The paper challenges the analysis of proverbs as particular cases of Genericis Specific metaphor suggested by Lakof and Turner (1989). I argue that their metaphoric account of proverbs should be considerably revised and extended. Proverbs are usually not used in order to make “generic statements”, but, rather, in order to comment on specific construals of current situations. Therefore, I suggest that proverbs should be analyzed in terms of the theory of conceptual integration networks (Turner & Fauconnier 1995). Accordingly, the specific content of the proverbs and the construal of the current “target” situation should be considered as input spaces, the generic level schema as the generic space and the particular emergent meaning of the proverb in the current situation as the blend. Whether the mapping between the two spaces is more metonymic or metaphoric depends on the relation between the two input spaces.

Parental work migration can pose important risks for adolescents, such as joining inappropriate peer-groups, poor results in education or school drop-out. It can also facilitate positive changes in young people’s behaviour, as many become aware of the sacrifices their parents make to provide them with a better lifestyle and education and behave responsibly in return. Given that the literature highlights both negative and positive transformations related to parents’ migration, our aim is to address the impact of migration on adolescents left behind in rural Romania from their own perspective. We focus on teenagers’ experiences of separation from their mother, father or both, in different situations (family life, communication and rela-tionships, caring and concern for others, school achievements, future migration plans). Young people’s agency – their capacity to self-educate and organise themselves to perform well at school and in everyday activities following parental migration – is less studied in Romania. Thus, in addition to making the reality of these adolescents better known, our approach provides information that can be turned into policy solutions aimed at improving their life quality.

This paper summarized results of estimation of concentrations of pollutants (chemical and bacteriological) in a barrier lake on the river Łęg (Wilcza Wola near Raniżów, subkarpatian province). The second goal of the research was aimed at a trial of forecasting the pollution of apparently stagnant water (as the test bed the barrier lake mentioned was used) applying pattern recognition method in a variant called ,,look-ahead-and-back-KNN" [8, 9]. It was found, that concentrations of some contaminating species can be predicted with satisfactory accuracy. The approach tested allows to develop a dense grid, partly consisting of nodes with real (experimentally estimated) results, and partly consisting of nodes with these values predicted. Additionally, our research has been recently augmented with results achieved using data mining methodology based on virtual visualization [12].