Although some aspects of the phenomenon of Polish multisegmental discourse and pragmatic markers (MDPMs) were subject to the analysis and description in Grochowski et al. 2018, Grochowski 1986, 1997, Bogusławski 1997, 2005, Weiss 1975, 2005 or Birzer 2015, 2017 there is still a significant group of expressions, in case of which it cannot be simply decided whether they are (a) the fully formed and frozen outcome of lexicalization or (b) constructions (understood as in Fried & Östman 2004 or Fried 2010) the subject of the ongoing pragmaticalization. This contradiction is painfully present (1) in the contemporary Polish dictionaries (both mono- and bilingual) along with texts representing the so-called written (official) register of Polish on the one hand and (2) in spoken, living language, which is difficult to track and pin on the other. Although on the basis of the former type of sources the hypothesis of lexicalization of the expressions such as: by tak rzec, że tak powiem (‘so to speak’, ‘as it were’, ‘if you will’), by nie rzec _, że nie powiem (no to say _), co by nie mówić (‘whatever they say’, ‘anyway’, ‘however’, ‘after all’), nie wspominając / mówiąc (już) o czymś (‘not to mention sth’) seems to be strongly supported, digging deeper into the types of texts that more adequately reflect the contemporary spoken language provides the data-samples that challenge this claim. None of the above mentioned papers and monographs - to my knowledge – has taken into account the problem of the small but quite meaningful sequence nie (‘not’). Since nie also happens to be a negation marker in Polish and tends to be the part of them many MDPMs (some of also have their counterparts without nie) this makes a quite interesting field for further research.
