Die polnische Schule der semantischen Syntax im Kontext globaler Trends im Bereich der funktionalen Linguistik

Summary The Polish school of semantic syntax constitutes a distinct direction of scholarly research that emerged in the 1980 s, largely owing to the groundbreaking work Gramatyka współczesnego języka polskiego (“Grammar of Contemporary Polish,” 1984), in which S. Karolak elaborated the fundamental assumptions of a semantically grounded conception of syntax. Karolak’s framework draws, on the one hand, from the Polish tradition of semantic inquiry – particularly the Lwów–Warsaw School of logical positivism – and, on the other hand, engages with contemporary developments in semantic-syntactic research. The present study aims to demonstrate the value of the Polish school of semantic syntax in relation to major models of syntactic theory in contemporary linguistics, including categorial grammar, functional generative grammar (in the version proposed by S. Dik), lexical-functional grammar (as developed by J. Bresnan and collaborators), and Role and Reference Grammar (as formulated by W. A. Foley and R. D. van Valin). The paper examines those aspects of syntactic-semantic analysis that the Polish school has adopted from other theoretical frameworks, as well as those that constitute its original contributions. Furthermore, it presents key theoretical and heuristic proposals advanced by Polish scholars, emphasizing their potential applicability to syntactic studies of other languages.