The article consists of two parts. The first one is of a reporting character and presents the concept of a new synthesis of the history of the Polish language worked out by a group of scholars at the Commission on the History of Language of the Committee on Linguistics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. This conception assumes the elaboration of 3 volumes, the first of which is to concern the theory and methods applied in historical linguistics, the second is to cover the chronological approach, and the third is to present the most important problems in the history of the Polish language, especially those not yet described in synthetic studies. The second part of the article is problem-oriented and deals with the notion of change, which is the most important for the diachronic description and diachronic research understood in this case in a broad and multifaceted way. On the one hand, the authors discuss the change of language, proposing a way of understanding and describing it, on the other hand, they show a change in the approach to historical-linguistic research (on the example of research into Old Polish language). In the conclusion, the authors present their view on further work and discuss their idea of preparing the concept of a fourth volume, which would present the history of the Polish language focusing on language varieties, language variants and contacts between languages.

The article is devoted to the possibilities of embedding historical-linguistic research within the context of the new humanities. The reflection encompasses digital humanities, engaged humanities, cognitive humanities, posthumanities, and artistic humanities. Observations lead to the following conclusions: (1) the history of language should be treated as a subdiscipline of linguistics providing knowledge about culture; (2) in addition to describing and interpreting phenomena related to language and communication, the history of language should strive to formulate diagnostic and prospective conclusions leading to the solution of current human and world problems; (3) it is necessary to culti-vate and deepen the methodological openness of the history of language to other disciplines and fields of science; (4) in accordance with the assumptions of neo-humanities, the history of language should value qualitative research, wherever possible and depending on the research topic, strengthen it with quantitative data; (5) a historical-linguistic reflection within the domains of the new humanities confirms their intersection, complementarity and the opportunity for holistic understanding at the same time; (6) observations aligning with various trends in neo-humanities are visible in the research on the linguistic contemporaneity, which is worth extending to historical inquiries.

The article is devoted to a semantic evolution of lexemes from the field of the concept of zabawa [play] in onomasiological approach. The aim is to present the project to create a model of the semantic evolution of words on the example of lexemes from this field. This will allow us
to verify the validity of one of two theoretical views on the development of the meaning of words – about its regularity or chaotic nature. The subject of the study contains all lexemes from the field, unlike the current diachronic onomasiological analyses that deal only with the main representatives of the concept. The analysis requires taking into account etymologically different lexemes and carefully tracing the history of words throughout the history of the Polish language, according to changes in the cultural shape of the concept of zabawa. The syncretic method developed in Polish historical-linguistic studies will be used in the analysis, and the material basis is the corpus of texts from all periods of Polish language. The text is devoted to the project, so the conclusions are only anticipated, and, ultimately, it is to decide whether the semantic evolution of words is regular or chaotic.

The objective of this article is to present a selection of research opportunities inherent in the category of memory for historical linguistic studies and to discuss the relationship between linguistics of memory and diachronic linguistics. This will be done by presenting their common and distinct places. Both linguistic subdisciplines share a common interest, especially a focus on the past, which is worthy of exploitation when applying memory-centred topics at the discursive and genological level, in the study of specific texts or in the stylistic and lexical layer of historical linguistic studies. The linguistic disciplines, of memory and diachronic, facing converging problems resulting, among other things, from the lack of direct accessibility of the object of research, can learn a great deal from each other. Memory can also be considered a concept that guides the study of the history of language, as postulated by Magdalena Pastuch (2018). The examination of memory as a category for analysing the history of the Polish language can be further enriched by considering textual-level phenomena. The genres of discourse of memory represent a particularly valuable source of material for this purpose, as it allows for insights to be gained into both the issue of the permanence of the reception of linguistic events of youth and the language of a given generation.

