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Jerzy Kurylowicz
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Jerzy Kurylowicz (1895-1978) was a Polish linguist who studied Indo-European languages. He was the brother of Wlodzimierz Kurylowicz.
tudied in Vienna at Die Hochschule fur Welthandel (1913-1914), and then, after World War I, continued the studies at the University of Lviv, where his unusual language skills drew the attention of some prominent linguists.
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Jerzy Kurylowicz (1895-1978) was a Polish linguist who studied Indo-European languages. He was the brother of Wlodzimierz Kurylowicz.
Life
He was born on August 26th 1895 in Stanislawów, Austria-Hungary (now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine) , is considered the most outstanding contemporary Polish historical linguist, structuralist and language theoretician, deeply interested in the studies of Indo-European languages.
He studied in Vienna at Die Hochschule fur Welthandel (1913-1914), and then, after World War I, continued the studies at the University of Lviv, where his unusual language skills drew the attention of some prominent linguists. As a result, he was granted a scholarship in Paris. This gave him an opportunity to qualify as a university professor of Indo-European linguistics soon after his return to Poland. After obtaining the title, he became a professor at the University of Lviv. Later on, in 1946-48 Kurylowicz filled in for Dr Krzyzanowski at the Institute of English Philology in Wroclaw. Finally, he moved to Cracow, where he took the chair of General Linguistics at Jagiellonian University. He retired in 1965. Kurylowicz was a member of the Polish Academy of Learning and the Polish Academy of Science. He died at the age of 83 on January 28th 1978 in Kraków.
He was a member of the Polish Academy of Learning and the Polish Academy of Sciences. His son, Jerzy Kurylowicz (1925-2002) obtained his PhD from the Technical University of Warsaw, Poland.
Work in linguistics
Kurylowicz did not belong to any of the structuralist linguistic schools. In his views he was close to glossematics, whose many assumptions he accepted and developed.
He 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.
Case Theory
In this theory he proposes the division into grammatical and concrete cases. According to Kurylowicz, 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:
1. grammatical case
2. 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 kierowac (to drive) governs the direct object in the instrumental case, as in the expression kierowac samochodem (to drive a car) (Fisiak 1975: 60)
Laryngeals
While studying the phonology of Indo-European languages, Kurylowicz pointed at the existence of the Hittite consonant h. This discovery supported Ferdinand de Saussure’s suggestion that in the Indo-European languages we may find unique for these languages speech sounds called laryngeals.
Syntactic transformation
In 1936 Kurylowicz 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 Kurylowicz 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
Kurylowicz 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 –os or –or in sg. The 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 us to predict the ending in the Nominative case. It can be either –os or –or. (Fisiak 1975: 56)
Publications
- Kurylowicz, J., 1936. “Derivation lexicale et derivation syntaxique”. In Kurylowicz, J., 1960, 41–50.
- Kurylowicz, J., 1938. “Struktura morfemu”. In Kurylowicz, J., 51–65.
- Kurylowicz, J., 1949a. “La nature des proces dits ‘analogiques’”. Acta Linguistica 5: 121–38.
- Kurylowicz, J., 1949b. “La notion de l’isomorphisme”. In Kurylowicz, J., 1960, 16–26.
- Kurylowicz, J., 1949c. “Le probleme du classement des cas”. In Kurylowicz, J., 1960, 131–154.
- Kurylowicz, J., 1956. Apophony in Indo-European.
- Kurylowcz, J., 1960. Esquisses linguistiques. Wroclaw – Kraków, Polska Akademia Nauk.
- Kurylowicz, J., 1964. The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg, Carl Winter.
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