Studia Językoznawcze

The aim of this article is to look at the ways in which feelings are expressed and conveyed in a 16th-century diary by Jan Ocieski. The manuscript dates from 1531 and is an account of an envoy to Constantinople. The discussion of the excerpted material is based mainly on theoretical proposals and typologies by Stanisław Grabias and Iwona Nowakowska-Kempna. Based on the collected material, it seems possible to describe the ways in which the author of the letters expresses his feelings and communicates them. In the written text – unlike in the spoken text – it is difficult to capture the manifestation of emotions. What is noticeable here are mainly lexical exponents, but also linguistic means on the formal – grammatical level (e.g. exclamatory statements, repetitions of words). Taking into account the difficulty of evaluating the historical material of interest and the specificity of the text, in which etiquette formulas are clearly present, an attempt was made to show, on selected examples, the author's ways of expressing his feelings, both towards himself and towards others, then the emotions of third parties conveyed and interpreted by Ocieski. The analysis of the letters showed that the author more often expresses and communicates the feelings and emotional attitudes of third parties than his own. These are mostly positive feelings (e.g. sympathy, joy, gratitude), although there were also exponents of negative attitudes and emotions. The expressive exponents noted in the linguistic layer range from lexical to formal, which testifies to the efficiency of early sixteenth-century Polish.