Bartmiński, Jerzy

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„Etnolingwistyka” na jubileusz Profesor Anny Wierzbickiej

University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska (UMCS): Scientific e-Journals / Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej: e-czasopisma naukowe

Ethnolinguisticsfor Anna Wierzbicka’s jubilee∗Professor Anna Wierzbicka, since 2004 an honorary doctor of MariaCurie-Skłodowska University, has maintained intense academic and perso-nal contact with Lublin ethnolingusitic circles for many years. The degreeof indebtedness of Lublin ethnolinguists to Anna is hard to measure. Herjubilee is a good opportunity for all associated with the journal Etnolingwis-tyka/Ethnolinguistics to express their appreciation for Anna’s outstandingachievements, as well as their gratitude for scholarly inspirations and keeninterest that Professor Wierzbicka has displayed over many years.Those academic and personal contacts date back to the times of theunforgettable Professor Maria Renata Mayenowa (1910–1988), Wierzbicka’smentor and academic supervisor. Maria Renata inspired a series of scholarlydiscussions, held throughout the 1960s and 1970s (often at her hospitableWarsaw apartment at 1 Sandomierska Street) with the participation ofmany young researchers: Anna Wierzbicka, Teresa Dobrzyńska, AndrzejBogusławski, Zygmunt Saloni, Zofia Zaron, Irena Bellert. . . Years later,those discussions crystallised into several publications, among them my bookon the language of folklore (Bartmiński 1973) and the idea of the Dictionaryof Folk Stereotypes and Symbols (SSSL 1996–).In the years 1961–1972, while working at the Institute of Literary Re-search of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Anna Wierzbickabecame known as a syntactician with original ideas (cf. her 1966 book onthe syntactic-stylistic system of Polish Renaissance prose and a series ofexcellent papers on word order, hypotaxis, subjectless sentences, and nominalconstructions in the development of the Polish language), an expert on issuesof general linguistics (Wierzbicka 1965), and stylistic nuances (Wierzbickaand Wierzbicki 1967). Her publications from that period have remained∗ The article appeared in Polish as “Etnolingwistyka na jubileusz Profesor AnnyWierzbickiej” in Etnolingwistyka 30. The present English translation has been financed bythe Ministry of Science and Higher Education, project titled “English edition of the journalEtnolingwistyka. Problemy języka i kultury in electronic form” (no. 3bH 15 0204 83).10 Ethnolinguistics for Anna Wierzbicka’s jubileerelevant to this day and, thanks to reprints in the so-called “green series”of Maria Curie-Skłodowska University Press, are constantly being used inacademic pedagogy at Lublin’s Department of Polish Philology and in manyacademic centres in Poland.During the Warsaw stage of Anna Wierzbicka’s career, an especiallysignificant period were the years 1969–1972, when the scholar’s interestsembraced linguistic semantics and opened new vistas for innovative inter-cultural research (cf. Wierzbicka 1969 and especially the 1972 monographSemantic Primitives).However, the most creative stage in Anna’s professional life began aftershe left Poland in 1972 and started teaching and researching at AustralianNational University in Canberra. The pivotal idea of her work, the conceptof the alphabet of human thought, comes from European linguistics, notablyGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Andrzej Bogusławski (born1931), but its theoretical and analytic development, the ideas of linguistic“semanticism” and anthropocentrism, the recognition of linguistic universalscoupled with the cultural specificity of languages, and above all with theidea of Natural Semantic Metalanguage and minimal grammar as toolsfor intercultural analyses, took place in the 1980s and 1990s in a seriesof outstanding books, published first in Sydney and then by top globalpublishing houses, mainly by Oxford University Press.Six books published in the Warsaw period1 were followed by almosttwenty monographs in English, each of which immediately became an out-standing scholarly event. The following volumes appeared successively:– 1980. Lingua Mentalis: The Semantics of Natural Language. Sydney:Academic Press.– 1980. The Case for Surface Case. Ann Arbor: Karoma.– 1984. Mały portret języka polskiego dla młodzieży w krajach anglosaskich.Adelaide: South Australian Department of Education.