Volume 66, Issue 1

The paper characterizes the poetics of the Sorbian poet Róža Domašcyna (*1951). Domašcyna creates diverse methods of metamorphosis in her numerous lyrical works. Different concepts of metamorphosis from Ovid to Goethe as well as concepts of Chinese philosophy are discussed. The novelty of Domašcyna’s concept lies in her language, particularly in the mutation of sound and transformation of all reality. The paper uses “parkfiguren,” a speech composition created together with the composer Harald Muenz, as an example to analyze Domašcyna’s new metamorphosis. It is precisely her extremely uncertain take on metamorphosis that makes this poetic language the language of our present.

This article is about Simeon Polotskii’s voluminous lament of 1669 about the death of Mariia Il’inichna, the wife of tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich. The lament is analysed as a specimen of baroque court poetry and as a poetic cycle. Special attention is paid to its religious content. What are the lament’s principal ideas about death and the afterlife? How does it treat the central motif of contemptus mundi , the Christian contempt of life on earth? And how does it relate to the religious tenets of the Orthodox Church?

Research into cross-linguistic influence in L3 acquisition and processing has recently shown remarkable growth. However, still little is known about reverse interactions, i. e. the effects of L2 and L3 on L1. This study investigates visual cognate processing in Polish to determine whether lexical access in the dominant L1 is susceptible to the influence of the non-dominant L2 and L3. A group of 13 Polish learners of German and English participated in a lexical decision task in which both double and triple cognates were examined in comparison to control non-cognates and non-words. In line with the pattern found in most similar studies, the results reveal no cognate facilitation effect, thus indicating that L1 lexical access in multilinguals may also be selective with respect to L2 and L3. The theoretical consequences for L1 lexical processing in the multilingual mind are discussed.

Idioms of the Torlak dialect (spoken in southeast Serbia and western Bulgaria) are known for their “double affiliation”. On the one hand, by virtue of their historical and phonetic features, they belong to the western range of the South Slavic dialectic continuum. On the other hand, according to their morphosyntactic characteristics (the presence of the post-positive article, the reduced case system, etc.), they adhere to the eastern range (i. e. Balkan Slavic). This paper views the innovative features of Torlak syntax from a strictly synchronic perspective and as a phenomenon of double (i. e. both head- and dependent-) argument marking. It is argued that cases of double argument marking in Torlak appear when several conditions are met. In order to be archaically marked with an overt relict case marker, a nominal group should either refer to the a-declension or, in case of the other declension types, assume a prominent position not only on the animacy scale but also on the scale of emotional involvement. In order to be innovatively indexed by a bound personal form (Haspelmath 2013), the argument should create the most favourable pragmatic and semantic conditions for the possible (optional) occurrence of argument indexing, i. e. be a derhematised and highly individualised Patient.

The following paper provides a review of research in historical and modern Ukrainian onomastics. The article analyzes the peculiarities of the formation of Ukrainian surnames; in particular it describes the origin, the function, the geographical distribution and the productivity of the suffixes in the formation of the names. The main ways of creating Ukrainian surnames were morphological and semantic methods. The semantic method of creating surnames consists in the transition of personal names, nicknames and appellative personal names into hereditary names without any structural transformations, namely, only as a result of changes in the function. The morphological way of creating hereditary names was to create new anthroponyms with the help of special surname formants. A characteristic feature of the names of the morphological method is that they were formed only from personal names with the help of suffixes. Ukrainian anthroponymy did not have special formants for the creation of surnames, but used the possibilities of its language and adapted them to the onomastic system. By their origin the name suffixes are not the same type but multifunctional. Some of them from the moment of occurrence are used only for the creation of names from parents’ names, while others only eventually began to express kinship. Some suffixes today are actively creating both appellatives and anthroponyms.

Commonly, press comments lie at the border between media studies and text linguistics. In this contribution, we focus on press comments and their main characteristics by devoting our analysis to press-based social commentaries deriving from Polish daily newspapers. Aiming at highlighting differences that are present in the writing culture of German and Polish philology, we first discuss specificities apparent in the research of both philologies. In the second part of this contribution, we discuss the results of our analyses. We do so by emphasising the structure of the textual whole and – by using numerous examples – pointing out evolving syntactical and lexical characteristics. Over the course of this study, the differences in regional and local press are of particular interest.

The paper analyses complaining behaviour at the workplace across several languages (French, German in Austria and in Germany, Polish and Russian). As speech acts, complaints deal with socially unacceptable actions that are brought up as problematic issues retrospectively. This may include critical evaluative assessment or the request for compensation. Data have been collected using an online discourse completion task (DCT) including discourse scenarios in which the power distance between the participants as well as the weight of the transgression/misconduct varied. The results show that complaining strategies vary along several dimensions (e. g. mention of transgression +/-, justification of complaint +/-, way in which a solution or compensation is requested). The observed differences in complaining strategies can be interpreted in terms of culture-specific ways in which the relationship at the workplace is conceived of. Despite the general restrictions of DCT as a method of data collection, we suggest utilizing data and results derived from their analysis in the context of courses of intercultural business communication and of business language courses.