Department of Slavic Languages

The Department of Slavic Languages conducts research in linguistics (East Slavic and West Slavic) and language teaching. The main areas of research include:

1. Grammatical and lexical systems of Slavic languages, particularly Russian and Czech, from both monolingual and comparative perspectives.
2. The theory and practice of phraseology and phraseography, both monolingual and in translation, particularly in the Polish-Russian-Czech context.
3. The history and contemporary state of Slavic teolinguistics.
4. Collective identities and communal memory in the cultural borderlands of contemporary Europe.
5. Translation lexicography.
6. Textbook theory and issues in the optimisation of foreign language teaching.

Within the above areas, the Department’s staff focus on the following specific topics:

1. A comparative study of Polish and Russian simple sentence syntax.
2. A comparison of prepositional systems in Slavic languages.
3. The language of the modern Russian internet.
4. Polish-Czech language contacts from a diachronic perspective.
5. Stratification of contemporary Czech.
6. Polish-Czech firefighting terminology.
7. The functioning of idioms, catchphrases and precedent phenomena in Polish and Russian.
8. Communication on the Internet.
9. New Internet genres.
10. Theory of phraseology and phraseography (monolingual and translation).
11. Translation paremiology and paremiography.
12. The linguistic and cultural image of inanimate nature in Czech phraseology.
13. Winged words in intra- and intercultural circulation.
14. Issues concerning the use of texts, dual-text and multi-text approaches in lexicographical theory and practice.
15. Issues in onomastics and eponymy and their lexicographical description.
16. Theory and practice of translation studies in the teaching of Russian as a foreign language.
17. Theory and practice of optimising textbooks for foreign language teaching.
18. The use of multimedia in the practical teaching of Russian.
19. Description of Russian business language.
20. Practical didactic translation phraseology.

An important form of disseminating research is the academic conferences organised by the Department, which are usually international in scope. Staff members of the Department also participate in international research programmes and projects, such as ‘Prepositional grammar in Russian and other Slavic languages’, “The Linguistic and Cultural Worldview of the Slavs in Comparative Perspective”, “Universities for the Borderlands” and “Česko-polsko-ruský idiomatikon”. The Department’s Inter-departmental Lexicography and Translation Laboratory is compiling a translation dictionary entitled A Handy Polish-Russian Idiomaticon and its theoretical framework (currently 15 volumes). Furthermore, as part of the “Universities for the Borderlands” project, an interactive map of the Polish-Czech borderlands has been published, produced with the participation of the Department’s staff.

The Department of Slavic Languages also cooperates with the Association for Polish-Eastern Cooperation.