– 1985. Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma.– 1987. English Speech Act Verbs: A Semantic Dictionary. Sydney: AcademicPress.– 1988. The Semantics of Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benja-mins.– 1991. Cross-cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction.Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [2nd edition, revised and extended, 2003]1 The books from the Polish period are: Wierzbicka 1965, 1966, 1969, 1971, 1972;Wierzbicka and Wierzbicki 1967. While in Australia, Wierzbicka also authored books inPolish: Wierzbicka 1984, 2017 (as well as many articles). Some of her English works havebeen translated into Polish, cf. Wierzbicka 1999, 2002, 2006, 2007.Ethnolinguistics for Anna Wierzbicka’s jubilee 11– 1992. Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts inCulture-specific Configurations. New York & Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.– 1996. Semantics. Primes and Universals. New York & Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.– 1997. Understanding Cultures through their Key Words: English, Russian,Polish, German, Japanese. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.– 1999. Emotions across Languages and Cultures. Diversity and Universals.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.– 2001. What did Jesus Mean? Explaining the Sermon on the Mount andthe Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts. Oxford & NewYork: Oxford University Press.– (co-edited with Cliff Goddard) 2002. Meaning and Universal Grammar:Theory and Empirical Findings (vols. 1–2). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: JohnBenjamins.– 2006. English: Meaning and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.– (co-edited with Mary Besemeres) 2007. Translating Lives: Living with twoLanguages and Cultures. St Lucia: Queensland University Press.– 2010. Experience, Evidence, and Sense: The hidden culture legacy ofEnglish. Oxford: Oxford University Press.– 2014. Imprisoned in English. The Hazards of English as a Default Language.Oxford: Oxford University Press.– (co-authored with Cliff Goddard) 2014. Words and Meanings. LexicalSemantics across Domains, Languages, and Cultures. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.Anna Wierzbicka’s vast output has been quoted abundantly in worldliterature (in 2018 her h-index of citation reached 76); it continues to sparkunwavering interest, and her analytic application of Natural Semantic Me-talanguage (with the adoption of the first-person perspective) is followedby numerous researchers. Wierzbicka’s achievements have brought her pre-stigious awards: the Humboldt Research Prize for Foreign Scholars in theHumanities (1995); the Dobrushin Prize (2010), and the Prize of the Foun-dation for Polish Science (“the Polish Nobel Prize”, 2010).Although a world-renowned scholar, Anna has never broken ties withher native country, Poland, with her home city of Warsaw, or with Lublin.Volume 4 of the journal Etnolingwistyka contains her essay “Uniwersalnepojęcia ludzkie i ich konfiguracje w różnych kulturach” [Universal humanconcepts in culture-specific configurations], translated by Henryk Kardela,with extensive discussions of her other publications.2 The following years2 It appeared in 1991, i.e. before the publication of the English original as the Intro-duction to Wierzbicka 1992.12 Ethnolinguistics for Anna Wierzbicka’s jubileesaw the publication of Anna’s articles written specially for our journal:“Między modlitwą a przekleństwem” [Between a prayer and a curse] (1996),“Współczesne dylematy moralne przez pryzmat dwóch jezyków – angielskiegoi polskiego” [Contemporary moral dilemmas through the prism of two lan-guages: English and Polish] (2006), “Polskie słowa-wartości w perspektywieporównawczej: DOBROĆ, PRAWOŚĆ, ODWAGA” [Polish words-valuesin a comparative perspective: GOOD/KINDNESS, RIGHTEOUSNESS,COURAGE] (2011–2012). The volume W zwierciadle języka i kultury [In theMirror of Language and Culture] (Adamowski and Niebrzegowska 1999) con-tains her essay “Semantyka i Ewangelia” [Semantics and the Gospel]. Booksin the so-called “red series” published by Maria Curie-Skłodowska UniversityPress contain Wierzbicka’s contributions on animal names and “the dualsubject” (on bilingual speakers), while six other articles were published in thepedagogical “green series”: on (i) the semantics of polite phrases, (ii) dialects,jargons, and styles, (iii) speech genres, (iv) the semantic coherence of text,(v) metatext within text, and (vi) the hypotaxis and nominal constructionsin the development of Polish. Etnolingwistyka has also published reviews ofWierzbicka’s monographs. Since 1998, Anna Wierzbicka has been a memberof the Editorial Board of the journal, as well as of the scientific council ofthe EUROJOS project.Another initiative, launched in Lublin, was to publish Polish translationsof some of Anna Wierzbicka’s work written in English. The collection ofessays Język, umysł, kultura [Language, Mind, Culture, ed. Jerzy Bartmiński]appeared in Warsaw as Wierzbicka (1999), whereas her fundamental Seman-tics. Primes and Universals was published in 2006 in Lublin as Semantyka.Jednostki elementarne i uniwersalne (2nd edition 2010). The translation ofLexicography and Conceptual Analysis (1985) is currently underway.Anna Wierzbicka’s work has had a significant impact on the formationof the Lublin ethnolinguistic circles. One of the key concepts developed inLublin ethnolinguistics, the so-called cognitive definition,3 was inspired byWierzbicka’s theoretical solutions, especially those from her Lexicographyand Conceptual Analysis. This is pointed out by the editors of a volume onlinguistic worldview:The name of Anna Wierzbicka is especially important in the context of the so-called“cognitive definition” of the “mental object” associated with a given entity, of the way itis viewed, categorized, evaluated and talked about by speakers of a given language [. . . ].On the one hand, the preliminary installment of SSSL [Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes3 It is applied, among others, in Leksykon aksjologiczny Słowian i ich sąsiadów [TheAxiological Lexicon of Slavs and their Neighbours], in five volumes, published by MariaCurie-Skłodowska University Press.Ethnolinguistics for Anna Wierzbicka’s jubilee 13and Symbols] [. . . ] arose independently of Wierzbicka’s theory of semantic primitives asa continuation of the work on folklore inspired by the linguist Maria Renata Mayenowa.However, in his major article on the cognitive definition, Bartmiński (1988) already refersto Wierzbicka’s Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis (1985). This, in the words ofthe former author (p.c.), is Wierzbicka’s most interesting work, with an introductionthat contains an excellent account of a comprehensive semantic description that is alsopursued by the Lublin-based ethnolinguists. It therefore seemed justifiable to includeAnna Wierzbicka’s chapter at the beginning of the section on the cognitive definition inthis volume: her explications have conceptually fuelled the pursuits of Bartmiński and hiscollaborators and while the two approaches arose independently, they follow the samegeneral path. (Głaz, Danaher, and Łozowski 2013: 16)Anna Wierzbicka herself, when commenting on the mutual relations ofthe Lublin cognitive ethnolinguistics and her own NSM school, wrote:Despite the fact that we work in different fields, from different viewpoints, in differentdisciplinary contexts, and with different methodologies, I consider our approaches to becomplementary, and the directions of our research to be convergent. (Wierzbicka 2013: 137)The approaches are complementary in that, inter alia, both reject tra-ditional lexical taxonomies (that limit the description of word meaning tonecessary and sufficient features), both take note of the whole richness offeatures relevant to communication and culture, they relate to colloquial awa-reness and the intuition of the language user, consider lexical, phraseological,paremiological, and textual data as the basis of definitions, both constructexplications in the form of sequences of statements grouped into facets. In ge-neral, both approaches refer to and continue the anthropological philosophyof language proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Edward Sapir.In 2004, Anna Wierzbicka received her honorary doctorate from MariaCurie-Skłodowska University in recognition of her work in interculturalsemantics and uncompromising pursuit of scientific truth. On that occasion,the University Press published her essay Jak można mówić o Trójcy Świętejw słowach prostych i uniwersalnych [How one can speak of the Holy Trinityin simple and universal words]. The work found its development in the 2017book