No. 5/2013

The paper presents an outline of the speech-therapy care in Poland since its early days until the present time. It describes legal and organisational framework of the speech-therapy care system within both educational facilities (pre-schools, schools, psychological and educational counselling services) and health care institutions. The directions of evolution in the currently prevailing speech-therapy care model are described. The paper point out that the current needs for speech-therapy care are not satisfied to a sufficient extent, in particular with regard to care over children during the antenatal, perinatal and postnatal period. Moreover, the author provides an outline of contemporary training models for speech therapists and points to the autonomisation of speech therapy as a stand-alone academic discipline.

The paper describes the speech disorder classifications which are most commonly applied by Polish speech therapists. Developed during the last six decades, those classifications are based on a variety of criteria: causes, symptoms and a combination of the two. The paper also provides an overview of international classifications of speech disorders.

This paper describes the results of analysis of creative linguistic efforts made by five-year-olds. In this experimental project each child was studied three times in the course of six months and was asked, each time, to tell its own, made-up fairy tale. Children’s stories were then analysed in a number of dimensions. Additionally, the process of fairy tale creation was observed. During a period of three months after the first step, some children either took part in classes aimed at boosting and activating their linguistic skills (experimental group: during those classes children invented their own fairy tales) or participated in a standard pre-school programme (control group: those children only listened to fairy tales). Although the differences between the groups were insignificant right after the end of the classes, yet it turned out that children from the experimental group made greater linguistic progress versus the control group after the subsequent three months.

The paper addresses the problem of linguistically polite behaviours where the senders or recipients are pre‑school children. The source material consisted of dialogues between an adult (a pre-school teacher, a trainee) and a child (or children) which were part of educational discourse. Elements of that discourse are identified: participants, situational setting, topics and goals. The description focuses on selected polite behaviours, i.e. greetings and farewells, both of which represent a politeness frame of a communicative event, and on positive attitudes towards the conversation partner. It seems that polite behaviours displayed by adults play primarily an educational role. In turn, children engage in acts of politeness appropriately for a specific situation: they do it either upon their own initiative or ‘forced’ by the teacher as they constantly remain the subjects of the upbringing process.

The text aspires to contribute to the stream of research exploring how young people conceptualise the reality through the medium of teen-specific communicative practices. It seems that such practices reflect the transformations of the cultural category of ‘rebellion’ which is an effect of experiencing the world at a young age. The reconstruction of rebellion in the semantic of the youth sociolect seems a highly worthwhile effort in the reality of ‘liquid structures’ (What happens throughout the whole life in your case, happens within a week in ours), network-based bonds, apotheosis of ludicity, where dynamics determines the strategy of experiencing the world (usage, consumption, flexibility) and its hermeneutics. The rebellious ‘potential’, justified in the models of post-figurative cultures, becomes exhausted in the co-figurative and pre-figurative McWorld. Unless pragmatically justified, negation becomes an unnecessary ballast and a waste of energy. Creation is more exciting as it involves experimenting with ‘the self’ in a supportive youth community (including the speech community). The ludic dimension of dissent has prevailed over the idealistic dimension, the latter being firmly established in the cultural consciousness. Therefore, it seems valid to ask whether contemporary young people are ‘non-angry’ or maybe they are ‘differently angry’? This paper aims to provide an answer to this question by looking ‘from inside’ of the youth language, through semantic analysis of vocabulary, phraseology and textual practices of ‘youth speak’.

A Dictionary of Personal Names is a project aiming to describe common names of persons in a way which is unified in terms of content, methodology and formal aspects. The Dictionary has been developed as a free-of-charge online service, available to everyone via a web browser. We believe that thanks to its format the Dictionary will become an easily accessible, convenient yet reliable tool for translators, text editors, journalists, teachers or administrators. It may also serve as a reference for other researchers (e.g. linguists or sociologists). We hope it will also become an interesting reference source for others who are interested in the meaning of words in Polish.

The use of language evokes some ethical implications. It seems that this idea has been quite common since antiquity and there is no need to provide a full description of this stream of reflection. However, issues relating to ‘ethics of the word’ are connected, on the one hand, with the culture of the language, and, on the other, with the problem of politeness norms that are associated with the ethical dimension of behaviours. However, is the term ‘ethics of the word’, which has become widely popular and is commonly used, correct from the logical and rhetorical point of view? This discussion aims to provide a twofold analysis of this term and present the associated difficulties. The basic difficulty is associated with defining the term but there is also a serious related issue, namely that the elliptical nature of the term may lead to semantics problems. Moreover, problems with the designatum may lead to a situation where the scope of this semantic expression will be unclear. This article is an attempt to resolve these paradoxes.

The essence of an editor’s work is to ensure availability of authors’ manuscripts for purposes associated with research or education. Manuscripts have remained the core of an editor’s work since the Middle Ages. As shown in this essay, the last two centuries witnesses radical changes in this sphere, from a sheet of paper to an electronic storage medium, and from a quill pen to a cursor. The challenges faced by modern-day editors call for a good understanding of those changes and for new research tools to be developed. However, the role of editing, especially in the Polish territories during the last two hundred years, goes even deeper. The texts which were disseminated on those territories had a chance of surviving the ravages of wars on the Polish territories in the 19th and 20th century just because they were printed.