The subject of the article is the ending of letters in correspondence from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The description uses a pragmalinguistic approach or, more precisely, a description from the perspective of speech acts and linguistic etiquette. The aim of the research is to present the ending of a letter as a kind of an etiquette macroact, which consists of individual microacts that carry out different communicative intentions. The source database consists of about 500 letters, written by 73 people of the noble estate. In the course of the analysis, it was shown that the end of a letter may consist of two types of microacts: (1) phatic acts with the function of farewell (announcements of the cessation of contact and symbolic farewells), (2) concomitant acts: expressive (positive evaluation of the correspondence partner, expression of feelings towards the addressee), declarative (placing oneself under the care of the addressee, offering services to the addressee, self-identification of the sender) and performative (requests). The multiplicity of intentions expressed in the conclusion of the letter results from the strategic nature of this fragment of the epistolary text. The intensification of interactivity and politeness serves to mitigate the negative impression caused by the end of contact on the part of the sender, and, at the same time, to design further positive interactions with the addressee.

This article is devoted to the lexeme szwermer, which is a Polonized form of the German noun Schwärmer, attested in various Polish-language texts of a religious nature written in the 16th century (including the postille of M. Luther). The aim of the article is to determine the meaning of the lexeme szwermer in this period and to try to answer the question whether this noun should be considered an example of a sequative name (names of believers and followers of religions and sects, identifying or non-identifying) or of expressivism (expressive appellative names of people). The considerations were based on a lexical-semantic analysis taking into account the frequency and textual extension of the lexeme. The analysis of the noun szwermer showed that in the 16th century literature it was an expressivism with a negatively evaluative function, the closest Polish equivalent of which was the noun wartołeb. Due to the origin of the lexeme, the need for comparative research was also indicated to complement the presented conclusions.

This article focuses on 19th-century folk songs, which are typically used as sources for dialectological research, but, as it turns out, also serve as important source material for studying the evolution of sociolects. The author’s aim is to demonstrate the necessity of including folk songs in discussions about the development and history of thieves’ jargon. The premise is that when studying historical vocabulary belonging to social varieties of language, particularly as recorded in diverse sources (such as folkloric works, crime novels, or popular science studies), adopting a broad, inclusive perspective is essential. This perspective should not exclude anthropological approaches and consider language a communicative tool deeply rooted in specific cultural, historical, and sociological contexts. As the analysis reveals, this approach opens the door to re-examining widely accepted theses and theories about thieves’ jargon – for example, the chronology of the emergence of specific forms and meanings, processes of semantic change, the origins of particular lexical items, and the increasingly visible trend of this jargon becoming less secret and infiltrating other language varieties.

This paper is an overview of linguistic phenomena leading to the formation of dative-locative syncretism in various Slavic languages, mainly in Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Slovene, Serbian, and Croatian. These innovations may be motivated either by semantics, where they are linked with the category of animacy, or by morphology, where they arise as an effect of the rearrangement of the inflection system. In both cases, the mechanisms forming the syncretism originate in Proto-Slavic, but the morphology-oriented changes are more likely to result in a full syncretism, whereas the semantic motivation keeps the innovation within the bounds of the paradigm of masculine animate nouns.

The aim of this paper was to identify the most important features of the French-Polish bilingualism of Queen Marysieńka Sobieska (Maria Kazimiera d'Arquien), present in her correspondence. The analysis refers to the concept of linguistic change by William Labov and historical sociolinguistics capturing language within a broad social context. As a sender, the queen in the egodocuments assumed various social roles characteristic of the Polish society in the 17th and 18th centuries (e.g. daughter, wife, mother, grandmother, sister-in-law, friend, owner of goods, superior), with their own formal exponents realized using segments in Polish. Polish as a second language appears in various positions of the delimitation frame of the analyzed letters, performing various functions. The conclusion emphasizes the fact that their author had full communicative competence in the two languages, which constituted an inseparable and coherent whole.

