Gramatyka historyczna języka polskiego Witolda Mańczaka na tle innych podręczników akademickich

Abstract

Witold Mańczak’s Gramatyka historyczna języka polskiego (‘Historical Grammar of Polish’) as Compared to Other Academic Textbooks
Professor Witold Mańczak authored many academic textbooks, mostly concerning Romance languages, but also a historical grammar of Polish. This textbook focuses on the interpretation of linguistic, phonetic and morphological changes and on their subordination to general laws of language. According to Professor Mańczak, laws apply to all or the majority of languages; regularities observed in a single language can be granted no higher status than that of rules. Mańczak viewed laws as residing on a very high level of generalization, and he believed their verifiability lies in statistical circumstances. He wrote that linguistic problems should be formulated in such a way that they can be solved using statistics; those that cannot be solved using statistics are not worth the consideration. He saw the development of linguistics as tied to the progress in electronics. Professor Mańczak was an individuality in Polish linguistics who did not follow the linguistic fashion; he was never a structuralist and all the more a cognitivist. But it transpires that he was also an individuality in academic teaching. This author inferred his stance by delving into the specificity of the textbooks he authored: an Italian, French, and Spanish textbook, but also historical grammars of French and Polish.