Die Welt der Slaven: Internationale Halbjahresschrift für Slavistik

Русские указательные местоимения в недейктических функциях: микродиахроническое исследование

Olga Pekelis — 2023-12-20

Russian demonstrative pronouns in non-deictic functions: A micro-diachronic study

The paper deals with the evolution of the Russian demonstrative pronouns ėtot ‘this’ and tot ‘that’, used in non-deictic functions, namely as anaphoric expressions and grammatical markers, since the 18th century. It is demonstrated that while in present-day Russian the proximal and distal pronouns are in complementary distribution in such functions, they were not complementarily distributed in the Russian language of the 18th–19th centuries and earlier. At the same time, the current distribution of demonstratives in Russian does not coincide with the one in modern Czech, Polish, and Bulgarian. I argue that the latter difference is due to different scenarios of the morphological evolution of the distal and proximal demonstratives in East Slavic, on the one hand, and South and West Slavic, on the other. Furthermore, the syntactic shift that occurred in the usage of Russian demonstratives since the 18th century is suggested to have been triggered by the “one meaning, one form” principle, i.e. to be similar to analogical levelling.

The effect of fake news on the conceptualisation of the role of the face mask during the Covid-19 pandemic in Poland

Ewa Konieczna — 2023-12-20

The aim ascribed to this paper is to investigate the effect of fake news on the conceptualisation of the role of the face mask and the distinguishing features of its wearers during the Covid-19 pandemic in Poland. The analysis is couched in the cognitive linguistics paradigm in which meaning is dynamic, negotiated in context (Langacker 2008) and may be influenced by the mental process of subjectification, as a result of which the conceptualiser explicitly expresses their attitude towards an element or elements of the perceived scene. The main objective is to demonstrate how being enclosed in the Covid-19 fake news filter bubble (in the sense of Pariser 2011) subjectifies the conceptualisation of the reality of the pandemic, manifesting itself through replacing the standard Polish term maseczka ‘face mask’ by negatively loaded lexemes, which express a critical and frequently condescending attitude towards this unpopular sanitary accessory and people using it. The meanings of the equivalents of maseczka are analysed in context in order to demonstrate how they are both grounded in and updated by the expressions occurring in the Current Discourse Space (Langacker 2008).

Kritisieren als Zugriffsobjekt auf mediale Diskurse

Anna Hanus — 2023-12-20

Criticising as a means of accessing media discourse: An analysis of German and Polish political discourse on the rule of law in Poland.

This article, grounded in pragmalinguistics, aims to identify similarities and differences in the transfer of knowledge with regard to the prominent actors involved or presented in the national discourse on the rule of law in Poland, conducted in Germany and Poland. Its purpose is to draw conclusions on transnational discourse. The method proposed, defined as an extension of the previously applied discourse research methods, is based on the concept of criticising, construed as a complex language action whose communicative goal can be inferred mainly from the context, as well as on the basis of the recipients’ general knowledge of the world and their ability to make intertextual and discursive references. The analysis was designed to facilitate conclusions on the individual actors and their knowledge, the knowledge conveyed to the recipients, as well as general social knowledge.

The role of noun termination in grammatical gender assignment in Polish

Kamil Długosz — 2023-12-20

Previous research has shown that speakers of a variety of languages benefit from formal gender cues, e.g. word ending, when assigning grammatical gender to nouns. However, the extent to which Polish speakers compute gender based on such cues has not yet been examined. Therefore, the goal of this study was to investigate the role of noun termination in gender assignment in Polish on psycholinguistic grounds. The paper reports on a timed Gender Decision Task which was carried out with 24 adult native speakers of Polish. Participants responded significantly faster to gender-transparent than to gender-opaque feminine nouns. However, no effect of noun termination was observed for masculine and neuter nouns. The results provide psycholinguistic evidence that the ending -a constitutes the strongest gender cue that Polish speakers can depend on when assigning gender to nouns, arguably because it is the only noun ending that shows high availability and reliability in parallel.

