There are more than 350 fl owing waters in Poland with names containing a colour adjective. Etymological propositions mention sometimes various physical attributes such as the colour of the water or of the bottom, or even a possible symbolical usage connected e.g. with the cardinal directions, but most often they limit themselves to citing the literary version of the adjective, and there end their inquiry. The goal of the present paper is to establish to what degree physical attributes can explain the use of colour epithets; and if they cannot, then whether there is any reason to believe that there existed in the past a more elaborate system of colour symbolism.

The author presents the thesis that the referent of the dative noun phrase is ‘a second human participant’ of the event ‒ referent of the proposition in question. The same applies to the referent of the genitive noun phrase. The two constructions differ only in their syntactic distribution ‒ dative is an adverbal case, while genetive is adnominal, which is the result of their semantic roles ‒ ‘recipient’ for dative and ‘possessor’ for genetive.

In these remarks I do undertake one more time the attempt to answer the following question: what do agnostics really want? This issue is so complicated that even the agnostics themselves had great trouble in delivering the answer. This is also related to these agnostics, such as the recalled here Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Stephen W. Hawking, who belong to the greatest format of scholars. The agnostics are being distanced from, both the atheists and theists. However they do judge differently their views it is important that as well the first as the latter ones may appreciate what stands behind agnosticism and this might be very variable.

The “top‑bottom” opposition is a binary spatial opposition. It describes the orientation of objects in space as well as identifies the spatial qualification of an object and models the coordinate system of the linguistic (resp. dialectal) worldview. This article deals with the problem of the semantic structure of derivatives, i.e. fragments of the derivative clusters of the base words of this opposition: верх, гора (“top”) and низ, гора, (с)під (“bottom”). The author scrutinizes the semantics of the adjectives вéрхній (верховúй, верхóвний), горíшній (гóрний) / ни́ жній (низови́ й), дóлíшній (дóльний), спíдній (сподо- вúй). These semantic features are analyzed within three semantic subcomplexes: ‘the top / bottom of the object’; ‘high / low limit’; ‘surface (exterior / interior)’. The subcomplexes unite the meanings of the adjectives which are structured hierarchically. These meanings represent different aspects of Ukrainian life. This study applied the traditional onomasiological descriptive model, moving the focus from the meaning to the word. The analysed units represent semantic and derivational features which are typical for the dialects of the Ukrainian language. The sources of the study are historical and regional dictionaries and texts, as well as linguistic atlases. As the study is based on an analysis of historical sources and manuscripts of the Ukrainian language from the 11th century onwards, semantic changes were recorded at different historical stages.

Constructions expressing the separation of a part from the whole which arose independently on the two ends of the Slavic land are presented in the article. The analyzed phenomena, resulting from interference of Slavic and non Slavic languages (Greek and German), are relevant to some South Slavic and Kashubian dialects. The semantic structure of these constructions is proposed and it is shown how their relevant semantic features are expressed in sentences. One of them is the definiteness of the object from which a certain part is detached. It is concluded that Bulgarian and Macedonian on the one hand and Kashubian dialects on the other are characterised by similar level of details expressing the semantic structure of the analyzed sentences despite different grammatical structures of these languages.

The study of colonial discourse in belles‑lettres fiction in the context of the “great time” (M. Bakhtin) allows us to trace its connections with the historical and cultural past, with today’s realities and find a connection with future events. Particularly interesting in this regard is the Russian colonial discourse, which claims a special place in history that distinguishes it from the colonial discourses of other empires. The poem by the poet Pavel Vasiliev, who was repressed in 1937, reflects imperial ideologemes relating to the Asian frontier – the Kazakh‑Russian transboundary. The colonial discourse in the poem is built on the opposition ‘COSSACKS – KAZAKHS’, which is an implementation of the opposition ‘OWN – OTHER’. In the conditions of the frontier the image of the OTHER is transformed into the image of the ENEMY. The Cossacks, the defenders of the imperial borders, brutally suppress the revolt of the Kazakhs working in salt mining. They act under the slogan‑ideologems of defending the fatherland, the tsar, and Orthodoxy. The description of this suppression is distinguished in the poem by naturalistic details, which are not of the author’s imagination, but an image of information heard from others. The author conveys the attitude of the Cossacks to the murder of unarmed women, children, old people, as a revelry, fun, using the technique of the “carnivalization” of a terrible, awful event. The author shows sympathy and pity for the victims of the massacre and presents the Cossacks as ruthless killers and robbers.