Volume 17 of Neophilologica, edited by Wiesław Banyś, brings together a collection of studies devoted to the semantic, syntactic, and cognitive dimensions of language, with a particular focus on Romance languages and their interaction with other linguistic systems. The contributions explore how languages structure human experience and conceptualize reality, combining approaches from cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics, phraseology, discourse analysis, and translation studies.
Cognitive representations and linguistic images of the worldSeveral contributions investigate how languages construct cognitive models of reality.
In Représentations cognitives opérées par les langues, Jean-Pierre Desclés proposes a theoretical framework explaining how linguistic diversity reflects different modes of conceptualization while relying on shared semantic primitives.
Similarly, Józef Sypnicki and Jolanta Dyoniziak, in Sur la représentation linguistique de la femme en français et en polonais, examine the linguistic stereotypes associated with the concept of “woman” in French and Polish. Their analysis identifies three dominant cognitive profiles — physical, psychological, and social — that structure the linguistic representation of women in both languages.
In Occhio all’italiana – cioè il ruolo dell’occhio nell’immagine linguistica del mondo italiano, Aleksandra Kosz analyzes the role of the concept of eye in the Italian linguistic worldview, identifying several conceptual profiles that reveal the symbolic and metaphorical richness associated with visual perception.
Lexical structure and computational approachesAnother group of papers focuses on lexical semantics and computational modeling of language.
In Désambiguïsation des sens des mots et représentation lexicale du monde, Wiesław Banyś proposes an object-oriented lexical model designed to address word-sense disambiguation problems in machine translation.
Similarly, Krzysztof Bogacki, in Le traitement de l’article dans la traduction automatique du polonais vers le français, discusses the challenges posed by translating between languages with and without articles.
In Répercussions des activités humaines dans les collocations verbo-nominales, Grażyna Vetulani analyzes verb–noun collocations as linguistic structures reflecting human activities and argues that they can serve as a basis for building linguistically motivated ontologies.
Morphology, grammaticalization and syntactic structuresMorphological processes and grammatical evolution are examined in several contributions.
Denis Apothéloz, in Morphème opportuniste et lexicalisation d’inférences : la préfixation négative in-, investigates the semantic effects of negative prefixation in French.
In La vision de l’espace dans les syntagmes locatifs kazakhs et français, Mikołaj Nkollo analyzes how spatial relations are expressed in two typologically distant languages and shows how lexical units gradually evolve into grammatical markers through the process of grammaticalization.
Phraseology and metaphorical representations of the bodyThe metaphorical representation of the human body is explored by Witold Ucherek in Les images de la tridimensionnalité du corps humain vues à travers les expressions figées françaises et polonaises, which compares somatic idioms in the two languages and shows how spatial orientation — verticality, perspectivity and laterality — shapes metaphorical conceptualizations.
Discourse and media representationsOther contributions address discourse structures and media genres.
Zlatka Guentchéva analyzes forms of reported speech and their narrative functions, while Ewa Miczka proposes a functional approach to information organization at the suprasentential level.
Media discourse is examined by Isabelle Laborde-Milaa in a study of journalistic portraits, whereas Marcela Świątkowska explores the expressive and pragmatic role of interjections in discourse.
Taken together, the contributions highlight the richness of contemporary research on the relationship between linguistic structure, cognition and cultural representation, illustrating the productive dialogue between cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics, discourse analysis, phraseology and translation studies
Vol. 36 (2024)
Published: 2024-12-31
10.31261/NEO