„I Believe God Like a Child” – A Sacralization of Colloquial Language in the Poetry of Jan Twardowski

Abstract

There are many elements of colloquial speech in poetry of Jan Twardowski which belong to different subsystems of a language, such as: lexics and semantics, phraseology and syntax. A large amount of lexics includes words with antropocentric meaning which exist in every variant of language. But the major part of the lexics is colloquialisms with emotional meaning. The most often they have expressive and pragmatic function. Imitating oral language has also an impact on the structure of Jan Twardowski’s poetry. The poet uses colloquial elements for breaking language conventions and in this way he creates a new kind of metaphisical poetry. Using colloqiualisms apart from elements becoming from other variants of language causes an increase of semantic potention of this poetry. It also creates a new perspective that is not charateristic for the linguistically homogenious texts and enables this poetry to get to the larger amount of readers, including even these who don’t believe in God.