Volume 19 (2015): Issue 1 (May 2015)

This paper concerns the role of hierarchical semantic relations: class inclusion and partwhole relations as factors organising the mental lexicon, and the dependence of their importance on visual perception and visual memories, as demonstrated by the results of a free association task. 58 blind and 58 sighted language users were instructed to give associations for a list of 75 Polish nouns. Semantic analysis showed that more than 40% of the whole corpus of answers was related to stimuli through the part-whole or class inclusion relations. The results of the analysis indicated many similarities, concerning both types of relations, in the feedback obtained from the blind and sighted respondents. However, the blind participants showed a significantly stronger tendency to respond with inclusive terms (hyperonyms of the stimuli) than the sighted respondents. Th e results were interpreted in terms of the specificity of the compensation processes.

Despite their increasing use, little is known about the purpose of word blends, e.g. chillax, which have near-synonymous composite words (relax and chill). Potential explanations for their existence and persistence include: use in different sentence constructions, to provide unique meaning, and to create interest/identity. Th e current study used a vignette methodology with two-hundred and forty-one students to explore the relevance of such hypotheses for ‘guesstimate’, ‘chillax’, ‘ginormous’, and ‘confuzzled’. Our inconsistent results suggest that the semantics of the word blends may diff er from their composites in very subtle ways. However further work is needed to acknowledge and determine the impact of context upon the use and consequences of these word blends.

In the current study it was assumed that participants of the act of communication do not always follow the rules of cooperation, and sometimes build their utterance in a way that misleads the listener. It depends on the communicative competence of the listener and the message sender if an interaction between them takes place. Th e aim of this research was to assess to what extent deliberate, incorrect identification and the mode of communication in which the text is presented makes the audience lose their orientation in both bona-fide (informative) and non-bona-fide (playful) mode formulations. In order to answer these questions, two experiments were conducted using three types of texts: informative text with a humorous digression, humorous informative text, and a real life parody joke. Th e information preceding the presentation of the texts and the order in which they were shown was manipulated. Respondents assessed how funny each of the texts was. 85 high secondary school students participated in the survey. Th e conducted statistical analyses enabled us to establish that the information appearing at the beginning, i.e. the type of message (informative/humorous), can affect the recipient’s reaction and assessment of how funny a particular text was. Th e research results indicate that poor intensity of comicality in the messages may be aggravated by not indicating that they were intended to induce a humorous effect. This reveals the specific nature of humorous messages, bringing about an effect that is categorically inconsistent with the stimulus that precedes it.

This study investigated the use of politeness strategies in a corpus of English business letters written by Iranian non-native speakers in comparison with business letters written by English native speakers. The positive and negative politeness strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson’s (1978) theory were employed. A corpus of 46 business letters written by non-native employees of four companies and 46 letters written by native speakers who were in correspondence with these companies were analyzed to examine their use of politeness strategies. Th e results collected from the analysis of letters written by nonnative parties as senders were compared to those written by native speakers as receivers in response. Th e findings showed that although both parties used both types of politeness strategies in their letters, non-native participants employed both types (negative and positive politeness strategies) more than native speakers, especially positive politeness strategies, which were found to be used more frequently than negative ones. Additionally, the results demonstrated that social distance plays an important role in the employment of different strategies, particularly in choosing the type of salutation, which is an act requiring the positive politeness strategy to reduce face threatening act. Th us, more frequent use of positive politeness strategies by non-native speakers could be an effect of this factor.

Normative studies of the Polish adaptation of Th e Ruff Figural Fluency Test (RFFT) were conducted on 475 men and women aged 16-79, taking into consideration such factors as gender, education, and place of residence. Clinical studies were also performed on a group of patients with left -, right-, or bilateral hemispheric brain lesions, Parkinson’s disease, Huntingon’s disease, progressive obturational lung disease, dementia and depression. Th e results support the utility of the RFFT as a measure of executive functions. Th e validity and reliability indices of the Polish version of the test are similar to those reported by Ruff (1996). However, the sample Polish test performance differs notably from American samples performance and this difference is discussed.