Semantic differences between Polish and Russian lexical units originating from the same source (lekcja vs lektsiya: on cultural specificity)

What is it about?

The paper deals with the Polish word lekcja and the Russian word lektsiya (a lecture): that are similar in sounding. We start with the review of dictionary descriptions of the word lekcja in Polish lexicographical sources, indicating the changes in the lexical meaning of the word concerned over time. In a similar way, we analyze the lexicographical description of the Russian word lektsiya. The focus is on the specific features of the meaning-changing process of both words. The study proposes an analysis of relevant examples from mono-, bi- and polylingual dictionaries. Since the typical opposition between the words urok (a lesson) and lektsiya (a lecture) was not evident enough in past centuries, we also describe the basic features of semantic development of the word урок. The paper provides the results of the corpora data study by analyzing and describing the usage contexts of lekcja in the National Corpus of Polish and lektsiya in the Russian National Corpus. Also, the methods of translation of the words under consideration from Polish into Russian and from Russian into Polish respectively are investigated. The paper aims to reveal why these two words that are so similar in sounding have little in common in their semantics in Polish and Russian. This difference is due to the specification of lexical meanings of the words under study in each of the languages compared: having undergone a complex semantic evolution, the Polish word lekcja acquired the key semantics of “a lesson at school,” with the Russian word lektsiya meaning mainly “an oral presentation of a subject by a professor at a university.”

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