"W głębi serca, w tajemnicy, w cztery oczy..." On the Linguistic Status of a Certain Type of Expressions with "w"

Abstract

The present paper is dedicated to the problem of the description of expressions characterizing transparency of activities. The point of interest are only multisegmental expressions, called prepositional expressions, built with the preposition w ‘in’, for example w tajemnicy, w głębi serca, w cztery oczy. Their linguistic status is not the same: some of  them are lexical units, whereas others are only constructions. Nevertheless, in the older and more recent lexicographical works their characterization is neither adequate nor consistent. They are described as the meanings or uses of the particular nouns or prepositions or as distinct entries. Often, they occur in many different entries, once as lexical units, once as constructions. In my article I show the modes of the lexicographical description of selected examples of such expressions. Next, I present the results of the analysis of these expressions achieved by using the method proposed by Bogusławski (1976, 1987) and Grochowski (1976, 1995).