This article shows that Classical Arabic expresses verbal number. Arabic, of all the Semitic language family, meets the typological tests of the languages expressing verbal number. In addition, I will show that Classical Arabic provides a morphological verb form to express number. I will, however, show that for the form to express verbal number it requires a combination of morphological and semantic conditions. Without which the designated form does not express number, but expresses transitivity or the transfer of agency. These conditions are: form II must come from a root that has a form I, form I must be the transitive meaning of the root and the root must express an instant action. Form II, therefore, does not exclusively express number. Verbal number in Arabic is conditional. However, I will also propose that when form II verb expresses number, it does not express the transfer of agency.

The objective of the article is to examine the approximative and adjustive uses of the verb dire, which is mostly regarded as an assertive and eventful verb; hence nonapproximative. Meanwhile, in many expressions, in an impersonal use, in negation when the subjunctive mode is used, in the conditional forms, its evidence value is weakened and the verb dire can express approximation. The study is situated in light of the enunciation theory, notably it refers to a notion of modalisation. The corpus was established on the basis of dictionaries, which are representative for normative uses, but we will refer as well to press texts, particularly interviews, where the verb say is frequently used as a marker of the position of the speaker.

The subject of the presented article is Bulgarian, Polish and Russian emotive verbs, treated in perspective of syntactic valence. The author examines the grammatical forms of propositional argument in the sentences with emotive verbs that represent pre- dicate-argument structure P (x, q). All forms are divided into several types: observance, compression and splitting. The author shows that in this area we have to deal with analog reflection of propositional structure, or more or less compression of proposition argument, or its dismemberment and doubling syntactic position. The author takes into account the regularity of the implementation of each grammatical form, quoting the relevant quantitative data.

The purpose of the present article is a contrastive analysis of the verbs and verbal forms expressing the spatial situation in the Pericope Adulterae from the point of view of their translations into Polish and French starting from the original Greek biblical text. The author presents the general context of the pericope, its controversial place in the Gospel of John as well as its construction and its linguistic specificities. Starting from the original text of this biblical passage, then are listed the Greek verbs which express a spatial situation and are subjected to the analysis from the point of view of their forms and their meaning. According to the Polish and French translations chosen from this evangelical episode, the author proceeds to the comparison of the proposed equivalents and presents the comments which ensue. The analysis of translations demonstrates that some of the equivalents are analogous for two or all of the three languages, and some are typical only to one of the three languages.

The paper presents an analysis of the grammatical function of the German perfect tense form by encoding the “real” times. The theoretical base provides a combination of two separate concepts, i.e. Reichenbach’s and Weinrich’s model, and is an attempt to combine them into one, prototypical model. As an additional criterion, the classification according to Vendler is introduced, because one of the goals of the paper is also to examine the use of auxiliary verbs haben-have and sein-be in verbal periphrases depending on their Aktionsart, or type of activity.

This article asks the question to what extent Ryszard Nycz’s ambitious project of cultural practice outlined in his book Culture as Verb succeeds in opening up ‘a new form of knowledge’ and thus equipping the humanities with a fresh validity. Nycz takes up the poststructuralist concept of the humanities as a site of alternative or subversive knowledge, founded on the principles of interpretation and textual dispersion, and refocuses it on involvement (participation) and binary oppositions (borders), i.e. human vs. nonhuman, or nature vs. culture as a construct. The article, rather than addressing the issues of involvement and borders (liminality), concentrates instead on the contradictions that Nycz’ s theory gives rise to when applied to history, time and the emergence of subjectivity (identity). There is nothing objectionable about the proposition that temporal change is at the very core of culture, yet its locus must be sought not in the proclamations of individual agents, but in the conceptual ruptures that expose and reveal the boundaries of (collective) consciousness and unconsciousness, i.e. the operation of contingency.

This article takes a look at Ryszard Nycz’s new, groundbreaking study of cultural theory, pointedly titled Culture as Verb. It focuses on the author’s two major claims which seem to provide a foundation for the whole project. One is a vigorous defence of the humanities, the other is the proposition that culture may be best understood as a verb. The latter provokes a number of questions, especially about the role of invention, a dominant factor in any action-oriented model of culture. For example, would invention control and drive the mechanism of semantic ordering and appropriation of the things that used to be nameless, ignored, or suppressed? Is that domination culturally determined, or merely conditioned? Is it a source of suffering? It would also be interesting to find out more about the Nycz’s idea of transition from passive participation to the culture of active participation. The question is: Are we doomed to take part? As an aside, the author of this essay draws our attention to the darker side of being permanently involved in other people lives, the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) anxiety, and a new narcissism.

In a follow-up to Ryszard Nycz’s work Culture as Verb this article outlines a new way of bringing forward his great project. The challenge it has to face is the cognitive dilemma that lurks at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, or, in other words, the dissonance between the traditional paradigm of accumulating and developing the store of cultural knowledge and cognitive procedures that underpin new, experimental and inductive knowledge with a potential to effect qualitative change. The article contends that Nycz’s study allows us to bypass that dilemma. The ‘Third Way’, as it is called here, would open up new forms of innovation, i.e. not just knowledge whose value is determined by its utility for the systems of late capitalism, but a mode of concrete practice of rediscovering the outer world for the humanities. In the process of capturing and transforming of that world, the metaphors of embodied labour and of knowledge production (conceptualized as the verb) function as extraordinarily important tools of the humanities reinvented as a practical, embodied theory.

The first part of this article brings the author’s reply to the participants of the panel discussion of his book Culture as Verb (Anna Łebkowska, Jakub Momro, Tomasz Rakowski and Dorota Wolska). In the second part he outlines his premises and explains the analytical vocabulary that has enabled him to move from an active to a passive ‘verbal’ understanding of culture. He also draws a broad outline of prospective new research that would complement his project. Central to it is the exploration of what he believes is the dominant contemporary cultural experience, which is based on active participation. To characterize its most important features and forms we should make use of the following, newly defi ned analytical concepts – passivity, the present moment, immersion, and testimonial authority.

This contribution to the critical discussion of Ryszard Nycz’s Culture as Verb draws on his use of the parts-of-speech model to submit another formula of conceptualizing culture, based on the adverb, and complementary to the already existing approaches. They can be divided into three classes: those that treat culture as adjective (i.e. all epiphenomenal interpretations which view culture as a set of attributes), those that treat it as noun (i.e. an object, a separate academic discipline), and those that focus on action and the processual nature of culture (hence culture as verb), and even – in association with pragmatist and performative theories of language and the more recent ‘Activist Turn’ in the social sciences – have come to regard culture as culture-in-the-making, constituted and sustained by action (activities, performances). Most important for the adverbial approach are the modalities of culture, manifested in a variety of life styles. The study of culture as adverb (‘how’) can be pursued independently of the trench wars of cultural determinists and functionalists. Responding directly to Culture as Verb, qualifi ed as, chiefl y, an epistemological study, the article calls for a closer examination of the ontological implications of Nycz’s project of reinventing the humanities.