The present study deals with the process of a-prefixation in the mid-nineteenth-century dialect(s) of a selected part of South Carolina. This phenomenon is said to have been brought to America with immigrants from the southern parts of Great Britain. For the purpose of the study, a corpus of Civil War letters has been compiled in such a way as to assure at least relative geographical and social homogeneity. Specifically, letters written by soldiers of the rank of private hailing from three counties located in South Carolina, i.e. Greenville, Pickens, and York, found their way to the corpus. Since these privates wrote as they spoke, elements of the spoken idiom are presumed to transpire in their correspondence.On the basis of this corpus both quantitative and qualitative studies of the grammatical phenomenon known as a-prefixation have been carried out. Their purpose is to verify whether the constraints proposed by Walt Wolfram for the twentieth century context also hold in the case of a century earlier. Finally, this investigation looks at the process of prefixation from the perspectives of idiolects and community grammars.

The paper explores the use of the lexeme shit in the corpus of Dave Chappelle’s stand-up specials released between 2000 and 2019. It consists of two parts: theoretical and analytical. The first one presents theoretical and pragmatic considerations connected with stand-up routines, touches upon slang semantics, and depicts the links between Dave Chappelle’s stage persona and the hip hop community. Lastly, it presents the reader with the past and present-day status of the lexeme at issue. In the analytical section of the paper the use of shit in the aforesaid corpus is scrutinized from the semantic angle. The discussion is supplemented with the results culled from the corpus of rap lyrics compiled at the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The paper argues that (i) shit has lost its taboo status and is mainly used in both corpora as a less formal equivalent of stuff, anything and something and (ii) Chappelle’s stage use of shit, even though present in a different context and serving context-specific purposes, corresponds to the use of African American rappers in their song lyrics (assuming that rap lyrics depict African American English, this conclusion can be extended to the sociolect of African Americans).

This article attempts to document the history of finite be in New England folk speech, a phenomenon thus far neglected in scholarly publications devoted to American historical dialectology. The authors aim at proving that even though plural indicative be had been brought to the early colonies with the first settlers, be as a singular indicative form was a New Englandism, not attested until the late seventeenth century—consequently, the authors engage in a comparative analysis of the linguistic contexts attracting the feature in focus respectively in Early Modern British English, early and late colonial New England English, and postcolonial New England English. In terms of textual selection, the authors make use of a vast array of primary sources, ranging from documents containing “close-to-oral” language through vernacular letters and comments by coeval language specialists to literary representations of the New England dialect; as for the latter, the authors have not shunned fictional portrayals but approached them with necessary caution both by means of careful selection of reliable dialect writers and comparison of the retrieved data with the ones obtained from other sources, such as the Linguistic Atlas of New England.

The onset of Professor Jacek Fisiak's scholarly career is marked by his 1961 Ph.D. dissertation devoted to the lexical influence of English upon Polish. This study, conducted 55 years ago, offers a multilayered analysis and sets the standards of studies on lexical transfer from English to Polish for the years to come. The present article is a tribute to Fisiak's first scholarly endeavor; it examines the fate of lexical items comprising Fisiak's corpus in the second decade of the 21 st century. More specifically, by conducting searches in the National Corpus of Polish as well as a Google search, the paper checks which borrowings to the Polish language listed and scrutinized by Fisiak gained popularity, which fell out of use, and which underwent semantic changes.