English Loan Translations in Polish
Word-formation Patterns, Lexicalization, Idiomaticity and Institutionalization
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1. Introduction
- Chapter 2. Loan translation as a linguistic phenomenon
- 2.1 Terminology – theoretical background
- 2.1.1 Overview of prior work on calques: the East meets the West
- 2.1.2 Conclusion
- 2.2 Loan translation as a type of loan
- 2.2.1 Loan translation as calque
- 2.2.2 Loan translations versus other types of calque
- 2.2.2.1 Loan translation vs. semantic loan
- 2.2.2.2 Loan translation vs. multi-word semantic loan
- 2.2.2.3 One-word loan translation vs. semantic loan
- 2.2.2.4 Loan translation vs. loan rendition
- 2.2.2.5 Loan translation vs. phraseological calque
- 2.2.2.6 Multi-word loan translation vs. syntactic calque
- 2.2.3 Loan translation vs. loanblend
- 2.2.4 Loan translation vs. loan creation
- 2.2.5 Loan translation vs. adapted loanword
- 2.3 Definition of loan translation
- 2.4 Loan translations as contact-induced innovations
- 2.4.1 Contact-induced set expressions – identification criteria
- 2.4.2 Loan translations from English – identification criteria
- Chapter 3. English loan translations in Polish
- 3.1 Loan translations in Polish: a diachronic account
- 3.1.1 Classical loan translations
- 3.1.2 Loan translations from German
- 3.1.3 Loan translations from French
- 3.1.4 Loan translations from Russian
- 3.1.5 Loan translations from English
- 3.2 English loan translations in Polish – formal description and classification
- 3.2.1 Sources of research material
- 3.2.2 Method of description
- 3.2.3 Principles of material division
- 3.2.3.1 Types of deviation from the foreign model
- 3.2.3.2 Inexact loan translations, i.e. loan renditions
- 3.2.3.3 One-word vs. multi-word loan translations
- 3.2.3.4 Multi-word compounds vs. nominal phraseological units
- 3.2.3.5 Phraseological replicas
- 3.2.4 Components of research material
- 3.2.5 Classification of English loan translations in Polish with respect to the exactness of translation and structural deviation
- 3.2.5.1 Comments on the categories
- 3.2.5.2 Analyzing, synthetizing, contracted and expanded loan translations
- 3.2.5.3 Structural regularities between loan translations and their English etymons
- 3.2.6 English loan translations in Polish – presentation of research material
- 3.3 Multi-word semantic loans
- 3.4 Loanblends and hybrid creations
- 3.5 Pseudo-loan translations
- Chapter 4. Semantic processes in loan translations
- 4.1 Lexicalization and idiomaticity of loan translations
- 4.1.1 Lexicalization: an overview of approaches
- 4.1.2 Semantic lexicalization (idiomatization)
- 4.1.3 Lexicalization of loan translations
- 4.1.4 Semantic lexicalization of loan translation
- 4.1.5 Degrees of idiomaticity of loan translations
- 4.2 Semantic importation in loan translations vs. their semantic adaptation
- 4.3 Semantic development of loan translations: reinterpretation and semantic reborrowing
- 4.4 Ellipsis in loan translations
- 4.5 Collocability of the components of a loan translation
- 4.6 Semantic fields represented by loan translations from English
- Chapter 5. Perception of loan translations
- 5.1 Institutionalization: from a nonce formation to a dictionary entry
- 5.2 De-institutionalization
- 5.3 Institutionalization of loan translations in the recipient language
- 5.3.1 Factors facilitating institutionalization
- 5.3.2 Factors inhibiting institutionalization
- 5.3.3 Introduction of loan translations into a written text
- 5.3.4 Semantic interpretation of loan translations
- 5.4 Signs of institutionalization of loan translations
- 5.4.1 Inflectional status of loan translations
- 5.4.2 Lexical adaptation of loan translations
- 5.4.2.1 Lexical substitution, palimpsest and antonymous replacement
- 5.4.2.2 Modification
- 5.4.2.3 Lexical extension
- 5.4.2.4 Fusion
- 5.4.2.5 Individualization of idiomatic constituents
- 5.4.2.6 Idiomatic allusion based on a loan translation
- 5.4.2.7 Idiomatic disintegration
- 5.4.2.8 Mixed adaptation
