Rodzina i jej profile we współczesnej polszczyźnie
Family and its profiling in contemporary Polish

Summary/Abstract: An attempt is made to answer a few important questions: how is the concept of family profiled in public discourse, from what (whose) point of view individual profiles are constructed and what aspects of family are brought to focus as a result of these operations? The data are of three complementary types: systemic (based on dictionaries of Polish), experimental and textual (mainly journalistic texts of various genres). According to the principles of the cognitive definition, the defining features of the concept of family have been identified. The base stereotype of family is both coherent and trivial, characterized by such features as kinship, physical resemblance, social bonds or the care of children. The concept is differentiated only at the level of specialized discourse types. The basic profile is that of the family as people’s natural environment (together with the homeland, nation and the Church it is treated as the basic human community, an ideal place of human development). In „oppositional” discourses there is a different treatment of the main features connected with the family’s procreative function, passing on values and attitudes, the division of roles into „male” and „female”. Several socially-entrenched points of view and subjects become manifested: from the feminist point of view, the family is hard labour and a prison, from the radically leftist point of view of it is a seat of hypocrisy and pathology, from the point of view of a copywriter (in marketing, determined by the suasive function of language) it is an idyll.

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