On Representations of Communication in the English and the Polish Language

The main purpose of the research presented in this paper is to explore representations of communication in the English and in the Polish language. As a principal result, a comparison of the two main representations of communication in English and Polish, that is the verbs: to communicate with sbi and komunikować się z kimśi is shown. Also, the main differences between natural language comprehension of communication and some theoretical approaches are indicated. The major conclusions are that, fundamentally, the analyzed verbs differ only in the scope of use: the English predicate refers to the individual activities of people in a given place and time, the Polish one does not. Nevertheless, as is evidenced by the data from both languages studied, in a natural language, communication appears as the interaction of human or animal beings with the use of a particular type of instrument, such as articulated speech, body movements, dance, etc., or media, such as phone, email, chat, etc. If no such instrument has been used, we cannot talk about communication, as no act of communication can be recognized or interpreted.