The French verb tomber can be translated into Polish as paść / padać and its derivatives formed with various prefixes, which denote the path of motion (semantic features of vertical orientation and downward direction are included in the base paść / padać). In this paper, we discuss four meanings of the verb tomber extracted from the dictionnary Les Verbes Français (01: ‘choir, chuter’, 05: ‘se détacher’, 06: ‘se défaire’, 28: ‘survenir sur’) and their Polish equivalents. We provide a comparison which shows differences of the perception of motion by the French and Polish language users.

The purpose of this article is to describe the means of translating the grammatical tense futur antérieur in the accompli aspect from French into Polish. The accompli aspect constitutes a trait which is characteristic for French compound tenses, but absent from Polish in any form which would indicate the completion of the process and the state resulting from it. The perfective aspect of the future tense does not allow to underscore the resulting state, therefore, the translator tries to express it by using other structures.

The paper constitutes the analysis of the question of metonymy in automated translation. An average language user is not familiar with the notion, which does not preclude them from using metonymic structures on a daily basis. By being natural mental shortcuts they guarantee faster communication and, hence, contribute to economy in language. Similarly, an automated translator “does not know” that an expression which it is to translate is called metonymy. But this particular knowledge would not be useful in the process since the computer’s task is to translate the given expression correctly in the target language, not to define or classify it. Therefore, the following paper does not touch upon the question of definition, categorization or criteria of distinguishing metonymy among other structures. Instead, by analyzing examples translated into French the author presents the solution for translating metonymic structures in automated translation, which is based on the Object Oriented Approach formulated by Wiesław Banyś.

This analysis is concerned with the description of sensory perceptions connected with feelings, thoughts and stereotypes in two Polish versions of Madame Bovary. Perception is situated at the implicit level, the point of view or apparently reported speech in embryonic form, and is connected with vocabulary, with the subjectivity introduced by the connector mais, with demonstratives (ce X) as well as stylisation as a spoken text. This affects the coherence of the text. In the translation, one may observe the appearance of both creative (in the lexical domain) and deformative (in the structure of the text) modification. Because of this, it is the reader of the translated text who invests more effortto construct the interpretation based on the instructions that the text gives.

The article is situated in the area of communication research and is related to the phenomenon of media coverage. The author analyses the pragmatic potential of press-based denominative units containing oxymorons. The language material derives from French and Polish political press available electronically according to chosen titles. The discussed problem seems essential for research on media strategy, which is responsible for creating information in contemporary societies. It influences cognitive processes by the paradox of comparing contrasting concepts, enables realization of several crucial ranges of media strategy, which are discussed in the article.

As part of Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics (1959 [1964]; 1992), we propose to explore the French lexicon (in synchrony) to clarify some aspects of our conceptual schemes concerning perception and sensation. Our goal is to identify the margins in which lexical semantics can provide a contribution to the philosophy of knowledge and perception. We will try to answer linguistically general theories of philosophy of perception.

The objective of this work is to evaluate the voice quality of patients who underwent thyroid surgery and to find out if listeners succeed in distinguishing between a man’s voice and a woman’s voice. The aim is also to evaluate the intelligibility of their voice. To answer these questions, 14 speakers (7 patients and 7 control subjects) were recorded while producing [iCa] sequences and sustained vowels. The recordings of patients took place in different phases: 15 days after surgery (post-op1), 1 month after (post-op2), etc. Two perceptual tests were then proposed to a jury consisting of 27 naïve listeners. They had (1)
to identify the sex of the speaker and to assign a confidence score of 1 to 5 for three vowel productions of the vowel [a], by various speakers and at different recording phases (84 stimuli). Listeners also had to (2) identify the uttered nonsense word and assign to their response a confidence score going from 1 to 5. The chosen distinguishing criterion will be that of consonantal voicing, for 168 stimuli. The results of the sex identification of the speaker indicate that pathological speakers were correctly
categorized. Confidence scores did not prove significant. Concerning the intelligibility of pathological speakers, an effect of recording phase has been shown for the identification of nonsense words, since nonsense words are best perceived by naïve
listeners in the late recording stages. Confidence scores were not significant.

