The article examines the meanings, both literal and figurative, that are expressed in the British national press by the words blue and blues. The materials on which this study is based come from two corpora of newspaper texts: one collected from the daily newspaper The Guardian, and the other from the weekly magazine The Economist. In its main part, the paper analyses numerous instances of blue and blues use to determine their meanings in respective contexts. This is done to see which aspects of their meaning potential are activated in newspapers targeted at different readerships and preoccupied with dissimilar thematic and ideological concerns.

The article examines the disciplinary preferences of medical and psychology writers of research articles (RAs) in the use of epistemic lexical verbs (ELVs), regarding their frequency, prominence, distribution across the RA sections, and recurrent phraseology. The results show that disciplinary affiliation affects these phenomena, as more ELVs are found in psychology than in medicine. Both groups prefer speculative judgements and quotative evidence and most frequently use ELVs in Discussions. Yet, psychology authors are more balanced in their preferences and rely on a wider selection of frequent ELVs which are often combined with self-mention. Medical authors are more inclined towards deductive ELVs. Disciplinary differences are also observed in the choice of the specific ELVs, their frequency distributions and phraseology in the distinct RA sections.

The article explores the attitudes of Polish students of English towards their target language pronunciation. The data collected through a questionnaire are analyzed in correspondence to two major grouping variables: specialization (teacher vs. translator) and the level of studies (BA vs. MA level). In particular, the paper reports on five aspects of advanced learners’ opinions and beliefs about L2 pronunciation: concern for pronunciation accuracy, self-efficacy beliefs about pronunciation learning, attitudes to pronunciation instruction, pronunciation learning goals as well as strategies. Additionally, comments are made regarding the respondents’ attitudes to their target language accent and to the presence of native features in their English pronunciation.

The article examines the different ways in which various types of shortened forms are employed in Polish-English translation of a corpus of medical articles found in the Case Report section of Acta Angiologica, a bilingual quarterly for vascular specialists. A comparative analysis of the source and target texts is conducted to determine the reasons for the use and non-use of abridged forms in medical translation. On the one hand, attention is devoted to how the source text abbreviations are handled in translation. On the other hand, the focus is on those cases in which an abbreviated form is used in the target text regardless of its absence in the source language version.

The article studies the use of linking adverbials (LAs) in English-medium articles by Polish and Anglophone scholars representing medicine and psychology, attempting to reveal discipline- and culture-specific preferences in the choice, frequency and distribution of linkers. The results show that disciplinary and linguacultural constraints impact on LA use. Variation across disciplines reflects differences in the knowledge base and its rhetorical management, as there are significantly more LAs in psychology than in medicine. Cross-cultural variation determines the choice of specific LA (sub)categories in line with the authors’ linguacultural backgrounds, target readers and publication contexts. These findings can raise academic writers’ awareness of culture- and discipline-driven aspects of adverbial cohesion in English academic prose.