The subject of the research in this article is the relationship between the history of the Polish language and Polish language glottodidactics. It is considered from two perspectives: (1) research – as a relationship of separate sciences with a common object of study, having their own goals and a conceptual apparatus, but also mutual sources in terms of certain research concepts and methods, and (2) practical – in terms of the relationship between the knowledge of the history of language construction and use and the teaching and learning of Polish as a foreign and second language. The presented considerations were intended to demonstrate the importance of mutual relationships between the subdisciplines being compared. Today, the common research area of the history of the Polish language and glottodidactics is the increasingly visible traces of the use of the Polish language recorded in writing. There is also a need to include historical and linguistic content in the glottodidactic workshop, and special emphasis should be placed on teaching Polish and Polish culture in the spirit of understanding the common Slavic heritage, for which knowledge of the history of the language seems necessary.

The article stems from the belief that glottodidactic materials documenting the history of teaching Polish as a foreign language should be more intensively included in the scope of diachronic research. The review, conducted from a discourseological perspective, covered Polish language textbooks written for English-speaking audiences from the end of the 19th century to the mid-20th century. The study aims to describe the socio-cultural and institutional conditions as well as the subject matter of the Polish-language glottodidactic discourse in the English-speaking environment in the past. A preliminary analysis of the content of the textbooks allowed for establishing that the demand for Polish language proficiency in English-speaking countries was motivated by academic, integrative, and cultural reasons. Another factor contributing to the prestige of the Polish language was the political situation of Poland after 1918. The scope and manner of the presentation of the Polish language reflect the state of knowledge of the methodology of teaching modern languages at that time. The observations made in the study seem to confirm the usefulness of discursological analyses of old glottodidactic textbooks, also in order to supplement knowledge about the prestige and functional differentiation of the Polish language in the past.

The author's main aim in the article is to present the state of historical-linguistic education based on comparing the curricula in Polish philology studies implemented in ten Polish universities in the academic year 2023/2024. The reference point for the considerations made was selected opinions of linguists on the academic didactics of historical-linguistic courses since 2000. The collected data was discussed and compared quantitatively and qualitatively with a report from 2014 developed by the linguistics education team at the Linguistics Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Krystyna Kleszczowa. The comparison concerns the number of hours in historical-linguistic courses in 1st and 2nd cycle studies, the courses taught, and their sequence in the education cycle. Next, the author discussed new educational opportunities offered by e-learning and digital tools. The last part of the article presented a new curriculum of Polish philology 1st cycle studies in the field of didactics of historical-linguistic courses, implemented from the academic year 2024/2025 at the University of Silesia in Katowice as part of the so-called New Conception of Studies.

The author assumes that there are two fundamentally different theoretical and methodological views in the tradition of linguistics: determinism and indeterminism. The first direction is based on the algorithmic, systemic, and computational approach, while the second on the empiriocentric, experiential, phenomenological approach. Although scientific formations founded on the first or second theoretical assumption are polarized, in fact, both approaches represent an ambivalent nature of language and its characteristics which complement each other in a linguistic activity. The need to use indeterminism methodology in linguistic research results from the fact that language constructions in practice are modified under the influence of factors that are extralinguistic in nature – primarily under the influence of human experience. Therefore, the author considers the phenomenon of approximation as a basic principle of language activity which determines various types of modifications of language rules in the field of grammar. Using the example of the category of voice, the author shows that due to approximation, the oppositions of functional classes of an active and passive voice, existing in the language system, are blurred.

The purpose of this paper is to briefly analyze the conceptualisation of the notion [I] being a sub-notion of [SELF] among the English, Polish and Italian societies. In this paper, the author refers to cognitive linguistics; in particular the principles of R. Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar and the imagery process. His main objective is to verify conceptualization processes behind the aforementioned notion, focusing on the imagery of the scene of particular linguistic expressions as well as on image schemata and conceptual metaphors thereof. In order to perform such a goal, examples depicting the [I] notion at the superficial linguistic level will be analysed, especially in terms of different types of personal pronouns. Based on that, the differences between examples and ways of presenting the notions in English, Polish and Italian will be analyzed. Preliminary analysis has shown factual differences in how [I] is realised not only on the linguistic level, but also on the conceptual one, as the latter determines how we perceive and function in the extralinguistic world. Potential sources of these differences, which can constitute a starting point for further analyses, has also been described.