Dr. Agnieszka Kocel-Duraj
Assistant Professor at the University of Bielsko-Biała, Poland; linguist and sworn translator/interpreter, with specialization in legal translation and conference interpreting.
Agnieszka graduated from the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw in Poland, where she obtained her Ph.D. in historical phonology and discovered her present path. She has since completed two years of post-graduate training in conference interpretation, complimented with a few years of teaching experience acquired in Poland and England – places which may now lay claim both as her home, and to her heart.
Academically, her interests lie in two distinctly different disciplines; linguistics, dialectology and phonology, on the one hand; and jurislinguistics with contrastive studies, on the other. At the moment, Agnieszka’s focuses are on comparison of various countries’ legal systems, research related to legal entity differentiation, and insolvency and bankruptcy proceedings relative to Poland, Great Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia.
LingLex, a School of Legal English and translators’ office that Agnieszka set up to teach lawyers and business persons, offers workshops on various aspects of Legal English and provides various Legal English courses. She currently also writes an original Legal English coursebook, which is slated to publish in the near future. Personally, she has always held that doing what one loves for a living means living without ever having to work. Agnieszka cites her great passions as linguistic study, languages in general, English in preference, and Legal English in particular; assurance that her work efforts are done with regard to what she most deeply identifies with.
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Palatable Palatalization. A Story of Each, Much, Such, and Which in Middle English Dialects.
The concept of palatalization has always intrigued linguists trying to find a palatable explanation for one of the most influential processes in the English phonology. Having initiated in Old English, palatalization took Middle English by storm, introducing a variety of forms, some of which have survived well into our modern times. Contrary to the popular belief, however, the process itself was far from palatable, proving lack of consistency observed across different dialects of that period. The present monograph intends to show the true, both palatable and unpalatable, character of palatalization, examining its effects exerted on four high-frequency words: EACH, MUCH, SUCH and WHICH, all of which appear copiously in the texts of the Innsbruck Prose Corpus. The monograph thus aims to analyze the extent of phonological inhomogeneity from the point of view of lexical diffusion, which demonstrates the impossibility to establish any definitive dialectal boundaries underlining the existence of a [k]-dialect and, consequently, the everlasting idea of the north-south divide.
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