Jerzy Kuryłowicz


Jerzy Kuryłowicz was a Polish linguist who studied Indo-European languages.

Life

Born in Stanislau, Austria–Hungary, he is considered the most outstanding contemporary Polish historical linguist, structuralist and language theoretician, deeply interested in the studies of Indo-European languages. He studied at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, and then, after World War I, continued his studies at Lwów University, 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 Lwów. Later on, in 1946-48 Kuryłowicz filled in for Dr Krzyżanowski at the Institute of English Philology in Wrocław. Finally, he moved to Kraków, where he took the chair of General Linguistics at Jagiellonian University. He retired in 1965. Kuryłowicz was a member of the Polish Academy of Learning and the Polish Academy of Science. He died at the age of 83 in Kraków.
He was a member of the Polish Academy of Learning and the Polish Academy of Sciences.
He was the brother of the microbiologist Włodzimierz Kuryłowicz. His son, also named Jerzy Kuryłowicz, obtained his PhD from the Technical University of Warsaw.

Work in linguistics

Kuryłowicz 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 and The Inflectional Categories of Indo-European. 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.

Laws of analogy

Kuryłowicz's 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 form and the new 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.

    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:
  1. Grammatical cases: their primary function is syntactic, the semantic function is secondary. If we take the sentence: ‘The boy sat down’ with an intransitive verb ‘sit’, we may notice that the sentence can be changed into causative construction: ‘’He made the boy sit down’’, where the word ‘boy’ is changed from nominative into accusative, with the superior position of nominative.
  2. 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 example, the Polish verb kierować governs the direct object in the instrumental case, as in the expression kierować samochodem

Laryngeals

While studying the phonology of Indo-European languages, Kuryłowicz pointed at the existence of the Hittite consonant ḫ in his 1927 paper "ə indo-européen et ḫ hittite". This discovery supported Ferdinand de Saussure’s 1879 proposal of the existence of coefficients sonantiques, elements de Saussure reconstructed to account for vowel length alternations in Indo-European. This led to the so-called laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics and a confirmation of de Saussure's theory.

Syntactic transformation

In 1936 Kuryłowicz introduced the idea of syntactic transformation, pointing at the same time that this syntactic 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 endings -os and -or in the nominative singular both always correspond with the ending -orem in the accusative singular. 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.

Publications