Formal Variance in Polish Adjectival Anglicisms

Summary

Introduction

It is only in recent studies that the corpus-based analyses of loans, traditionally being typically quantitative and form-oriented, have begun to focus on the usage of loans in specific contexts and on the recipient language users’ communicative needs, reflected also in the conscious choices of the formal variants of loanwords.

The description of the morphological and graphic adaptation of English-sourced adjectives in Polish presented in this paper is based on corpus-retrived data for two reasons. Firstly, some of the examples used to illustrate formal variance are relatively recent lexical loans not listed in SZA (2010) or in Polish dictionaries of foreign words (WSWO, SWO). Secondly, lexicographers tend to be selective in their choices of the formal variants of loanwords, which is conditioned by the sources used in dictionary compilation and/or the degree of linguistic purism. Large language corpora including diverse texts and genres are not, by definition, normativity-oriented; thus they are an adequate source for the retrieval of authentic material.

While the paper focuses on the morphological and graphic adaptation of English adjectival lexical loans, it also addresses cases of parallel and unsystematic processes of loanword formal integration that result in formal variance. The coexisting morphological and graphic variants of English adjectival loanwords in Polish are attested in corpus-retrieved excerpts presented in this study. The term variance, seen as a manifestation of polymorphy in loanwords at the levels of pronunciation, spelling and morphology, is used after Winter-Froemel (2010: 66, 69).

The research question put forward in the present study is whether the formal variance observed in English adjectival loanwords in Polish is an exclusive result of the integration procedure being an ongoing gradual process spread over a period of time, illustrated for instance by the English-sourced Polish adjectives casualny and casualowy, and ultimately każualowy (corpus queries might be of help here to determine frequency of the loan variants in respect of time), or is the simultaneous usage of the various morphological and graphic variants of loanwords by the recipient language speakers a reflection of conscious choices designed to evoke intended pragmatic effects.