- 5.4.3 Dialectal versions of loan translations
- 5.4.4 Loan translations as derivational bases
- 5.4.5 Lexical entries for loan translations
- 5.4.6 Semantic development and ellipsis of loan translations
- 5.5 International loan translations
- 5.5.1 Internationalisms
- 5.5.2 International loan translations from English
- 5.6 Reasons for loan translating (rather than adopting foreign lexemes)
- 5.7 Cultural specificity of loans
- 5.7.1 Anglo-American cultural patterns reflected in loan translations from English
- Chapter 6. Conclusions
- References
- Index of English loan translations in Polish
- Subject Index
a. general abbreviations and symbols
b. dictionaries
| EJO | Encyklopedia językoznawstwa ogólnego. Polański, Kazimierz (ed.). Wrocław, 2003. |
| FD | The Free Dictionary. Available at: http://thefreedictionary.com. |
| MW | Merriam-Webster online. Available at: http:// merriam-webster.com. |
| OED | Oxford English Dictionary. 20 vols., 2nd edition. Simpson, John A. and Edmund S. C. Weiner (eds.). Oxford, 1989. |
| OED online | Oxford English Dictionary online. 3rd edition. In progress 2000-. Available at: http://www.oed.com. |
| PASF | Polsko-angielski słownik frazeologiczny. 2 vols. Arabski, Janusz (ed.). Łódź/Warszawa, 2010. |
| SJPDor | Słownik języka polskiego. Doroszewski, Witold (ed.). Warszawa, 1961. Available at: http://doroszewski.pwn.pl. |
| STJ | Słownik terminologii językoznawczej. Gołąb, Zbigniew, Adam Heinz and Kazimierz Polański. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. 1970. |
| SWar | Słownik języka polskiego. Słownik warszawski. Karłowicz, Jan (ed.). Warszawa, 1900–1927. |
| SWil | Słownik języka polskiego. Słownik wileński. Zdanowicz, Aleksander. Wilno, 1861. |
| SZA | Słownik zapożyczeń angielskich. Mańczak-Wohlfeld, Elżbieta (ed.). Warszawa, 2010. |
| UD | Urban Dictionary. Available at: http://www.urbandictionary.com. |
| USJP | Uniwersalny słownik języka polskiego. Dubisz, Stanisław (ed.). Warszawa, 2003. ← 15 | 16 → |
| WD | Webster’s Dictionary. Available at: http://www.webster-dictionary.org. |
| WSF | Wielki słownik frazeologiczny języka polskiego. Müldner-Nieckowski, Piotr (ed.). Warszawa, 2003. |
c. sources of research material
Corpus
| NKJP | Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego [Polish National Corpus]. Available at: http://www.nkjp.pl. Adam Przepiórkowski, Mirosław Bańko, Rafał L. Górski, Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (eds.). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2012. |
Printed magazines and newspapers cited in NKJP
Other printed magazines
| N | Newsweek Polska |
Spoken sources
| MP | speech by a Member of Polish Parliament during session, stored in NKJP |
| TVN24 | TVN television station |
| TVPolsat | Polsat television station ← 17 | 18 → |
Among the many possible ways of expanding the lexical stock of a language, word-formation processes, semantic changes and borrowing foreign language material constitute the most effective means. Word-formation processes, some of them endlessly productive, either alter the internal structure of a lexeme or use the bonding potential of native (and assimilated foreign) morphemes or fragments of words to supplement the lexis. Semantic changes, which occur either independently of or under a foreign influence, alter the meaning of a lexeme, which contributes to its novel collocational patterns. Borrowing foreign language material ranges from the adoption of complete lexemes with their forms and meanings to the copying of foreign structural and syntactic patterns. These three methods of enriching the vocabulary of a language operate on different principles and so are usually treated separately in linguistic studies. Yet they come together and are all at play when loan translations are formed. Among the various strategies in lexical development and filling lexical gaps in a language, the literal translation of foreign set expressions is unique in the sense that it involves all three processes: borrowing, word-formation and semantic change.
