Res Humanitariae

Polish language in Latgale today is only one of many languages spoken in the local community. The Polish minority here forms seven per cent of population but Polish language, which extended to the territory during the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, is in fact threatened with extinction. The regiolect in question is mainly exposed to the influence of the Russian and to a smaller extent Latvian language, thus it extensively incorporates foreign linguistic units. The report aims at describing some structural and semantic peculiarities of verbs functioning in the spoken variety of Latgalian Polish. Current research is based on interviews with eighty-six Poles born from 1922 till 2006 representing all generations of the local Polish minority.

This article focuses on compound nouns and adjectives in the first dictionary by K. Sirvydis Promptuarium dictionum Polonicarum, Latinarum et Lituanicarum. The analysed compounds are firstly divided into groups according to the part of speech the constituents of the compound belong to, seeking to identify the most productive model of compounds in this 17th-century source. Moreover, attention is also paid to the relationship between elements of compound words and to rare compound words of indirect meaning. Finally, the use of Lithuanian compounds is compared to neighbouring Polish words, to clarify if Sirvydas tended to use mechanical translation.

The article presents the analysis of onomasiological system of one group of infixed and sta-stem verbs attested in the old Lithuanian scripts, denominative verbs in particular, derived from adjectives and nouns. The analysed verbs belong to the type of fientive word formation: their derivational meaning is ‘to become or to acquire/experience something which is denoted by the primary word’. The primary words are specific and abstract adjectives and nouns which by the means of affixal nomination – paradigmation – are used to form fientives or, more rarely, stative verbs. What is more, in the process of verbalization, additional means of derivation, namely, the infix and affix sta, play a significant role in attributing the verb to the derivational model of fientives. The centre of fientive derivational type is comprised of deadjectives, while desubstantives stand in the periphery of this type. The semantics of the denominatives analyzed is determined explicitly (in rarer cases, implicitly) by semantics of primary adjectives and nouns. According to properties/objects denoted by the lexical motivator, seven motivational models of denominative verbs have been established: colourative, morphological, physiomorphological, psychomorphological, the model of possession and social relationship, gustatory, and thermal one.

The article presents an analysis of the derivational system of one group of verbs attested to in the old Lithuanian text ‚Ziwatas‘ (1759), in particular denominative verbs derived from adjectives and nouns. The verbs analysed belong to factitive, ornative, fientive, stative, instrumental, similative and participative word formation categories. The centre of the denominative derivational type is comprised of desubstantives (51% in total) and deadjectives (42%), while derivatives from other parts of speech stand on the periphery of this type. The prototypical derivational types of denominatives are deadjectival verbs with the suffix -inti, and desubstantives with the suffixes -avoti and -yti, both belonging to the factitive category.