This article aims to analyze the structure and semantics of Polish and Russian speech acts of wishing sent in greeting cards in the second half of the 20th century. The research leads to the conclusion that speech acts of wishing usually come in a fixed and concise form in both languages. However, some of the described formulas have not been recorded by researchers so far. The brevity of the texts may be related to the small size of the card, which requires the senders to write concise messages. It is also worth pointing out that formal modifications of Russian wishes are sometimes made for pragmatic purposes, mainly with the intention of reflecting the asymmetry of relations and the distance between the interacting partners. In contrast to Russian wishes, the form and content of their Polish counterparts is more varied depending on the holiday they concern. In addition, Polish speech acts of wishing are more often combined with other speech acts than are their Russian equivalents.

The author defends the thesis that the dative case relation in Indo-European languages represents the second man – participant of the act of the linguistic communication, i.e. the addressee of the information (and the factual consequences of the information) sent by the fi rst man – participant and initiator of the act. Arguments documenting her thesis derive from her analysis of the pronominal systems of Polish and Macedonian as represents of Slavic languages on the one hand and French and English as represents of West European languages.

In the present paper, we extend previous work on the speech act of threatening by including in our analysis a corpus of crime fiction based on 700 English books, a characteristic trait of which are threats. By including data derived from written narratives in prose, imaginary rather than factual, this research aims to identify potential differences between fictional and authentic threats, thus contributing to the general panorama of this speech act. Here we concentrate on a single construction, known as disjunctive conditional or pseudo‑imperative, which is analysed in terms of parameters employed in previous studies and modified to meet the purposes on the present research.

The main aim of the following article is to juxtapose two methodological perspectives, influential in the field of the widely understood history of ideas, that is to say, the Cambridge School with the German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte. Presenting both opportunities and pitfalls that may result from applying these perspectives, I sketch the propositions to overcome possible shallows. In concluding remarks, I draw potential challenges for the history of ideas in Poland.