Anglicism-Defining Statements in Informational Articles on the Internet

Abstract

More and more words borrowed from English are penetrating contemporary Polish. Such lex­emes give name to the social, economic and cultural phenomena that are appearing all over the world, and which later arrive in Poland. Some of them have Polish equivalents, whilst others do not (yet) have, so they function in their original, foreign language form. This article presents ways of defining anglicisms in informational articles on the Internet in order to explain their meanings to new readers of the media (e.g. the types of borrowing and their linguistic determi­nants, the types of sems used in the definitions, etc.). The analysis focuses on the description of the internal structure of the defining utterance: the definiendum, the definition hyphen and, above all, the definiens, which is the basic transmitter of the meaning of the lexeme. Research has shown that journalists use various methods for defining anglicisms, such as: dictionary, clas­sical, contextual, and cognitive definitions; partial and complete definitions; and neutral and metaphorical definitions. The Internet definition statements are characterised by linguistic diversity (lexical, syntactic, structural, and stylistic), used by the media broadcaster to explain the meaning of the borrowing, and – more importantly, for a media text – to make the form of com­munication more attractive.