Objectives and hypotheses

Project objectives and presumptions

The aim of the project is to investigate various factors bearing on loanword adaptation: linguistic, psychological and historic-cultural. Particular interest will be paid to seemingly unnecessary lexical borrowings, i.e. those which do not serve nominative needs, because they have a domestic synonym (cf. Pol. kuriozum – osobliwość, Cz. kuriozita – zajímavost), as well as to instances of variance in which a foreign element is resistant to assimilation processes (cf. Pol. jazz – dżez, Cz. jazz – džez). We plan to search for an answer to why 'unnecessary borrowings' remain in use and why, in some cases, unassimilated variants prevail in usage over assimilated ones. Traditionally, the answer has been sought in socio-cultural phenomena, such as linguistic fashion and snobbery. In our opinion psychological factors are no less important; this has led us to undertake systematic investigations to test the hypothesis that it is the speakers' perception of a foreign word that in certain circumstances makes it more attractive and influences its use and development.

We plan to describe, mainly by means of corpus analysis, 100 word chains of the kind exemplified above – 50 of them Polish, 50 Czech – and identify the differences between their elements, i.e. between a foreign word and its native synonym or between a weakly assimilated and a well assimilated variant of a borrowed word. The differences will be sought not only in the words' designative meaning, but also in their emotive, associative, collocational, stylistic, structural, etymological and other features. We also plan to study the adaptation of Anglicisms in Polish and Czech in order to verify the casual observation that Czech integrates them better into its lexical system.

In the psychological part of the project, respondents' attitudes to the words investigated and their designata will be observed and measured by means of standard methods (viz. Osgood's semantic differential). Newer techniques of measuring the semantic proximity of words will be used as well (viz. the Hyperspace Analogue to Language model).

The observations made within the project will be set against the historic-cultural background comprising the development of Polish and Czech standard languages, the diversification of contemporary Polish and Czech, the history of linguistic contacts of Poles and Czechs as well as Poles' and Czechs' attitudes to loanwords. By combining linguistic, psycholinguistic and historic-cultural approaches, we expect to assess the relative importance of various factors in loanword adaptation.