Ocena stabilności ekspresywnej leksemu słodziak

The analysis of the expressive stability of lexeme ‘słodziak’ in Polish The aim of this article is to analyse the lexical changes – expressive stability, to be more specific – in the Polish lexeme ‘słodziak’. The expressive stability of the lexeme was analysed with the application of the value theory by Jadwiga Puzynina, basic human emotions by Anna Wierzbicka, Likert scale, and stylistic marking. Furthermore, the following websites served as sources for the analysis: Polish Wordnet, Language Observatory of the University of Warsaw, Internet dictionary of slang miejski.pl, dictionary glosbe.pl built on the basis of the English-Polish translations, language corpus monco.frazeo.pl, National Corpus of Polish, as well as numerous entries on blogs and forums. The analysis allowed to establish the following meanings of the lexeme ‘słodziak’: (1) lovely person, (2) cute animal, (3) cute item, (4) sweet food and drinks, (5) sweet scent, and (6) unattractive man. Furthermore, the analysis of sources shows that the lexeme is present mostly on gossip and news websites. This emphasises the colloquial nature of the lexeme but allows another tentative conclusion: since most of the gossips, news, and interviews are translated from English, one may suspect significant productivity of the investigated lexeme in the English to Polish translations. The claim is further supported by the presence of the lexeme in English-Polish dictionaries, in which ‘słodziak’ is a suggested equivalent for such English words and phrases as sweetie, cutie, cutie-pie, peach, cutie-patootie. All in all, the analysis shows that the lexeme is relatively stable.