient” chapters of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita attributes the role of an active moral subject to Pilate and a largely passive role to Ieshua. Proceeding from this assumption, the encounter between these characters is interpreted as an ethical event, in which Pilate is supposed to make decisions based entirely on his own will. This paper challenges this reading by arguing that Ieshua, generally considered the epitome of love, is the actual source of the events in which Pilate is involved. This idea is demonstrated by a comparison with the early Christian experience that views divine love as prior to power and intellect. The analysis traces Pilate’s inner transformation caused by the impact of proactive love and of the actual person of Ieshua, rather than his ideas, which clarifies the meaning of the encounter of these protagonists in Bulgakov’s novel.

Perspectives on the lives of migrants in their host countries tend to be bicultural, which is at odds with the multiethnic reality of British industrial cities, especially with London’s low-paid sector. This paper proposes migrant literature as an antidote to bicultural restrictions. It endeavors to provide a comparative reading of writings by Polish migrant authors about interactions with other migrants in Britain and other migrant writers’ perceptions of Poles. The corpus consists of post-accession texts and includes, among others, books by A. M. Bakalar, Gosia Brzezińska, Grzegorz Kopaczewski, Daniel Koziarski, Adam Miklasz, Jarek Sępek, and Daniel Zuchowski on the one hand, and Marina Lewycka and Aleksandrs Ruģēns (alias Vilis Lācītis alias William B. Foreignerski), on the other. Given that the authors in question draw on diverse—Polish, British, Ukrainian, Latvian, and other East European—traditions of cultural and/or economic Othering, this paper scrutinizes both the mutual Orientalizing tendencies and the transnationalizing trajectories involved.