The article presents the analysis of the rules of punctuation concentrated on the use of a comma in Spanish language. Nevertheless, in the introduction the author cite several exemples to show the differences and similarities between the use of a comma in Spanish, Polish, Russian, Czech, French, English and German languages in order to emphasize the conventional nature of the comma. The main part of the work presents the use of a comma in Spanish in five syntactic contexts. The article ends with conclusions that reveal the obligatory, distinctive and optional nature of the comma in the Spanish orthography.
Our purpose in this paper is to show how the output of academic student-writers demonstrates the different ways in which they react to the discipline’s discoursal demands and how that, in turn, forms their writer identity. We also argue that the current Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory fails to adequately integrate notions of second language (L2) academic writer identity and the social contexts in which L2 writers produce their texts.
This study discusses the cross-cultural re-conceptualization of the slogan ‘I’m lovin’ it’, popularized in Poland by a global fast-food restaurant chain, which occurs in the inter-linguistic transfer between English and Polish. The analytical framework for the study is provided by Cultural Linguistics and the Re-conceptualization and Approximation Theory. The analysis is based on proposals submitted by 45 translators asked to come up with a Polish equivalent of the slogan. The results indicate that because the semantic networks for the meaning of love do not overlap between English and Polish perfectly, attempts at the cross-cultural transfer of the slogan can be approached only as more or less accurate approximations of the original meaning constructed according to culture-specific norms, expectations, and attitudes.
Attitudes, or a person’s internal/mental beliefs about a specific situation, object or concept can greatly influence behaviors. This truth also applies to linguistic choices made by second language students. Their low level of knowledge of cross-cultural differences as well as pragmatic competence intertwined with inner norms and attitude towards politeness can result in producing the discourse which could not be considered appropriate. The fact of using and learning a second language (being bilingual or multilingual) may influence the level of politeness. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the differences existing in the scope of politeness revealed in the written, contrastive (Polish-English) discourse. The corpus under investigation encompasses seventy six emails written in the two languages by English philology students of teachers faculty. The analysis focuses on the level of politeness as exhibited through various forms of hedges and mitigations used both in the Polish and English language.
