„Człowiekiem się rodzę, osobą się staję”. Relacje semantyczne między leksemami osoba i człowiek we współczesnej polszczyźnie

Abstract

“Człowiekiem się rodzę, osobą się staję” ‘I am born a man and become a person’. Semantic relations between the lexemes osoba ‘person’ and człowiek ‘man’ in modern Polish

The paper attempts to determine the scope of realization of two synonymous words in modern Polish: człowiek/ludzie ‘man/people’, and osoba/osoby ‘person/persons’. A semantic analysis of the two has been conducted based on lexicographic sources and corpus texts, and led to the conclusion that no hierarchy exists in the semantic relation between them. Due to its stylistic neutrality, accommodation requirements, and deviation of reference towards the feminine gender, the understanding of the lexeme osoba ‘person’ complements the semantic field of the word człowiek ‘man’, which is marked for all aspects and directed towards description of representatives of the masculine gender. Moreover, having no stylistic connotations, the lexeme osoba ‘person’ is very frequent in journalistic texts, much more so than the noun człowiek ‘man’.