The present study analyzes the use of the French verb produire with the aim of disambiguating its meanings. The process consists in finding every possible meaning of the word by analyzing contexts in which it might appear. This stage constitutes an integral part of creating a Polish-French and French-Polish electronic dictionary and exemplifies the methodology of object-oriented approach proposed by Professor Wiesław Banyś. The analysis is based on the information taken from Le Grand Robert de la Langue Française, Le Trésor de la Langue Française. After analyzing all contexts in which the verb has appeared and after specifying the object classes for each use of the verb, the author gives its Polish equivalents. Seventeen Polish equivalents of the French verb produire are presented.

This article discusses several problems concerning the automatization of declination of simple units in Polish language. Our analysis is based on the Proteus model. The proposed solution contains a module that enables automatic generation of possible inflected variants of the given lexical units.

This contrastive study fits in the overall framework of French as a Foreign Language teaching methods and focuses on non-native speech production and perception. Our observation is founded on the premise that: any voice is a result of filtering by the phonological system of a learner’s mother tongue coupled with listening to the target language. This study will focus on the pronunciation of “spoken French” by Hungarian learners with special emphasis on their difficulties and the issue of remediation. This will be done by conducting an acoustic study on phonological and phonetic interferences, especially vocalic, from a unidirectional perspective. We will consider articulatory, acoustic and perceptual aspects, with the aim of describing phonological and phonetic characteristics of the “Hungarian accent”, determining its special features, thus highlighting repetitive mistakes in oral production. How, therefore, can a Hungarian learner “sound French” bearing in mind interference
between the source language and the target language? Secondly, how can he work on his hearing? Teaching techniques as well as tips for remediation will be briefly presented.

The specific context of the realization of electronic discourse joins together two distinct enunciation modes: written and oral. The former one is restrained by the conditions of the realization of electronic discourse, the messages are merely written. The latter one poses many problems on orthographic level. The hybridization of these two modes, written and oral, tends to create new orthographical rules that would correspond to the economy of expression. In the present study, the author would like to compare the frequency of neography que / k in different types of computer mediated communication.

The object of this study focuses on the metatext elements that are present in persuasive writing, in particular in texts taken from various Internet portals and magazines, dedicated to feminine health and beauty. The discursive text operators make it possible to understand different concepts, they explain logical connections between arguments and integrate the information provided by other sources. Their explaining function contributes to the correct interpretation of the text and allows to understand the author’s intentions. This paper discusses, in a synthetic way, the classification of 5 groups of expressions regarded as elements that form textual metatext: logical connectors, frame markers, endophora markers, determinants of information source (footnotes) and glossary code.

The purpose of this article is to approach the problem of the disambiguation of adjectives in the context of translation. On the basis of the French adjectives analyzed for the purpose of the present study, the author demonstrates that these items can have several equivalents in Polish.Such multiple possible interpretations pose a major problem for the description of polysemous items in lexicographical publications, as well as for automatic translation technology. The correspondences between adjectives are rarely bi-univocal in two languages and this study gives some insights into the possibilities of using these words in both the languages. To exactly pinpoint all the available senses of the analysed words and to find their equivalents, the author makes use of the object oriented approach. This kind of description allows us to select the best equivalent of a word in a target language and to make explicit the relations of equivalence between the two languages.

There are uses of verbs, traditionally called ‘speech verbs’ where these verbs become predicates interpreting data — natural signs perceived by humans. Applying a rigorous semantic analysis allows us to understand and explain that there are a metaphorical and an imperfective uses (iterative or restrictive) of predicates of communication, as if the universe talking to us.

In language didactics perception holds an important place. It is usually explored in terms of individual learner differences, or in relation to beliefs and expectations of the participants of the learning process towards its different components. In this article, the author aims at exploring the ideas that French learners have about teaching of perception vocabulary, and its efficiency and necessity,by means of an open-ended questionnaire.

Over the last few decades the interest in translation has significantly increased due to global changes. Nowadays translation implies interchange between cultures. Translation has a sociocultural context and is a communicative activity that includes the transfer of information across linguistic boundaries. Together with the introduction of the term ‘cultural mediation’, the theory of ‘cultural translation’ has also appeared, generally used to refer to transactions that do not openly involve linguistic exchange. The objective of this paper is to discuss the difficult role and responsibility the Italian-Polish translator has in terms of cultural mediation and translation.