Livre illustré А. Агина и М. Шагала

Хе Чо Син — 2023-12-20

The livre illustré by Agin and Chagall: Portraits of Dead Souls

The purpose of this paper is to take a look at the poetics reflected in the illustrations to Gogol’s Dead Souls and to find out the relation between the literary text and the illustrations. First, the focus will be on the painters’ viewpoint when they converted Gogol’s literary text into illustrations and on how they understood the poetic meaning of Gogol’s epic. Second, the function of the illustration as an interpretation of the literary text will be discussed. This study tries to find out the meaning of the literary text through the transition of Gogol’s literary text into illustrative texts and through the illustrations themselves.

Das sozialistische Buch

Paweł Zajas — 2023-12-20

The socialist book: Multinational edition series in the European Eastern Bloc

The paper analyses the cultural-political conditions of multinational edition series that appeared or were planned in countries of the European Eastern Bloc from the mid-1970s. Attention is drawn to (i) the cultural-political context of the Helsinki Final Act, which gave a decisive impetus to the increased transfer of literature within the Eastern Bloc, (ii) the “Library of Victory” realized in the years 1975–1981, and (iii) the “Library of European Poetry of the Twentieth Century” initiated in 1976. All three aspects are developed using selected text constellations and unpublished archival material and related to general methodological-theoretical problems.

Klimawandelfiktion im Spätsozialismus

Clemens Günther — 2023-12-20

Climate change fiction in late socialism

This article examines fictional representations of climate change in late Soviet culture and traces the emergence of a cultural awareness of the dangers of climate change in late Soviet fiction. Building on recent research on Soviet climate change research, it centers around exemplary analyses of Ilʹja Ėrenburg’s “Thaw” (1954), Vladimir Rjabcev’s film adaptation of Aleksandr Beljaev’s “The Air Seller” (1961), Anatolij Gladilin’s “Forecast for tomorrow” (1972) and Ričard Viktorov’s “Through hardships to the stars” (1980). These case studies are taken to show what knowledge of the causes and consequences of climate change the works conveyed and how their representations related to contemporary research. In this way, the preconditions and particularities of late Soviet climate change fiction come into view, which can contribute to a better understanding of current ways of perceiving climate change in Russia.

»Eine Philologie, die kein Opium sein möchte«

Maciej Junkiert — 2023-12-20

"A philology that does not want to be an opium": Polish historical literary research in the 19th century in connection with the development of German philology

This article deals with the evolution of Polish philological reflection in the context of the development of German philology and literary research. Polish literary research in the 19th century developed on the basis of two main models. The first derived from the dispute that Romantic authors had with university philologists. The second used the methodology of historical-philological research. In this article, I try to prove that the debate between these different scientific approaches played a key role in the formation of Polish historical literary research in the 19th century.

Pathos, Schock, Trauma

Erik Martin — 2023-12-20

Pathos, shock, trauma: Psychological concepts in certain poetics of the avant-garde (Ėjzenštejn, Warburg, Benjamin)

The present article aims at conceptualizing the relationship between availability and unavailability of poetic and aesthetic means of expression in the production of avant-garde art. This relationship will be introduced and analysed based on the three title terms: pathos, shock, trauma. As it seems, the avant-garde was characterized by a fundamental ambivalence: On the one hand, it was inscribed in the empowerment discourse of Modernity and believed that it could also control the conditions of its own art production. On the other hand, it was the avant-garde in particular that emphasized the independent potentiality of the material itself, which was removed from the artist’s control and could nonetheless make a decisive contribution to the creative process. This ambivalence between the total subjugation of the material to the artist’s will to form and the potentiality of the resisting material or the fundamental unavailability of art’s own conditions will be examined on the basis of three representatives of the avant-garde: Sergej Ėjzenštejn, Aby Warburg, and Walter Benjamin.