Mistrz. Krótka historia słowa w polszczyźnie (badania korpusowe)
Master. A short history of words in Polish (corpus research)

Summary/Abstract: In this article, I analysed the history of the occurrence of one lexeme in Polish in the last 200 years: master (pol. mistrz). With data from Polish language corpora, I traced its frequency and examined its semantics and its transformations. Corpus analyses confirmed the semantic shifts taking place – from the meaning of ‘teacher, guide’ to the meaning of sport; also revealed a new – ironic – semantic shade of the analysed word. The second aim of the article was to develop postulates for corpus-based semantic research. These are: firstly, semantic analyses should be carried out on relatively small corpora; secondly, there is an urgent need to develop a (semi-)automatic tool for semantic analysis on corpus data (the linguistic basis for computer science work in this direction can be found here in the mental dictionary of A. Wierzbicka).

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