A few words about selected uses of the verb szanować się (‘to have self-respect’) in contemporary Polish

Abstract

The subject of the article is a description of selected modern meanings of the verb szanować się ‘to have self-respect’. The analysis covered 732 sentences selected from among the examples available in the text corpora. The collected material was divided into 6 groups, differentiated by context (partnerships and sex, way of being, adherence to rules, values) and the way of use (conditional, metatextual). In the analysis of meaning (qualitative and quantitative), pragmatic properties (recipient type, sender’s function) and grammatical properties (imperative forms, structures with modal verbs, sentences with negation) were additionally taken into account. On this basis it was determined what modern speakers of the Polish language mean when using the verb szanować się.