The paper presents the role of multiple semantic inheritance that may be used in the Object Oriented Approach (OOA). The aim of the OOA, proposed by Wiesław Banyś at the University of Silesia, is to organise the language description in the form of a lexical data base easily implemented and used in automatic translation. Semantic inheritance is one of the most important features of the AOO and takes place when an object or an object class inherits operations and/or attributes from its super-object class while multiple inheritance is when an object or an object class can inherit semantic characteristics from more than one super-class. Some Object-Oriented Programming languages let the implantation of multiple inheritance, which, if the procedure is not abused and treated as emergency solution, makes the AOO description responding to every modification of human language and reflects every new language item in that lexical date base.

The paper refers to the specifics of the French-Polish automated translation. The author summarizes briefly the rules of creating electronic lexical databases in the context of the Object Oriented Approach. This particular approach, created for the purpose of translation, especially for automated translation, by Wiesław Banyś, offers a specific approach towards the language description with the help of object classes seen through their semantic relations. The purpose of this description is to determine correctly the meaning of the words and polysemic expressions of the source language in the translation into the target language. Therefore, the main question of the paper concerns the role of frames and/or scripts criterion in the process of the natural language words’ disambiguation for automated translation. By analysing the example of the French word collier the Author shows how it is possible to solve the problem of near synonyms in automated translation with the use of the above-mentioned criterion.

The French vowels [e], [Ɛ] and [ə] represent difficulty for Mexican students learning French as a foreign language. This is due to two factors: (a) the influence of the sound system of their mother tongue (L1), Spanish, and (b) the proximity of the three vowels in the French acoustic space. In fact, the Spanish acoustic space of the vowel [e] covers the space of the three French vowels [e], [Ɛ] and [ə]. Moreover, the three French vowels stand in such acoustic proximity that the difference among them is subtle. Does the broad acoustic space covered by the Spanish vowel [e] allow Mexican learners to distinguish the French vowels [Ɛ] and [ə]? Do the subtle differences among the French vowels cause a perceptual confusion for Mexican learners of French as an FL? A behavioral experiment was performed with undergraduate Mexican students. Two ABX tests involving lists of discrete segments with the minimal structure CV were used in order to observe if the subjects could perceive a difference between the Spanish vowel [e] and the French vowels [Ɛ] and [ə]. The results show that 16 undergraduate Mexican students got high scores for accurate perception, demonstrating that they indeed perceive the difference between the three French vowels regardless of consonant context.

This paper presents an acoustic study which contributes to depicting the acoustic cues of Mandarin Chinese tones in whispered speech. By analysing modifications of the acoustic properties of the vowel /a/, we have found a correlation between the duration of vocalic segments and tones, in both normal and whispered voice. The durational differences among vowels which carry different tones are more noticable in whispered voice than in normal voice. In addition, while observing intensity and formants trajectories, we have uncovered a curve pattern which highlights the relationship between tones, intensity and formants trajectories in whispered speech. This pattern suggests that vowel intensity and formants may carry tonal information in a coordinated manner.

This study aims at defining the unit of lexical decrystallization on the basis of the analysis of our corpus created using the French satirical journal Le Canard Enchaîné. While creating the corpus, we have found out that atypical and idiosyncratic lexical diversions pose a definitional problem to the unit of lexical decrystallization on every linguistic level. We will analyze this phenomenon within the linguistic frame, although this problem is not only a linguistic one.

The present paper is intended to describe and compare the main categories of nouns which belong to the class of objects <passages> in French and Spanish as well as to indicate the most frequent predicates related with this class based on the works of D. Le Pesant and X. Blanco Escoda. Taking as a starting point a verbal lexem passage / pasaje, the author seeks to create a schematic contrastive French-Spanish description in which a sentence and its specified construction with the class of objects <passages> on the position of a subject or object constitutes a basic unit, introduced or not by a set of prepositions. The main purpose of the adopted methodology is to point out the possible translations of all the analyzed structures into Polish.