Style, discourse and their positioning. Comments on two fundamental works in the field of Polish stylistics from the perspective of German linguistics studies

Abstract

Recently, the number of bilingual or even multilingual contrastive text and discourse analyses has been on the rise in Europe. Attempts are being made to grasp the common features as well as dissimilarities in terms of several specific linguistic phenomena, often demonstrated against the broader background of social and cultural contexts.

However, contrastive analyses encompassing two parallel linguistic disciplines in two different fields of study are still in the initial phase.

The authors of this article carry out the contrastive analysis of the selected aspects of the Polish and the German linguistics. In this context, the analysis of relative positioning of style and discourse, as presented in the two fundamental publications on Polish stylistics from the German linguistics perspective seems to be the most interesting one. Reciprocal references between style and discourse are also discussed against the background of cognitive traditions in the two areas of study.

The authors also bring up a question to what extent the two aforementioned guides to the Polish style, widely considered to be representative, embark on fundamental questions on style as such as well as some notions in the field of stylistics and research traditions in the given field.