The main aim of this paper is to propose a terminological approach to the standardization of onomastic terminology. Attention is paid to the primary importance of conceptual systems and to the onomasiological approach typical of terminological work. Terminology is presented as a discipline devoted primarily to the study of concepts. Then the main concepts of terminology are discussed and the relations between a conceptual system and a terminological system are explained. An outline of the issue of conceptual systems of onomastics and of their internal structure is made. Then two important metatheoretical concepts are introduced and defined: 1) the concept of theoretical legitimacy of concepts and 2) the concept of economy of conceptual systems. In the final part of the article, several suggestions concerning the standardization of onomastic terminology are made: 1) terms referring to concepts belonging to separate conceptual series are not to be used interchangeably; 2) terms based on different roots (in the English onomastic terminology: -onym, -onymy, -onomastics, in the Polish terminology: -onim, -onimia, -onomastyka) are to be reserved respectively for the concept of a single (type of) proper name, for the concept of a set of proper names and for the concept of a specific onomastic discipline; 3) concepts used or newly introduced in a text are to be defined clearly in onomastic works, 4) onomasticians aiming for standardization of onomastic terminology should start their work by (re)constructing conceptual system(s) of onomastics and only then assign terms to concepts; 5) one completely unitary conceptual (and terminological) system of onomastics cannot be achieved due to the theoretical pluralism of the discipline; 6) the first goal of any conceptual and terminological standardization of onomastics is to define its range: should the standardization cover the concepts of philological or general onomastics? should it cover only empirical (descriptive) concepts or highly abstract theoretical concepts as well?

The article aims to investigate the problem of desemanticizing of phrasemes containing names of body parts, and at the same time referring to the emotional sphere. Within the three main research areas (face, heart and body as a whole), and based on three types of semes (spatial, physical and functional), the analysis allows to determine the participation of individual sems in the process of motivating the indicated phraseological relationships.

The paper presents the indicator method as an important tool of research in social sciences with the focus on socio-economic geography. It introduces the notion of indicator in the methodological meaning and concentrates on its basic type, i.e. the inferential indicator. The concept of an indicator is explained using a realistic approach, which assumes that unobservable conceptual properties can be represented by observable real properties. In this approach, an indicator is characterised as an observable variable assumed to point to, or estimate, some other unobservable variable. The indicator method is then a way of the realistic conceptualization and a cognitive operation as well. The paper contains the systematization of cognitive indicators in socio-economic geography. It also shows the examples of the construction and interpretation of applied indicators.

The present article is concerned with the notion of ‘guilt’ as understood by the legal sciences and in the context of psychology and culture studies. Although legal connotations are unavoidable, ‘guilt’ is a term emotionally related to other feelings like ‘shame’, ‘fear’, ‘sadness’ etc. The analysis shall take a closer look at legal definitions of ‘guilt’ and ‘culpability’ at work in the American, Polish and German legal systems and refer the equivalents existing in these languages (wina,Schuld) to the concept of guilt understood as an emotion. As it turns out, legal definitions do not account for conceptual dimension of meaning and as such, they can only serve as departure points for further analysis to be complemented with cognitive analysis. ‘Guilt’ is a culturally determined and complex emotion that may be ‘dissected’ into several more basic emotional states. The underlying assumption is that there are differences in the understanding of the concept ‘guilt’ across languages which must be taken into account by the translators who deal with translational equivalents.

The aim of the present paper is to discuss metaphorical constructions, based on figurative uses of words, in informal Polish in the field of computers and the Internet. The study is based on the author’s own corpus, compiled on the basis of short informal texts (entries, posts) written on 32 selected Internet forums. Altogether, the corpus consists of 1,541,449 words. The paper, as the title suggests, focuses on one metaphorical formula, i.e. COMPUTERS ARE BUILDINGS. The metaphors which can be subsumed under this heading belong to the most frequent in the corpus (alongside a different type, i.e. COMPUTERS ARE HUMANS). They are discussed within the cognitive framework, as introduced by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Some attention will also be devoted to the possible infl uence of English upon Polish metaphorical constructions used in the area of computers and the Internet.

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.

The text deals with the issue of “historical biography”. It aims to reconstruct the key concepts connected with the biographical publishing series “The Legacies of the progressive personalities of our past”. The text answers the question what conceptual framework surrounded and legitimised the edition.

The essence of advertising lies very often in unusual and surprising juxtapositions of apparently incongruous elements, which nevertheless successfully combine in producing a coherent and understandable message. A vital role is performed by a skillfully engineered context, which allows for simultaneous activation of certain otherwise inconspicuous senses and the construction of novel and attractive connections. Such theoretical proposals as Lemke’s traversals (2001; 2005), Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory (1998; 2002) and Kecskes’s Dynamic Model of Meaning (2008) seem to describe many vital aspects of the phenomenon in question. It is in advertising that we often come across the linking of elements by transgressing naturally existing borders between domains which are unrelated, and we are invited to map onto one another different mental spaces on the basis of their salient analogy or identity, and indulge in creative riddle-like exploration of contextual elements in order to reconstruct the intended message. These techniques’ true power lies in their ability to blur the distinction between ‘the real’ and ‘the imagined’ to such an extent that certain irrational but attractive connections, implanted in the minds of the audience, contribute to subsequent decisions in the real world. The present study attempts to uncover the ways in which certain unrelated elements are skillfully brought together in a context which allows for such a juxtaposition in selected Polish TV advertisements for various medicine and health-related products. The method employed is an in-depth content analysis of the material, followed by an attempt to integrate the identified mechanisms with the models of meaning-making mentioned above. The results will hopefully help in better understanding of the ways in which particular components of the context may interact with the message expressed verbally or pictorially in the construction of multilevel meanings in advertising communication.

