Zmiany w opisach fleksyjnych w gramatykach języka polskiego z lat 1817−1939

Changes in the description of the inflection in Polish grammar from 1817−1939

The article contributes to the study of the history of Polish linguistics. The author tries to trace the development of linguistic concepts by Polish grammarians exploring the language first in the prescientific period and later by linguists who drew from European linguistic theories and developed them for the Polish language. The author presents briefly the major problems in changes and the development of inflectional descriptions in: 1) the scope of the study of the word as part of linguistic description, its place in grammatical description, and in this context, a presentation of the status of inflection, 2) changes of the understanding of inflection and word formation, 3) an understanding of the word and description of its structure, 4) the scope of the inflectional paradigm in inflected parts of speech, 5) descriptions of and divisions between declensions and conjugations. The material presented in the article proves that many interesting insights into language already appeared in 19thcentury non-linguistic textbooks. Subsequently, such linguistic studies continued and in many cases, survived in grammatical tradition.