W co wierzą chrześcijanie? Opowieść o Bogu i o ludziach,4 publishedin Kraków by Znak.Anna Wierzbicka is an eminent scholar, greatly admired for her outstan-ding and prolific output, her impressive precision of thinking and expression,her consistency and perseverance in research. We would like to thank herfor the friendship that she has offered us over several decades, wishing hermany more years of creative presence in the academia.4 Its English version titled What Christians Believe: The Story of God and People inMinimal English was published by Oxford University Press in 2019 [translator’s note].14 Ethnolinguistics for Anna Wierzbicka’s jubileeReferencesAdamowski, Jan and Stanisława Niebrzegowska (eds.). 1999. W zwierciadle języka i kultury.Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.Bartmiński, Jerzy. 1973. O języku folkloru. Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków-Gdańsk: ZakładNarodowy im. Ossolińskich.Bartmiński, Jerzy. 1988. Definicja kognitywna jako narzędzie opisu konotacji. In JerzyBartmiński (ed.) Konotacja. 169–183. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.Głaz, Adam, David S. Danaher, and Przemysław Łozowski. 2013. Introduction. In: AdamGłaz, David S. Danaher, and Przemysław Łozowski (eds.) The LinguisticWorldview: Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture. 11–24. London: Versita.SSSL. 1996–. Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. 1996–. Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński andStanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.Wierzbicka, Anna. 1965. O języku dla wszystkich. Warszawa: Wiedza Powszechna. [2nded. 1967]Wierzbicka, Anna. 1985. Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Wierzbicka, Anna. 1966. System składniowo-stylistyczny prozy polskiego renesansu. War-szawa: PIW.Wierzbicka, Anna. 1969. Dociekania semantyczne. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Osso-lińskich.Wierzbicka, Anna. 1971. Kocha-lubi-szanuje. Medytacje semantyczne. Warszawa: WiedzaPowszechna.Wierzbicka, Anna. 1972. Semantic Primitives. Frankfurt: Athenaum Verlag.Wierzbicka, Anna. 1984.Mały portret języka polskiego dla młodzieży w krajach anglosaskich.Adelaide: South Australian Department of Education.Wierzbicka, Anna. 1992. Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Conceptsin Culture-specific Configurations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Wierzbicka, Anna. 1999. Język – umysł – kultura. Selected papers, ed. Jerzy Bartmiński,transl. Maciej Abramowicz, Jerzy Bartmiński, Teresa Dobrzyńska, AgataKochańska, Paweł Kornacki, Krzysztof Korżyk, Jolanta Szpyra, and RyszardTokarski. Warszawa: PWN.Wierzbicka, Anna. 2002. Co mówi Jezus? Objaśnianie przypowieści ewangelicznych w sło-wach prostych i uniwersalnych. Transl. Izabela Duraj-Nowosielska, Warszawa:PWN.Wierzbicka, Anna. 2006. Semantyka. Jednostki elementarne i uniwersalne. Transl. AdamGłaz, Krzysztof Korżyk, and Ryszard Tokarski. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.[2nd ed. 2010]Wierzbicka, Anna.. 2007. Słowa klucze. Różne języki – różne kultury. Transl. IzabelaDuraj-Nowosielska. Warszawa: University of Warsaw Press.Wierzbicka, Anna. 2013. Polish zwierzęta ‘animals’ and jabłka ‘apples’: an ethnosemanticinquiry. In Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, and Przemysław Łozowski (eds.)The Linguistic Worldview: Ethnolinguistics, Cognition, and Culture. 137–159.London: Versita.Wierzbicka, Anna. 2017. W co wierzą chrześcijanie? Opowieść o Bogu i ludziach. Kraków:Znak.Wierzbicka, Anna and Piotr Wierzbicki. 1967. Stylistyka praktyczna. Warszawa: WiedzaPowszechna.Jerzy Bartmiński(translated by Agnieszka Gicala)

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„Etnolingwistyka” na jubileusz Profesor Anny Wierzbickiej

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University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska (UMCS): Scientific e-Journals / Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej: e-czasopisma naukowe

„Etnolingwistyka” na jubileusz Profesor Anny Wierzbickiej

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

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Biblioteka Nauki - repozytorium artykuÅÃ³w

University of Maria Curie-Skłodowska (UMCS): Scientific e-Journals / Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej: e-czasopisma naukowe

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