Życzenia i winszowanie jako akt mowy

Wishing and congratulating as a speech act The paper attempts to synthesize and revise the views on wishing and congratulating as specific speech acts which are represented in Polish by the performative verbs życzę, życzymy ‘I/we wish’, winszuję, winszujemy ‘I/we congratulate’, by optative formulas based on aspect operators (niech, oby, aby, żeby ‘let’, ‘so that’ &c.), and sometimes also by imperative sentences. It examines the conditions of fortuitousness of the wishes and their illocutive value, and especially the quite questionable honorific function of wishing formulas, and their connection with the linguistic relics of primitive magical thinking. The proposed interpretations emphasize the cultural and pragmatic function of wishes, rooted in history and tradition.