On a certain pragmatic mechanism of the evolution of meanings towards enantiosemy (in Polish)

Summary The article presents a hypothesis regarding the evolution of the meanings of selected Polish lexemes, which, in addition to their basic senses, have developed secondary non-predicative meanings, and both of them function parallelly in the contemporary Polish; these are: całkiem , zupełnie ‘entirely/quite’, właściwie ‘properly/actually’, zasadniczo ‘strictly/basically’, pewnie ‘confidently/probably’, and with important reservations fakt ‘fact’. What is characteristic of them is that the derived meaning is in some aspects opposite to the primary one, hence they can be seen as examples of enantiosemy (in a broad sense of this term). In the presented interpretation, supported by many examples from the Polish corpora, the semantic change in question is triggered by the mechanism of hyperbolisation. The speaker’s “exaggerated speech”, if recognised as such by the recipient, may not result in the latter rejecting the utterance as incompatible with reality, but in a kind of adjustment, in which they actually read less information from what is said. Repeated situations of this kind may ultimately cause the “lowering” of semantic expectations regarding these words in general. Therefore, the meaning shift can be understood here as related to the switch of perspective from the speaker-oriented to addressee-oriented, and it is based on the conventionalisation of specific pragmatic effects connected with the use of these words in their original senses, in particular contexts.