The author of the article analyzed linguistic stereotypes concerning human and animal features of the characters appearing in the medieval novel The Romance of Reynard the Fox (Roman de Renart), many scholars call these characters the “animallike people”. King Lion’s courtiers: Reynard the Fox, Ysengrin the Wolf and others are often called barons as they display customs and manners of knights. Despite this fact their deeds have nothing to do with chivalry and morality that one can read about in courtly literature. Quite the opposite, these characters are presented in a much more modern manner - as cunning, going back on their words, pusillanimous and cruel. The animal costumes created a comic or even burlesque effect which resulted from the clash of stereotypical animal features with the description of adventures happening in the world extremely similar to the real one. In this article one can find many examples illustrating the linguistic forms of these stereotypical images.

The aim of the study is to carry out a comparative analysis of subjonctif and congiuntivo moods traditionally understood as a one grammatical category but at the same time belonging to two different language systems. The study of principal different uses makes the basis for constructing appropriate cognitive-semantic schemes and distinguishing prototype uses. It also
seems interesting to define semantic invariant, if one exists, for these categories. Such a study will help to understand the nature and functioning of moods, will show the difference and will
emphasise the role of environment, culture and experience in forming languages, their development and their influence on human relations.

The target of this work is an analysis of Spanish linguistic constructions, the so-called “nominalized infinitives” that are popular in the Spanish language. Results of the analysis of the role of the “nominalized infinitives” appeared interesting and revealed that however the nature of the “nominalized infinitives” is purely aspectual, their role in the language system, or better, the reason of their existence is rather of the communicative then semantic nature.

A term category of possessivity belongs for sure to the group of the universal language categories. It probably exists in all the languages and it is concerned with the relations of ownership, which means the fact of beeing an owner or a property. This relationship may be expressed by different expression measures. The most important would be a possessive adjective. However, it seems its use in different languages is not submitted to the same logic, which proves that not only linguistic but also grammatical units in many languages serve to express different concepts. This article deals with the criterions of usage of the possessive adjective in French language. The analysed examples show a polisemy of this element of sentence, as an expression of the real ownership or different ways of connections.

In natural languages, especially the Romance ones, there is a certain number of lexical units which can change their functions in certain contexts, although, traditionally speaking, they belong to specified grammatical categories. That is the case with nouns which, even in traditional grammars, are sometimes treated as adjectives. In his article Mirosław Trybisz presented this type of shift of grammatical category. The author concentrated his attention on the adjectives describing colours like: rose, chocolat, aubergine and the so-called noun phrases of the type une phrase La Bruyere. The author suggested that a series of tests should be conducted in order to prove that the degree of “adjectivisation” of nouns can vary.

This article deals with denominai adjectives, usually called ≪pseudo-adjectives≫ or ≪non predicating adjectives ≫. The author wonders whether ethnical adjectives are part of them. In this article, the analyses are limited to ethnical adjectives used in copulative sentences like L’Alsace est francaise or Ce mot est alsacien. The author distinguishes two uses of ethnical adjectives. Firstly, ethnical adjectives are not pseudo-adjectives when they are used like an ordinary adjective (cf. L'Alsace est tres francaise and L'Alsace est belle). According to predicate calculus, the two adjectives francaise and belle function here as a predicate. In this case, the ethnical adjective francaise does not refer to France but means ‘like France’. Its semantic analysis shows then that it is different from its derivation stem France. Secondly, ethnical adjectives are pseudo-adjectives when they function as an argument. In such a case, they refer to objects like in sentences as L’Alsace est francaise. This ethnical adjective is ambiguous: which derivation stem has it? France (territory), Francais (people) or francais (language)? However, in each of these three cases, it does not predicate, but functions as an argument by referring to an object. In this sentence, the predicate is a relational implicit sense. This predicate can have several contextual readings, such as is part of, belongs to, is dominated by or is occupied by.

