Unconventional, that is Better. The Evaluative Component and Meanings of the Words Conventional and Unconventional in the Polish Language

Abstract

The aim of this article is to describe the interpenetration of the descriptive and the evaluative components in language on the basis of a pair of antonymous adjectives conventional/unconventional as well as to analyse their contextual evaluation. The research material is composed of the dictionary data and concordances of the analyzed adjectives derived from The National Corpus of Polish (Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego). The conducted analysis has revealed the possibility of classifying the discussed adjectives into the group of words used for expressing description and evaluation. Furthermore, the investigation of the collected data has indicated that the Polish language tends to attribute negative values to the aspects widely assumed to be conventional, whereas positive evaluation is ascribed to the unconventional ones. Thus, in the case of the analysed words, the descriptive component is not parallel with the evaluative one. Something that is conventional according to dictionary definitions is consistent with the norm and expected by the society but, at the same time, it is assessed as secure, boring, uninteresting and unoriginal. Something that is unconventional, in turn, even though not established in accordance with widely accepted norms, is perceived as interesting, astonishing, brave, but also dangerous and unrecognized. It can be acknowledged, then, that in the case of the analyzed words the existing discrepancy between the descriptive and evaluative components is a sign that language follows the constantly changing reality which nowadays values a person who is able to play with convention rather than only comply with it.