The present work deals with loan translations from English in contemporary Polish, which, apart from loanwords, loanblends and semantic loans, constitute yet another possible result of an influence one language exerts over another. The following study is a continuation of the research on English semantic loans in Polish, whose results were published in 2007 in a monograph Anglosemantyzmy w języku polskim – ze słownikiem.1 An integral part of that study is a dictionary of English semantic loans in Polish, which have been defined and exemplified with authentic contexts of use. In the course of research for Anglosemantyzmy…, it became clear that there was a need for further research into the field of loan translations from English whose appearance could be witnessed daily by users of Polish. The first step towards the present study is an Appendix to that 2007 monograph, which lists over two hundred and forty English loan translations (P. kalki strukturalne) in Polish, including phraseological replicas of English idiomatic expressions. Since that collection was accumulated as a sort of “side effect” of the main research on semantic loans and as such was not supplemented with any theoretical background or analysis of the collected material, the need ← 19 | 20 → for further research was stated in the Conclusions, and the field was left open. In the face of copious language material, the need for further theoretical studies leading to a systematic classification of this type of loans and a discussion of the semantic processes that are present during and after the formation of a loan translation seems self-evident. The present study addresses morphosyntactic, semantic and extralinguistic issues in the context of one- and multi-word expressions loan translated from a foreign language.
It seems sound to assume that a comprehensive study of loan translations must be carried out from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. The recognition of the borrowing process, historical by nature, must involve a comparison of the various stages of the recipient language to identify innovations. Whether the innovations are contact-induced requires their comparison with the possible foreign models in the donor language (see e.g. Haugen 1950: 227). While in earlier studies on the subject of loan translations much attention was devoted to the very outcome of the calquing process, the present work endeavours also to address the semantic, lexical and morphological changes whose occurrence has been evidenced in a preliminary analysis of the research material. Loan translating includes onomasiological and semasiological processes, both during the borrowing process, which involves the creation of a new complex expression in the recipient language, semantic importation of a foreign sense and the semantic development of one or more of the constituents that are part of the newly-formed expression, and at the post-borrowing stage, which may bear witness to further semantic development of a loan translation, the formation of derivatives and lexical adaptation. One other attempt is to define a set of identification criteria which will be used to trace the origins of the loan translations in question. We shall also propose a classification of loan translations, taking into account a number of criteria, such as morphological patterns, exactness of translation, types of deviation from the foreign etymon, degree of idiomaticity and other.
Much theoretical work has been done on loan translations and a number of articles discussing and exemplifying the phenomenon in reference to other European languages have appeared over the last century (for an overview see Chapter 2). Yet a study of English loan translations in Polish is justified for several reasons. The number of English set expressions loan translated into Polish in the second decade of the 21st century is overwhelming and continually growing. The speakers of Polish are witnesses to daily language innovations whose origins must ultimately be sought for in English. A literal interpretation of expressions such as P. gorący ziemniak (E. ‘hot potato’) or P. białe kołnierzyki (E. ‘white collars’), ← 20 | 21 → which is to be expected from an average user of Polish, poses a communication problem. There is a need to record and analyze loan translated set expressions and define their idiomatic senses that have been imported from English. No such study has been offered for Polish so far. While Obara’s 1989 work on calques is a thorough account of both East- and West-European theoretical research, it was written at a time when only scarce instances of loan translations from English could be found in Polish and so the work is based on single exemplifications of calques from classical languages, as well as from German and French. In his largely theoretical work, Jerzy Obara expresses hope for a future comprehensive account of calques in Polish based on a sizeable corpus of research material, though in 1989 he may not have meant expressions loan translated from English. Thirdly, there is still room for a theoretical discussion of the semantic processes that accompany and follow the borrowing process, such as semantic lexicalization and semantic development of loan translations, which have rarely been addressed in previous studies. Moreover, a careful observer of the ways in which English set expressions are loan translated into Polish faces questions related to the origins and lexical content of loans. E. skyscraper has been loan rendered in Polish as drapacz chmur (E. lit. ‘scraper of clouds’) rather than *drapacz nieba (E. lit. ‘scraper of sky’), which may raise questions about the former’s relation to the German Wolkenkratzer, H. felhőkarcoló, and Cz. mrakodrap, which also, unlike F. gratte-ciel, It. grattacielo, Sp. rascacielos and Rus. небоскрёб, deviate lexically from the English etymon. Polish computer users have translated E. network war as wojna w sieci (E. lit. ‘war in the network’) rather than *wojna sieciowa, yet they use the polysemous adjective in the loan rendered hotel sieciowy (E. lit. ‘chain hotel’), where it has a different sense.
