INTERFERENCE OF NON-ARTISTIC LINGUISTICCULTURAL CODES IN ARTISTIC DISCOURSE (NEWSPEAK IN S. WIECHECKI’S AFTER-WAR FEUILLETONS)

Abstract

The subject matter of the paper is the interference of the Polish variant of Newspeak with wiech, i. e., the Warsaw vernacular as reflected in S. Wiechecki’s after-war feuilletons. The authors show how several Newspeak lexical items occurring in the speech of Wiechecki’s characters are used, besides denoting realities of life in Communistgoverned Poland, also to express a wide range of additional senses and attitudes, from mere playing on officialese to implicit irony and, further, criticism and negation. In doing this, these items change their meaning or otherwise adapt to wiech, serving artistic purposes of satirically portraying, along with other everyday existence paraphernalia, nowomowa itself. The reception and interpretation of these nowomowa entities by wiech are considered a variety of language self-defence (as understood by A.Wierzbicka), with nowomowa used by Wiechecki’s characters mostly in an unorthodox and creative way, notably in parody, burlesque, and even travesty. Generalizing the conceptual and methodological framework in which the study has been carried out and observations made substantiates the authors’ contention that it is both possible and feasible to use the concept of linguistic contacts and interference more broadly, applying it to any theoretically or practically significant instance of such idiom interaction, both interlingual and languageinternal; also, that in researching contacts and interference, one must take into account language entities and their features as well as linguistic-cultural codes to which they belong and functional varieties of discourse realizing these codes, as it is within these specific discursive varieties that language entities actually function, idiom interference takes place, and linguistic borrowings are made.