Encoding the ontology of everyday objects in their lexical labels

The paper presents an etymological analysis and comparison of English and Polish lexical labels for a selection of everyday objects. It focuses on how the objects’ ontological characteristics may have affected the manner of establishing their linguistic references, thus foregrounding said features and promoting a certain way of perceiving them in the speech communities, which in turn has led to cultural differences between them. The referents and their names were selected due to their long existence and linguistic tradition in the two languages. The differences between the English and Polish names is analysed with reference to Aristotle’s categories, which stem from different conceptualisations of the objects’ features in the respective speech communities.