XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Kuryłowicz is best known for his works on the Indo-European languages. The most important ones are Apophony in Indo-European (1956) and The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European (1964). In the latter, he discussed the inflectional categories of Indo-European languages and later, on the basis of these studies, formulated the so-called Case Theory.

Indo-European Languages:

Jerzy Kuryłowicz highly contributed to the Laryngeal Theory. It is a widely accepted hypothesis in the historical linguistics of the Indo-European languages positing that:

• Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) had a series of phonemes beyond those reconstructed with the comparative method.

• These phonemes, according to the most-accepted variant of the theory, were "laryngeal" consonants of an indeterminate place of articulation towards the back of the mouth.

The theory aims to:

• Produce greater regularity in the reconstruction of PIE phonology than from the reconstruction that is produced by the comparative method.

• Extend the general occurrence of the Indo-European ablaut to syllables with reconstructed vowel phonemes other than *e or *o.

The beginnings of the theory were proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879, in an article chiefly devoted to something else altogether (demonstrating that *a and *o were separate phonemes in PIE).

In the course of his analysis, Saussure proposed that what had then been reconstructed as long vowels *ā and *ō, alternating with *ǝ, was actually an ordinary type of PIE ablaut. That is, it was an alternation between e-grade and zero grade like in "regular" ablaut (further explanations below), but followed by a previously unidentified element. This "element" accounted for both the changed vowel color and the lengthening (short *e becoming long *ā or *ō).

So, rather than reconstructing *ā, *ō and *ǝ as others had done before, Saussure proposed something like *eA alternating with *A and *eO with *O, where A and O represented the unidentified elements. Saussure called them simply coefficients sonantiques, which was the term for what are now in English more usually called resonants; that is, the six elements present in PIE which can be either consonants (nonsyllabic) or vowels (syllabic) depending on the sounds they are adjacent to: *y w r l m n.

These views were accepted by a few scholars, in particular Hermann Möller, who added important elements to the theory. Saussure's observations, however, did not achieve any general currency, as they were still too abstract and had little direct evidence to back them up.

This changed when Hittite was discovered and deciphered in the early 20th century. Hittite had a sound or sounds written with symbols from the Akkadian syllabary conventionally transcribed as ḫ, as in te-iḫ-ḫi "I put, am putting". This consonant did not appear to be clearly related to any of the consonants then reconstructed for PIE, and various unsatisfactory proposals were made to explain this consonant in terms of the PIE consonant system as it had then been reconstructed.

Jerzy Kuryłowicz proposed that these sounds lined up with Saussure's conjectures. He suggested that the unknown consonant of Hittite was in fact a direct reflex of the coefficients sonantiques that Saussure had proposed.

Their appearance explained some other matters as well; they explained, for example, why verb roots containing only a consonant and a vowel always have long vowels. For example, in *dō- "give", the new consonants allowed linguists to decompose this further into *deh₃. This not only accounted for the patterns of alternation more economically than before (by requiring fewer types of ablaut), but also brought the structure of these roots into line with the basic PIE pattern which required roots to begin and end with a consonant.

There are many variations of the Laryngeal Theory. For example, the number of those laryngeal consonants varies according to different scholars. While some scholars, such as Oswald Szemerényi, reconstruct just one laryngeal. Some follow Jaan Puhvel's reconstruction of eight or more. But most linguists work with basic three:

• *h₁, the "neutral" laryngeal

• *h₂, the "a-coloring" laryngeal

• *h₃, the "o-coloring" laryngeal

And there is no universal consensus on pronunciation of these phonems.

Case theory

In this theory he proposes the division into grammatical and concrete cases. According to Kuryłowicz, the case is a syntactic or semantic relation expressed by the appropriate inflected form or by linking the preposition with a noun, so it is the category based on a relation inside the sentence or a relation between two sentences.

The category of case covers two basic case groups:

• grammatical case

• concrete cases

Grammatical cases: their primary function is syntactic, the semantic function is secondary. If we take the sentence: ‘The boy sat down’ (Fisiak 1975: 59) with an intransitive verb ‘sit’, we may notice that the sentence can be changed into causative construction: ‘’He made the boy sit down’’ (ibid), where the word ‘boy’ is changed from nominative into accusative, with the superior position of nominative. (Nominativus, accusativus)

Concrete cases: they include instrumentalis, locativus and ablativus, whose primary function is the adverbial semantic function. They answer the questions: with whom?, where?, from where?. The syntactic function of concrete cases is secondary. These cases are governed by semantically determined verbs.

For instance, the Polish verb kierować (to drive) governs the direct object in the instrumental case, as in the expression kierować samochodem (to drive a car)

Syntactic transformation

In 1936 Kuryłowicz introduced the idea of syntactic transformation, pointing at the same time that this syntactic (transformative) derivation does not change the meaning of syntactic form. Therefore, if we take the sentence like: Kate washes the car. and change it into passive: The car is washed by Kate. we can notice that the second sentence has the same meaning as the first one. They differ just in terms of style. The idea of transformative derivation proves that Kuryłowicz was ahead of his times, because what he described resembles one of the main assumptions of Chomsky’s Transformative – Generative Grammar postulated several years later.

Foundation concept

Kuryłowicz was also interested in the element hierarchy and the function of the language system. Analyzing the problem of hierarchy he introduced the concept of foundation, which is the relation between two forms or functions in a language.

One of the forms or functions, so-called founding, always results in the presence of the founded, not conversely. For instance, in Latin, the ending -s or -or in the singular nominative always forms the –orem ending in the accusative. It does not work the other way round because the ending in the accusative does not allow one to predict the ending in the nominative case; it can be either -os or -or.

Laws of analogy

Kuryłowicz is also known for his "Six Laws of Analogy" that have been widely used in historical linguistics to understand how analogical grammatical changes work. The laws consist of six predictive statements about the direction of analogical changes:

1. A bipartite marker tends to replace an isofunctional simple marker.

2. The directionality of analogy is from a “basic” form to a “subordinate” form with respect to their spheres of usage.

3. A structure consisting of a basic and a subordinate member serves as a foundation for a basic member which is isofunctional but isolated.

4. When the old (non-analogical) form and the new (analogical) form are both in use, the former remains in secondary function and the latter takes the basic function.

5. A more marginal distinction is eliminated for the benefit of a more significant distinction.

6. A base in analogy may belong to a prestige dialect affecting the form of a dialect imitating it.

Sharing the structuralist understanding of language as a “system of pure relations”, unlike many structuralists, he was actively engaged in the problems of the evolution of the linguistic system. One of the main theoretical achievements of Kurilovich is the substantiation of the method of internal reconstruction for the study of more ancient stages of a language: in contrast to the classical comparative method of external reconstruction, based on regular sound correspondences in the sphere of basic vocabulary of related languages, only one language is used for internal reconstruction, and more ancient forms are restored based on an analysis of irregular inflectional features. As a researcher of the problems of the origin and evolution of grammatical categories and the reasons for language changes, Kurilovich is one of the predecessors of the “theory of grammatization”. Considering this and everything he did for linguistics, including the Case Theory and his contribution into the Laryngeal Theory, I can conclude that he was one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century and probably the most prominent linguist of Polish descent.

References:

Курилович, Ежи. Очерки по лингвистике. Издательство иностранной литературы. М – 1962.

https://bigenc.ru/linguistics/text/2125383

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jerzy-Kurylowicz

Kiparsky, Paul. "Analogy." In International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. : Oxford University Press, 2003.

The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1964.

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