Someone or something? The names of deceased persons and dead bodies in the system of semantic relations

Abstract

The article examines the meanings, functional distribution, and grammatical and pragmatic features of names of deceased persons and dead bodies. There are many such units in Polish, and their meanings form an organized system in which the main role is played by the concepts of “someone” and “something”. The opposition of these concepts, which can be observed in all languages, presents a significant linguistic argument in the philosophical debate between dualists and monists, particularly among those who identify themselves as materialists. The lexical units in question clearly reflect the ontological dualism. The units zmarły, umarły ‘died’, denat ‘deceased’, nieboszczyk ‘defunct’ imply the concept of ‘someone’. In contrast, other units refer exclusively to the physical sphere, presenting it in two ways: as a shell of what constitutes the essence of a human being (zwłoki ‘corpse’, szczątki ‘remains’, powłoka cielesna ‘bodily shell’, ciało ‘dead body’) or merely matter undergoing the process of decomposition (trup ‘cadaver’, truchło ‘carrion’, ścierwo, padlina ‘carcass’). These semantic differences manifest themselves through grammatical features such as the distinction between personal and impersonal gender and between countability and uncountability.