Studies on English linguistic influence on Polish to date have been devoted chiefly to loanwords and the more recent ones to semantic loans and hybrid formations,2 which has been dictated by the nature of the linguistic influence ← 21 | 22 → of English. Loanwords, involving morphemic and semantic importation, were the first observable traces of English in the Polish lexicon, found already in the 17th century. The first English loanwords were culture-specific and their number in non-specialist Polish grew from eight items, attested in Merkuriusz Polski Ordynaryjny from 1661 (e.g. lord major, mylord, par, spiker), to approximately two thousand by 2010 (Mańczak-Wohlfeld 2006: 18, 2010: 8). The first English semantic loans and loan translations, still scarce at that time, appeared in Polish in the 1960s (Kurkowska 1976; Ożdżyński 1970: 69). As late as 1993 a publication on the most recent loans from English qualifies loan translations as rare and only three examples are cited, P. kobieta interesu (< E. businesswoman), P. lekarz domowy (< E. family doctor) and P. profesor wizytujący (< E. visiting professor) (Sękowska 1993: 247). Their number began to grow quickly in Polish after the political changes in 1989. Poles both as individuals and as a community willingly adopted the Western cultural patterns. Polish as a language of people long hidden behind the Iron Curtain began to draw extensively from English, already a global lingua franca, to fill in lexical gaps created by the rapid political, economic, cultural and social changes that Poland and Poles have been experiencing since 1989. Unlimited access to the Internet since the late 1990s and early 2000s marked a steady growth of all types of loans from English and irreversibly altered the face of the Polish lexical, semantic and derivational systems.
Loanwords, defined as lexemes borrowed from a foreign language with their form and meaning, constitute just one of the possible outcomes of linguistic borrowing. It is “covert borrowing [that] is so much more important than the more obvious loanwords” (Haugen 1956: 766). Semantic loans and loan translations, which make use of the native lexical stock of the recipient language, have been creeping into Polish almost imperceptibly. There is much less opposition among average language users to the new senses attached to familiar lexemes or to novel word combinations built of native linguistic material than to formally foreign loanwords whose pronunciation, graphic form and meaning betray their foreign provenance and pose a problem for a person not acquainted with English. Velten’s (1930: 332) early observation that large numbers of loan translations and semantic loans “that cannot be recognized at first sight are entirely overlooked” might still hold true. In his study, Velten maintains that intense language contact may cause covert loans to outnumber loanwords. ← 22 | 23 →
It has traditionally been assumed in the literature and proved by the history of foreign linguistic influence on Polish before 1989 that loan translations are much less frequent than loanwords because language users choose loan translating as a method of borrowing from a foreign lexical system only when the foreign linguistic influence is not welcome for political reasons, cf. the influx of German loan translations in Polish in the 19th century (Walczak 1987). An analysis of the contact-induced lexical changes Polish has been experiencing in the last two decades indicates that this condition does no longer hold. Translating foreign set expressions has become yet another effective means of rendering foreign concepts in Polish, the reasons for which will be discussed in this volume.
