Attitudes, or a person’s internal/mental beliefs about a specific situation, object or concept can greatly influence behaviors. This truth also applies to linguistic choices made by second language students. Their low level of knowledge of cross-cultural differences as well as pragmatic competence intertwined with inner norms and attitude towards politeness can result in producing the discourse which could not be considered appropriate. The fact of using and learning a second language (being bilingual or multilingual) may influence the level of politeness. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the differences existing in the scope of politeness revealed in the written, contrastive (Polish-English) discourse. The corpus under investigation encompasses seventy six emails written in the two languages by English philology students of teachers faculty. The analysis focuses on the level of politeness as exhibited through various forms of hedges and mitigations used both in the Polish and English language.

Running a business entails various risks which can significantly impact the economic and production results achieved by a given enterprise. One way of hedging certain risks is to use appropriately designed derivatives. This article presents the newest group of these contracts, i.e. swaps, and focuses on how these contracts can be used by Polish mining companies from the hard coal mining sector selling a part of their output on the global market. This article briefly characterises and presents types of swaps as well as the Polish swap market, pioneered by Polski Bank Rozwoju S.A. with the first FX swap of 1992. Since then, other types of transactions have also been included in the offering of domestic banks (assets swaps, cross-currency interest rate swaps). Mining companies producing hard coal have not been active on the swap market yet because of their poor activity on derivative markets. This article proposes a swap as an derivative hedging the hard coal price for a mining company exporting a part of its production to the global market. In the presented example, a mining company, by concluding a forward and an appropriately structured commodity swap, was able to both protect it self from a fall in the price and use additional gains due to prices rising in the global market. Apart from commodity swaps, mining companies can use FX swaps, IRS and other swaps described in the literature and commonly applied in practice by various economic entities, depending on the type of risk that needs hedging. A significant advantage of this kind of contract is that there is no need to freeze funds in security deposits, nor are there fees of other kinds (premiums) like those payable for other derivatives (futures, options).

Academic authors employ various language means in order to construct and disseminate knowledge, to sound persuasive, to undergird their arguments, but also to seek agreement within the academic community. The aim of this paper is to analyse a selected group of rhetorical strategies used by Anglophone and Czech authors of Linguistics research articles (RAs) and research theses (RTs). These strategies are assumed to vary in both academic genres since the position of their writers within the academic community differs. Even though authors of RAs have to meet reviewers’ requirements in order for their article to be published, so their relative position may be lower than that of the reviewers’, authors of RAs may have the same “absolute status” as the reviewers may be just as expert in that particular field. By contrast, the status of research students is lower than that of their evaluators both in relative and absolute terms. Even though students may gain some learned authority in presenting an original contribution, their assessors command both learned and institutional authority, hence are endowed with a higher status. Apart from comparing rhetorical strategies used in RAs and RTs, the paper focuses on cross-cultural differences between Anglophone and Czechacademic writing traditions.