In search of the invariant semantics of the preposition “da”: a cognitive analysis of the predicative context – The purpose of this article is to verify whether the semantic invariant of the preposition da [starting point allowing physical or mental movement] in the nominal context remains valid in the context of the verb. The analysis of the content of predicates that link to the preposition da will help to answer the question of the extent to which the choice of a preposition is determined by the knowledge of the experienced activities and/or the predicate itself (its selective features) or if it is the result of convention.

The dual nature of water (acqua) in feminine portals – The work is an attempt to show how the concept of acqua (water) is conceptualized in Italian persuasive discourse regarding the health and beauty of modern women. The conducted research mainly based on the notion of imagery in language (Langacker) and linguistic picture of the world (Bartmiński) reveals a number of semantic and axiological aspects involved by the analyzed concept. The valuation of acqua is also noteworthy, as water functions in the linguistic system as a neutral concept, while the corpus subjected to the analysis shows that it has a double face: it is benevolent and destructive at the same time.

The Polish word ‘niepamięć’ (oblivion) is defined by dictionaries as ‘forgetfulness’, ‘lack of remembrance’. In the last 25–30 years, its meaning has been extended and incorporated into the term ‘niepamięć zbiorowa’ (collective oblivion), which means ‘socially relevant phenomena suppressed from memory and/or not admitted to the collective memory of a community’. The author has analysed the contents of the Polish concept of ‘NIEPAMIĘĆ (zbiorowa)’ and asked whether one could find a lexical equivalent of Polish ‘niepamięć’ in Russian and an equivalent of the concept of ‘NIEPAMIĘĆ’ in Russian mentality. Providing a negative answer to these questions today, the author proposes that, instead of analysing individual words such as ‘niepamięć – забвение (zabveniye)’, one should analyse entire conceptual and lexical fields of memory in Polish and in Russian.

The changes in the paralinguistic (social, economic, cultural) and linguistic sphere influence the quantitative and qualitative changes in a categorically diversified onomastic resource and the communicative flow of its elements on three levels of linguistic contact — nationwide, local and individual. The flow is additionally determined in the sphere of spontaneous everyday communication and in higher communicative functions (official linguistic behaviour). The accumulation of determinants which allow the usage of appropriate names and appellative forms (official and unofficial, e.g. diminutives, feminisms) involves the application of cumulative research methods, including psycho-, socio- and pragmalinguistic description of proper names functioning in communication. The contemporary theory of discourse in its three dimensions — formal, functional and interactional gives this possibility. It also requires the constant specification and standardization of Neoslavonic onomastic terminology.

Due to the strength of Willlard V.O. Quine’s attack on the notion of analyticity, the reputation of this concept in philosophy has been considerably shaken. However, not everybody was convinced by Quine’s argument. Among those who decided to defend the dichotomy between analytic and synthetic sentences were two English ordinary language philosophers: Paul Grice and Peter Strawson. Their views are the main subject of the presented article. It consists of five parts. After outlining the basic distinctions connected with analyticity in Part One, the main elements of Quine’s critique of analyticity are delineated in Part Two. Part Three includes Grice’s and Strawson’s response to this critique. Part Four, perhaps surprisingly, describes some decisions by the Polish administrative courts, concerning the interpretation of the concept of ‘widow’ according to the article 20 paragraph 3 of the Act on the Combatant and Victimized Persons. In the final, Part Five, an attempt is made to establish the thesis that analytic sentences are not immune to criticism and may in fact be contested, though their effective abolition may require substantial argumentation and theoretical considerations. This opens a new possibility of using the notion of analyticity in conceptual analysis in jurisprudence.

While working on the oeuvre of P.F. Strawson (1919–2006), and especially on his metaphysics, I had a unique opportunity to exchange ideas with this eminent exponent of Oxford philosophy. Those exchanges, of which some have been reflected in private correspondence and in a published reply to one of my papers, were focussed on various interpretative questions. Three threads of those discussions seem especially pertinent for grasping the gist of Strawson’s philosophy and its general orientation. The first one concerned the nature of philosophical analysis, or to be more precise, the connective model of it, favoured by Strawson, and its relationship with the idea of concept presupposition. The second thread had to do with the position taken by the Oxford philosopher in the realism debate on three levels: semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical. Strawson made every effort to take a realist stand in this debate and avoid antirealism in any of its forms; however, his realism is in many respects very moderate and not so distant from antirealism. Similarly moderate was his stand in the traditional debate about universals, constituting the topic of the third thread of the exchanges with Strawson. He claimed that universals exist, but at the same time emphasized that they are objects of pure thought alone and as such do not form a part of the spatiotemporal world in which we live. One cannot also say much about the relation of exemplification in virtue of which universals manifest themselves in the world as particular instances. Presentation and elaboration of these three threads has led to the conclusion that although Strawson was a deeply systematic thinker, he avoided wide-ranging and ambitious statements and radical views. In characteristically minimalist way he dispelled some questions, and the ultimate resolution of many crucial and fundamental issues were for him choice and taking a particular attitude or stance.

For Peter F. Strawson, transcendental arguments were an important part of his philosophical method, referred to as a connective analysis. Both Strawson and his critical commentators have devoted a lot of effort to determining the nature, scope and purpose of those arguments. In this text, I intend, first of all, to reconstruct and characterize the basic elements of transcendental argumentation, specifying its general form, features and purpose. Secondly, I reconstruct some of the most representative examples of this argumentation. Thirdly, I refer to the basic objections against transcendental arguments formulated in the literature. Finally, I point to a few peculiarities in those arguments, commonly omitted by commentators and interpreters. The overall message of the paper is moderately positive: transcendental arguments are a legitimate way of reasoning in philosophy, and in particular, they constitute a comprehensible and well-founded part of Strawson’s connective analysis.