The Canadian-Polish Lexicon: Classes of Items and Their Semantic Distribution

Abstract

This paper focuses on the analysis of a specific group of lexemes used by Polish immigrants in Canada. The vocabulary used appears neither in Standard Polish nor in Standard English, but is an outcome of the contact of two separate language and culture systems and is characteristic only of the Polish language spoken by immigrant generations living outside Poland in English-speaking countries, in this case, Canada. The research reported in this paper is based on a corpus of lexeme items excerpted from a few sources: lexical and grammar surveys filled out by the respondents, the Polish media in Canada, recordings of the speech of first- and second-generation respondents, and daily conversations with Polish immigrants.

On the basis of the contrastive method of language description, which also takes into consideration extralinguistic and intralinguistic factors, I distinguish seven classes of lexical items: 1. morphologically adapted lexical items, 2. structural transfers, 3. semantic transfers, 4. citations, 5. Canadian-Polish idioms, 6. caiques, 7. Canadian-Polish word-formations. A major goal of this paper is to investigate the types of Canadian-Polish lexical items and to examine the semantic distribution of these items with respect to the contact of the two cultures. This article is based on a broader sociolinguistic project examining the Polish immigrant minority group and the language spoken by this group in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) (Lustanski 2005).