In her article Teresa Tomaszkiewicz compares the mechanism appearing during the interlinguistic and intersemiotic translation. Contrary to appearances, it seems that the transfer of meaning of an expression produced in one natural language into a text in another language has a lot in common with the transfer of meaning through non-linguistic means e.g. various types of images. The author compares the functioning of images with such linguistic forms as concepts, predicates, expressions and descriptions. She analyzes various types of relations that are created between linguistic elements and images in order to convey the meaning of these images. These relations are: equivalence, parallelism, complementarity, interpretation and contrariness.

In this age of the uniting Europe, according to the European Council's recommendation, citizens of the continent ought to receive education allowing them to communicate in their mother tongue, in the language serving as lingua franca, finally in the language of a neighbouring country or other European one. This forces us to adjust to these requirements not only the educational system, but also methods of education, including the school curricula and sylabuses, which take into account the different way of acquiring a foreign language - not the second after the mother tongue, but the third (after the mother tongue and the foreign language). Such analyses are a continuation of researches on the interference. The researches on bilinguality have been successfully developed for the past thirty years, after years of stagnation due to lack of methodological tools. A similar situation exists in the case of trilinguality. For it is impossible to transplant the already used methodology into the new, extended ground. Trilinguality turned out to be extraordinarily difficult to examine. The competence of a multilingual person cannot be a simple sum of competences in the particular languages, but rather their resultant. Thus, we encounter an utterly new type of competence, right now difficult to define and describe precisely because of lack of appropriate researches. It demands a new look at the selection of methodological tools allowing a precise diagnosis of the problem and a verification of hypotheses explaining the way of acquisition of the successive languages.

The author of the article emphasized the usefulness of information and communication technologies in foreign language teaching (TICE). The author presented new trends in the area of foreign language teaching: the conception of open educational communities, the role played by “fomators in languages” in the world of modem technology, the use of the criteria for assessing the usefulness of informational tools, the results of the introduction of the SMAIL project, the possibilities of applying the FAD and FAOD programs {Formation a Distance – Distance Learning, Formation Ouverte a Distance - Open and Distance Learning).

In didactics interculturalism is usually perceived from the perspective of the relations between certain communities, which blurs the individual level of approaching and handling the intercultural problems. In case of such problems Weronika Wilczyńska suggests assuming the perspective of a student, not the one of a group represented by this student. This approach pivots on the idea of the bilingual, multilingual or multicultural identity as the one characteristic of a bilingual or multilingual person. Basing on this identity such a person can develop cultural sensitivity that allows them to do more than just perceive superficial differences. Thanks to this sensitivity such a person shall be able to interpret the whole of discursive practices as an important determinant of their partner identity.

It is well known that some of the most important problems of translation concern differences in socio-cultural matters proper to the communities whose languages are to be translated, as well as socio-cultural aspects which are different in each of the communities or which do not exist in one of them. These socio-cultural aspects, evident at different levels of language, are reflected in the many ways in which speakers of distinct languages perceive reality. For this reason analysis of the aspects of translation - which is required when translating a text and which is linked to socio-cultural matters - could give us an insight into the way the world is perceived by speakers of the language of the text to be translated. This paper presents a number of problems in Polish-Spanish and Spanish-Polish translation and clearly presents a number of traits - relating to the perception of the world - which are specific to Spanish speakers, but different to those of speakers of Polish.

This article aims at performing - on the basis of cognitive linguistics - an analysis of idioms which are related to the concept of “colour” both in Spanish and in Polish. Various Polish and Spanish idiomatic expressions are examined with the focus on determining what colours are used and in what sense - literal, metaphorical, or metonymical. The comparative analysis of “colour” idioms in both languages is conducted. There are many linguistic expressions which use the colour “black” as a metaphor of the negative aspects in both languages. However, despite the tendency to perceive the colour “white” as the opposite of the colour “black,” such juxtaposition has been observed neither in Polish nor in Spanish. The expressions containing the colour “black” usually conote the negative, whereas the expressions with the colour “white” as a symbol of goodness or the positive are very rare.

