Napisy na murach jako gatunek miejskiej polszczyzny pisanej

Abstract

Wall inscriptions, i.e. “inscriptions, symbols, slogans, or pictures painted on building walls,
brick walls, board fences, and in public places”, as part of the written language of an urban
youth subculture, are seldom the subject of linguistic research and belong to the genre of
the street artistic work referred to as graffiti. The phenomenon of graffiti can be regarded
not only as a type of art (some murals can be found in New York galleries) but also as a sort
of mass social communication, especially at the level of words, i.e. the strictly linguistic one.
The urban space - walls, boards, public service vehicles (the underground, trains) - become
a specific medium and a special means of subcultural social communication in that way. Wall
inscriptions visually organise the urban space of interpersonal communication.
Vital features of that genre are humour and hybridity in respect of form - the message may
be a solely verbal one, a word may be accompanied by an image, but the message may also
be a drawing only (graphic form). All those features enable establishing graffiti as a separate
text genre of the urban written Polish language, whose feature, distinguishing it from other
types of expression, is its unique illocutionary power. Through that act of illocution, authors
of inscriptions want, at all cost, to achieve something in various spheres of reality, and in
particular to draw other people’s attention to what those other people allegedly do not notice
themselves.