Les anglicismes dans le dicours électronique médié

Although French is a Romance language descendant ffrom the Latin, there is of course some influence of other languages on it. English is perhaps the most important source of loan-words for the present French language. Our article is focused on new forms of written communication, mainly computer-mediated communication (CMC). The main aim of this article is to analyze the loan-words, especially the anglicisms that are used by chatters in various French chats. After examining the motivations of loan, the article studies the frequency of anglicisms in three chats and observes their grammatical adaptation in the context of CMC. A huge richness of anglicisms is illustrated by concrete examples taken from our corpus.

Komparatystyka na rozdrożu?

The author of the article attempts to present the situation of comparative studies as a field of research and a way of thinking about the contemporary world on the basis of the analyses presented in Comparative Literature at a Crossroads? in the monographic issue of “Comparative Studies” 2006. Much attention is paid to the phenomenon of the crisis of comparative studies connected with a noticeable reluctance towards great theoretical models shared by many researchers, the extensiveness of the topic area and resulting methodological problems but also the fact that comparatists abandon the studies of other languages. This results in a need of searching for a satisfactory definition of this field of study, its scope of research and applicable research methods. Among the specific issues raised in the article there is, e.g. the case of world literature seen in the context of the classical contradiction between cultural hegemony and cultural pluralism. Moreover, an interesting review of the picture of the Polish culture from the perspective of postcolonial theories and intracultural differences is presented.

Exploitation of linguistic ambiguity in Polish and English jokes

English & Polish jokes based on linguistic ambiguity are constrasted. Linguistic ambiguity results from a multiplicity of semantic interpretations motivated by structural pattern. The meanings can be "translated" either by variations of the corresponding minimal strings or by specifying the type & extent of modification needed between the two interpretations. C. F. Hockett's (1972) translatability notion that a joke is linguistic if it cannot readily be translated into other languages without losing its humor is used to interpret some cross-linguistic jokes. It is claimed that additional intralinguistic criteria are needed to classify jokes. By using a syntactic representation, the humor can be explained & compared cross-linguistically. Since the mapping of semantic values onto lexical units is highly language specific, translatability is much less frequent with lexical ambiguity. Similarly, phonological jokes are not usually translatable. Pragmatic ambiguity can be translated on the basis of H. P. Grice's (1975) cooperative principle of conversation that calls for discourse interpretations. If the distinction between linguistic & nonlinguistic jokes is based on translatability, pragmatic jokes must be excluded from the classification. Because of their universality, pragmatic jokes should be included into the linguistic classification by going beyond the translatability criteria & using intralinguistic features to describe them.

An ambiguity-based theory of the linguistic verbal joke in English

Instytut Filologii Angielskiej