The aim of the paper is to signal the need to carry out more thorough research on the academic life at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and to present Jan Karłowicz as a driving force of the academic and cultural life at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a researcher of Polish and Lithuanian folklore, an organiser of linguistic and ethnographic field research as well as extensive lexicographic studies, the founder and editor of the ethnographic magazine Wisła, the publisher of the „Library of Wisła”, a co-founder and member of the „Prace Filologiczne” editorial board. The academic legacy of Jan Karłowicz has not been thoroughly discussed yet. So far, only selected aspects of his activities have been described (especially some of his lexicographic and ethnographic studies). However, his other works, especially the ones on etymology, on the Lithuanian language, which were written in Polish, have been merely indicated in the academic literature and have not been presented so far.
The basis for the research can be the archive sources preserved in Poland and in Lithuania, especially the correspondence, notes relating to Karłowicz’s extensive activities, his academic research published during his life and after his death and his activities as an organiser, journalist (research on magazines, especially on Wisła which he founded, on „Prace Filologiczne”, which he co-founded, and on other magazines in which he published his papers, summaries and reviews), and other sources which give witness to his activities from the given period.
Jan Karłowicz, a famous Polish scholar, who worked and conducted his research during the second half of the 19th century, is not well-known to the present generation of researchers. No one, until now, has seriously examined his research in the Lithuanian language and folklore. He was born in Lithuania and was closely tied with his homeland for almost half a century. The cultural heritage of the Great Duchy of Lithuania is dominant in his numerous writings. J. Karłowicz was one of the first researchers who paid attention to the very complicated social, linguistic and cultural situation in Lithuania. He investigated it using the latest scientific methods and applying the vast knowledge which he acquired at foreign universities. He is also considered to be one of the first Polish scholars who started investigating Lithuanian dialectology, etymology and onomastics as well as the Lithuanian language. His bibliography consists of about 1,000 publications, more than 300 of which cover linguistics.
The main objective of this paper is to present J. Karłowicz’s achievements in researching the Lithuanian language and folklore, to analyse his works on the Lithuanian language, and to show his connections with Lithuanian researchers of Lithuanian culture and members of the national revival. Using mostly data from archives, the author describes his correspondence with Lithuanian academics and discusses his unpublished manuscripts.
In typological research the differences between languages may be a manifestation of the same tendency at various stages of its development. This explains why in the Polish language nearly every adjective can occur before and after a noun, whereas in the French language numerous adjectives occur exclusively in postposition.
Latin, Polish and French demonstrate the same tendency in the development of the position of an adjective in a sentence but they are at diverse stages of this development. This tendency is a special case of a more general tendency related to the Indo-European languages passing from the anticipatory to the progressive word order (in the latter subordinate expressions are in postposition to the superordinate expression). The tendency related to the position of an adjective in the nominative group leads to the following three stages: 1) AN (adiectivum, nomen) in the proto-language and old languages, 2) transitional stage: AN for the adjectives of quality and the dominant NA for adjectives of relation (Latin and Polish, with the latter progressing further and more consistently), 3) NA for nearly all adjectives of relation and most adjectives of quality (French). Restricting the differences to stylistic and semantic criteria determined in synchrony does not suffice as an explanation of these phenomena.
The aim of the present sketch is to demonstrate the role of an artistic text in reconstructing the conceptual model of a word. A poetic text, which is based on the general language on the one hand, and which is perceived as an exceptional artistic creation, on the other, constitutes a valuable research material used for a semantic description of words, particularly those unestablished in the general language. An example of such a lexical unit is stokrotka [daisy]. Code facts and lexicographic definitions provide the information on the mental image of the flower in Polish at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The presented analyses prove that artistic texts are extremely helpful when attempting to reach the characteristics belonging to the semantic core of the word stokrotka (‛has white flowers’, ‛is small’, ‛has tiny petals’, ‛has many petals’ and ‛blossoms in spring’), and contribute to revealing the entire spectrum of connotations with varying degree of establishment and detail. All the semantic components revealed in the process of analysis are internally ordered and find motivation within the semantic structure.
Elements such as textual recurrence and supra-individual nature of context, as well as cultural facts, which are argumentation for linguistic characteristics and support the reasonability of the suggested interpretations, also fulfil a significant function in determining linguistic relevance.