In her article E. Biardzka discussed the use of grammatical tenses in Philippe Delerm’s novel Il avait plu tout le dimanche. The protagonist of the novel is Arnold Spitzweg - a Parisian of Alsatian origin. In Delerms novel Biardzka distinguished three thematic parts that do not comply with the book’s formal division into chapters. The first part (55 pages) is devoted to the presentation of everyday events that illustrate Spitzweg’s habits, manners and likings. In this part Delerm uses the present tense. The second - romantic - part comprises 10 pages. In this piece the author describes a secret idyll experienced by the protagonist who is in love with his colleague from work. The present tense is replaced with the past tense (past simple) at the moment when love reaches Spitzweg. In the third part (42 pages) the protagonist rejects the feeling and returns to his previous lifestyle. In the narration we observe the return of the present tense, which was replaced with the past tense only for the presentation of the childhood memories, moral and philosophical reflections. Each of the thematic parts of the novel is characterized by the use of a different tense. The chosen tenses are meant to closely match the construction of the presented world.

In her article Ewa Ciszewska attempted to present the retrospective value (summary or synthesis) of the future perfect tense (futur anterieur). Futur anterieur is often used in press articles for underlining peculiar nature of an event from the past and for summarizing it, e.g. L'annee 2001 aura ete fatale pour l'economie mondiale. An analysis of the context makes it possible to indicate the elements which allow the reader to choose the correct interpretation of the futur anterieur tense. These elements comprise the expressions like: il aura fallu x temps pour..., il aura suffi de... pour..., summarizing expressions: au total, au final, en definitive, adversative phrases: en revache, neanmoins, pourtant and the adverbs jamais and rarement when they appear at the beginning of a sentence. In such utterances one can usually find continuative verbs {etre, durer, valoir) which are used with adverbials of time, thus indicating certain segments of time.

In her article Elżbieta Skibińska examined, on the example of three novels by Georges Simenon and their Polish translations, the possible interpretations and Polish renderings of the on + voir construction. Even such a limited linguistic corpus allowed the author to distinguish two ways of translating this construction: the first one, with the use of the predicate widać (one can see that...), retains the element of the visual perception; the second one, based on the use of a verb that can position an object in space, stać, leżeć, wisieć etc. (stand, lie, hang), eliminates the element of the visual perception. The outcome of the analysis made the author formulate the hypothesis that perceptional depiction of the presented events happens more often in French than in Polish, but this hypothesis ought to be verified on broader material.

The process of learning foreign languages carries the pragmatic aspect of gaining knowledge of it. Such pragmatism is revealed not only in the purposes and immediate motivations of the possibility to use a foreign language as a tool, but also it shows the conscious study and analysis of the language itself, which is an organized process supported by teaching programmes. Learning Italian, both today as well as in the past, in most cases is the process of learning the second language, which takes place not only within the territory of The Apennine Peninsula. The history of teaching Italian in Europe reaches back to the beginnings of the language in Italy, where the first grammar books were written down and the common language {italiano volgare) started to displace the Latin. In many European countries scholars created the Italian grammars, in national languages or in Latin, which were at the same time the manuals for learning Italian. Also in Poland Italian became wide-spread, in particular in XV and XVI century, mostly because of the political and cultural relations between Poland and Italy. The following presentation gives a picture of the history of Italian language in Poland, and tells of the evolution of teaching methods and their influence on Polish grammar terminology.

In her article Magdalena Edut presented a new type of the lexicographical description which is based on the methodology of the object-oriented approach (approche orientee-objets). In the first part of the text she discussed, on the example of the word mżawka (drizzle), which belongs to the category of the “natural phenomena”, the principles and aims of the proposed approach. In the following parts she compared the received description with the description suggested by the lexical database WordNet and with the contemporary lexicographical theories dealing with the issue of the automatic translation:
- prof. G. Gross’s idea of an electronic dictionary,
- I. Mel’cuk’s and A. Zolkovsky’s model Sens-Texte,
- Pustejovsky’s and Boguraev’s structure qualia.