Rewizja w badaniach historycznojęzykowych – inspiracje i możliwości
Revision in historical linguistic research – inspirations and opportunities

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses contemporary revisions of viewpoints and texts undertaken by historians of the Polish language, discloses motivations behind the revisited views, and elaborates on further research avenues in this area, as well as pinpoints the most common limitations. The literature on the subject reveals that although the necessity of research revision is widely recognised by researchers, studies specifically addressing the issue are relatively rare. Nonetheless, revision should be seen not only as a pretext for altering the established beliefs, but also as an opportunity to revisit the research object in order to unearth new, previously unnoticed data. Such a broadly defined concept of revision brings tangible benefits not only to historians of language, but also to representatives of related disciplines. Revision can result in, among others, a change in the dating of literary monuments, a change in lexical chronology, a change in text interpretation, a changed view on text origin, a new relationship postulated between text editions, and, finally, an expanded state of research. These arguments speak in favour of seeing revision sometimes as a necessity, at other times as a privilege and an opportunity, but never as a threat to established scientific methods or theories.

• Details
• Contents