Charakterystyka semantyczna wyrażeń chcąc nie chcąc i mimo woli

Abstract

The article discusses lexical units chcąc nie chcąc and mimo woli, which are used in contemporary Polish. Firstly, the author justifies why she considered chcąc nie chcąc and mimo woli as lexical units. Later, she describes features of the expressions under discussion by showing restrictions in their lexical collocations. Among other things, the author investigates whether there is a component communicating necessity in the expression chcąc nie chcąc and whether the unit mimo woli refers to a moment preceding the initiation of an action. The analysis conducted in the article shows that when we describe an activity with the expression mimo woli, we declare that somebody did not decide on initiating it. Whereas the expression chcąc nie chcąc, states that something caused a given action and that it was not the will of the person who initiated it to do so. At the end of the article, the author presents the semantic explications of the expressions studied.

In the first part of the article, I describe semantic features of Polish particles faktycznie and rzeczywiście. Next, I analyze three classes of factive epistemic particles: 1) assertive faktycznie, rzeczywiście, 2) excluding naprawdę, autentycznie, 3) polem ical tak naprawdę, w rzeczywistości, as well as, their possible uses in the context of knowledge, namely, their topicalization, focalization and eliminatory contrasting. In the final part of the article, I make the hypothesis that these operations are lexicalized as units in the language system, i.e. naprawdę (cf. focalization), w rzeczywistości (cf. eliminatory contrasting).