Paradigms of Polish linguistics at the turn of the third millennium

Abstract

The situation of language and linguistics in the age of intensive, multidirectional transformations in most (if not all) areas of life and communications, has been the central issue of specific and synthetic studies. Unsurprisingly, it has also become the dominant theme of methodological and metalinguistic reflection of scholars focusing upon the present state and cognitive perspectives of their discipline “after structuralism”. These transformations seem concurrent with the fact that in the recent years the territory of linguistic research has vastly expanded, or (perhaps more precisely) that linguistics’ “center of gravity” has shifted beyond the limits of the traditional subject area of the discipline. Today, the problems in the focus of scholarly attention are mainly those of the plane of parole, such as the use of language, text, discourse, communication styles, or speech/text genres. Consequently, the dominant element of Morris’s semiotic triad — is now pragmatics. Therefore, questions occupying the center-stage of contemporary linguistics mainly concern the role of the speaker and the recipient, the context of the utterance, and other extralinguistic factors (of social, political, or psychological provenance) determining modes of the use of language in communications of various types: artistic as well as non-artistic, public as well as private, spoken as well as written.