Budownik, krawc and łowiak – how five-year-old children form the names of the contractors of activities

Abstract

Naming is an important stage in a child’s life, proving that they learn and experience the world. With age, active vocabulary of children is growing. Pre-school children have the greatest ability to shape a language, they are creative and take an example from the environment. While modeling themselves on adults, they take over part of the vocabulary, but also create new words for naming things, phenomena, people they know, but also those who they have not remembered or have not met before. The aim of the article is to present and discuss the lexical material collected among five-year-old children (from the area of Turek, Greater Poland Voivodeship/ Wielkopolska). The presented analysis touches upon the methods of creating names of the contractors of different activities, including word formation techniques and the phenomenon of analogy.