The hurting and healing power of words (and grammatical constructions). A cognitive grammar study of the interactive and interpersonal effects of a directive construction in Polish

The paper considers the issue of howspeakers use different grammatical resources to achieve different interactive and interpersonal effects in specific contexts. More specifically, the paper analyzes the pragmatic effects of a particular directive construction fromPolish,which, on the one hand, exhibits a certain degree of grammatical incongruity and is not acceptable in Polish at large, but which, at the same time, was not only an attested but probably also a preferred means of performing a particular kind of directive in a specific context. In the analysis, the conventional values of the construction’s components are first analyzed via considering their selected uses in other constructions and the pragmatic effects they bring about in other contexts. The next issue under consideration is how the conventional values of the construction’s components interact with one another, aswell aswith contextual factors to produce particular interactive and interpersonal effects. The general claim made in the study is that a single grammatical structuremay bring about diverse pragmatic effects in different circumstances. At the same time, speech act participants can easily produce and interpret the intended effects via establishing appropriate categorizing relationships between the conventional meanings of the constructional components and the relevant aspects of the specific context-bound conceptualization constituting the interlocutors’ understanding of their speech interaction.