Anglicisms in The National Corpus of Polish: Assets and Limitations of Corpus Tools

Abstract

While electronic corpora may not seem adequate sources for anglicisms retrieval, since despite promising attempts they still lack readily available and efficient tools for foreign loans identification, they are indispensable in a systematic verification of the use of preidentified loans. The article offers an assessment of an electronic corpus of Polish in reference to its usefulness for the study of English loans. Though we test a selected corpus and its tools, and use Polish anglicisms as exemplifications, the findings presented in the article pertain to other large corpora and anglicisms in other languages. Corpus tools allow for a multi-dimensional analysis of loans, yet they fail to meet the requirements of more in-depth analyses of anglicisms, related to their semantics and structure. The limitations of corpora tools will be illustrated with authentic attempted-but-failed corpus searches.