Granice historii języka

BOUNDARIES OF THE HISTORY OF LANGUAGE The author of the article presents arguments for the redefinition of the subject of study of the history of the Polish language. Theoretical assumptions of this subdiscipline of diachronic linguistics were formulated more than a century ago by Zenon Klemensiewicz, the author of the, so far, only historical-linguistic synthesis. Since then, along with changing research paradigms, the boundaries of the subdiscipline’s field of study have been expanded to include stylistic, semantic, generic, textual, and discursive issues. The author argues that the growth of knowledge, resulting from the use of diverse methods, tools, and operational terms to describe the language of the past, should lead to the emancipation of such subdisciplines as historical stylistics, historical genre studies, and historical discourse studies. In turn, the history of language, rooted in the idea that it is the community that forms a language, would then focus exclusively on those changes in a language that have been causally related to the history of the community that uses it. Within such narrow boundaries of the research field, a new synthesis of the history of the Polish language could be created.