INTERFERENCES OF RUTHENIAN ON THE SZYMON ZIMOROWICS LANGUAGE

The paper presents the problems of phonetic, morphology, lexical and syntactic interferences of the 17th-century Ruthenian language on Polish, as observed in 'Roksolanki', a collection of wedding songs by Szymon Zimorowic. The poet spent most of his life in Lviv, and left for Cracow a year before he died. This biographical fact leads up to an assumption that the text may contain a considerable degree of interferences of Ruthenian on the Polish language used by the poet. Phonetic interferences of Ruthenian manifest themselves in the lack of phonological or phonetic contrast in the pairs of vowels a and á, é (often interpreted ortographically as y) and e; neutralization of the pairs rz(h) and rz as well as z(h) and rz; which constitutes a distortion in the division between the alveolar, palatal and palatoalveolar fricatives. Of Ruthenian origin are a handful of syntactic constructions in Polish: complex predicate with the subject complement in the Nominative Case, whereas Polish uses the Instrumental Case in this context; or the use of Accusative Case in predications with negated verbs. In the poetic lexicon of Zimorowic, there are 43 Ruthenian interferences, falling within the following thematic domains: 1) The human being. Physical life and psychology; 2) Plant and animal life. Space; 3) Arms and military thought. The Ruthenian interferences reported in the paper are mostly motivated stylistically - they serve as a means of emphasizing the Ruthenian atmosphere of Zimorowic's poetry. They stem from a conventional way of describing literary figures, and they enable the poet to consciously create the desired acoustic pattern of the rhymes.