Abstrakt

The article deals with the possibilities of using new digital linguistic resources for studies into history of expressive vocabulary. In the first part, the author discusses the most important of them, focusing on text corpora and digital libraries, such as Polona and Google Books, showing their advantages and disadvantages. In the second part of the article, theoretical consideration are exemplified by the diachronic analysis of the evolution of several expressive lexems (zajebisty [EN: dope], zajebiście [EN: for the win], szantrapa [EN: shrew, hellcat], ćpać [EN: pop], obciach [EN: shame]). It turns out that digital collections, especially libraries, contain a large number of unknown old texts, which may play a key role in dating rare lexical units as well as their semantic and pragmatic changes.