The term ‘borrowing’, often used ambiguously in studies on language contact, will be employed in the present study to refer to a process, not to the result of the process. The results of the process of borrowing will be labelled generally as loans unless a more specific reference is made to their various types, such as loanwords, loan translations, semantic loans, etc. It must be pointed out that the hyperonymic term borrowing, or loan, referring generally to any language element of foreign origin, has been used freely in the literature. That is, no definite specifications have been offered concerning the frequency with which or the period of time over which a foreign language element has to be used in the recipient language to be considered a loan. Polish studies on English loans represent divergent approaches to this issue. On the one hand, Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld in her early studies on anglicisms (see References) represents the more conservative but safer approach and defines loanwords from English as those foreign lexical items that are attested in general dictionaries of Polish. Their inclusion in a dictionary proves their high frequency in the recipient language.3 At the other end of the scale comes the recent research on anglicisms found in the language of the Internet, where single occurrences of English lexemes in Polish private blogs are counted as loans (cf. Zabawa 2010: 208). Precision calls for a distinction to be made between what might be termed a nonce borrowing and an established loan. In the latter case, the foreign element’s inclusion in a dictionary serves as a criterion for its recognition as a loan. However, the pace at which English lexical items are borrowed by Polish exceeds the frequency with which new editions of lexicographic works are published. Therefore dictionary reference cannot be the only criterion for defining the status of loans, many of which are characterized by ← 23 | 24 → a high frequency of use in the Polish National Corpus but are unattested in dictionaries. Since the phrase ‘high frequency’ is relative and since it seems impossible to define the number of necessary occurrences of a foreign language element in the recipient language for it to be considered a loan, it is reasonable to combine the two approaches and regard a single occurrence of a loan translation in the Polish National Corpus as sufficient attestation. Through such a decision we risk registering in the present study those loan translated expressions that may in the course of time prove ephemeral or become obsolete. What we gain, however, is a record of their existence at a certain point in time, which should be one of the objectives of lexicographic works. The main aim of the study is to provide as comprehensive an account of English loan translations in Polish as possible and to discuss the processes that accompany the formation of loan translations in the recipient language. Following the principles of corpus linguistics saying that reliable language analysis should involve field-collected samples, i.e. natural contexts, the corpus used in this paper comprises a variety of authentic texts. Registering material recorded in actual language production rather than relying solely on dictionaries allows us to capture the continual contact-induced lexical, semantic and derivational changes, typical of a living language. Therefore the research material used in this study is limited neither by the number of occurrences of loan translations in the corpus nor to the sources of material excerption. Professional jargons, though, will not be included (with the exception of commonly understood computer and economic terms).
The material used in the present study has been excerpted mainly from the Polish mass media, as well as from lexicographic works including general dictionaries of Polish and scholarly works on the subject. The authentic contexts of use that exemplify the use of loan translations come from written and spoken texts found in the Polish National Corpus (NKJP). In 1974, L. P. Jefremov believed that a dictionary of loan translations is something we can only dream of (Jefremov 1974 qtd. in Obara 1989a: 5). It may, of course, be impossible to compile a comprehensive dictionary of loan translated expressions (in any language), including those sourced in various languages and borrowed in various periods of time as well as loan translations representing all semantic fields, professional jargons and different registers. That is the reason why no claims are made that the material gathered in this study is complete. But an attempt will be made to accumulate enough instances of English loan translations for them to constitute a representative sample of the phenomenon, which will allow for their further classification and formulation of valid conclusions.
Details
- Pages
- 350
- Year
- 2015
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783653057935
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783653962222
- ISBN (MOBI)
- 9783653962215
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631663608
- DOI
- 10.3726/978-3-653-05793-5
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2015 (August)
- Keywords
- language contact linguistic borrowing calques contact-induced innovations
- Published
- Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2015. 350 pp., 2 tables, 6 graphs
