Department of Polish

The Department of Polish Language at the Institute of Linguistics, University of Opole, conducts research in the fields of contemporary, historical and applied linguistics. The specific research interests of the staff cover such thematic areas as: contemporary public, religious and educational discourse; stylistics, linguistic genology, text linguistics, onomastics, semantics, pragmatics, lexicology and lexicography, phraseology and phraseography, paremiology, dialectology, ethnolinguistics, language teaching, Polish language teaching, corpus linguistics, neuro-speech therapy and educational speech therapy.

The Department’s staff are members of numerous international and national academic bodies, including the Stylistic Commission of the International Committee of Slavists, the Legal Language Commission of the Polish Language Council at the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Stylistic Commission of the Linguistics Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Religious Language Group at the Presidium of the Polish Language Council of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

The Department is a co-founder of the editorial board of the international journal *Stylistyka* and the publication series *Language and Education*. Members of the Department are involved in the certification of proficiency in the Polish language (they have been organising certification exams for several years).

Specific areas of research

Stylistics, discourse studies and linguistic genology:

• stylistic, rhetorical and cognitive discourse analysis: the religious and educational spheres of communication, press discourse (the language of journalists and columnists), homophobic and inclusive discourse, feminism from a communicative perspective, linguistic and cultural emancipation of sexual minorities,
• text genres and their transformations in the contemporary genre landscape: genres of religious discourse, school textbooks, press genres (columns), the genre of phonographic publications,
• the social roles of language in the contemporary world, e.g. in human relations with the natural world (ecolinguistics),
• ethical and semantic contexts of contemporary discourses (including the influence of exclamations on style of expression and the emotional reception of messages, the influence of consumerism on semantics, post-truth from a linguistic perspective), also in a comparative aspect,
• historical stylistics: 16th- and 17th-century genres of artistic and religious style (here especially postyllography); idiostyle.

Onomastics:

• onomastics from a cultural perspective,
• toponymy and microtoponymy of Silesia,
• chrematonymy and medionymy,
• appellativisation of proper names, eponymy, metaphor and metonymy in naming,
• proper names in discourse,
• the onymic picture of the world,
• literary and musical onomastics.

Lexicology and lexicography:

• monolingual and translation lexicography,
• dialectal lexicon and phraseology (especially Silesian, particularly in the field of culinary lexicon and phraseology): a dictionary of Silesian dialectal phraseology and a lexicon recording dialectal names of dishes,
• popular music terminology.

Language teaching:

• teaching Polish as a first language: developing and improving linguistic awareness and competence, as well as communicative competence (particularly listening, writing and speaking skills),
• the ethical dimension of language in communication from an educational perspective,
• the impact of socio-cultural changes taking place in the modern world on pupils’ educational needs and on teaching at all stages of school education,
• the application of findings from language teaching theory in the teaching of Polish as a first language,
• assessment of achievement in Polish as a first language,
• didactic communication,
• the relationship between linguistics and language teaching (including common ground in the context of the development of multilingualism).

Language teaching:

• teaching Polish as a foreign and second language to adults, children and young people: developing communicative competence, working on mediation and interaction skills,
• the application of the principles and achievements of linguodidactics, neurodidactics and cognitive linguistics in the teaching of Polish as a foreign language,
• the specific nature of language courses, teaching methods and the work of foreign language teachers in various European Union countries.