This paper analyses the use of Polish achievements with durative expressions of godzinę (in an hour) and przez godzinę (for an hour) – types, their use in the progressive and finally a possible relationship between this use and the terminative recategorisation of imperfective achievements. In the analysis we have accounted for a number of linguistic and contextual factors that influence the possibility of the progressive use of achievements. This has allowed us to propose several subclasses of achievements that may undergo recategorisation under specific conditions set in the concluding section.

In the present paper, we extend previous work on the speech act of threatening by including in our analysis a corpus of crime fiction based on 700 English books, a characteristic trait of which are threats. By including data derived from written narratives in prose, imaginary rather than factual, this research aims to identify potential differences between fictional and authentic threats, thus contributing to the general panorama of this speech act. Here we concentrate on a single construction, known as disjunctive conditional or pseudo‑imperative, which is analysed in terms of parameters employed in previous studies and modified to meet the purposes on the present research.

This paper presents the results of a small-scale study into advanced trainee interpreters’ performance in tasks which involve consecutive interpretation of openly evaluative texts, with particular focus on the use of agentless structures and nominalizations by male and female subjects. It seeks answers to the following questions: i) Is the interpreter’s involvement in the ongoing discourse a factor that may elicit agentless structures in the output? ii) Does the preference for such constructions seem to be related to the gender of the interpreter? The analysis is based on 40 interpretations of four formal addresses, of which two express criticism and the other two praise of the audience. One text in each set is addressed to students of English at the University of Silesia, a group to which the trainee interpreters belong and with which they identify. The results indicate that while there is no substantial difference in the use of agentless structures in contexts which involve identification of the interpreter with the ultimate receiver and in contexts which preclude identification, nominalizations tend to be used slightly more frequently in the former set of circumstances. It also appears that female interpreters are more likely to use nominalizations in texts which express open evaluation of the audience with which they identify, irrespective of the direction of valuation.