Wyodrębnianie, dekodowanie i klasyfikacja historycznych jednostek języka
Delimitation, decoding and classification of historical language units

Summary/Abstract: The main goal of the article is to present different kinds of problems connected with the identification of the language units in Old and early Middle Polish texts, and with the various manifestations of their functional interpretation. The authors propose the term ‘historical unit of language’ that is understood in both dynamic and static aspects of diachrony. The major sources of these units are inherited expressions, borrowings and internal creations. The historical language unit is bilateral in nature and its semantic features consist of three dimensions: etymological, actual, and associative components. The article examines metatextual units and processes of metatextualization, as well as uses the example of Rozmyślanie przemyskie, Żywot Pana Jezu Krysta and other texts to show such problems as cohesion of the text and its comprehensiveness, especially in syntactic and utterance levels. In the second part of the article the authors present functional division of the Old Polish lexicon based on combinational and semantic characteristics of units in question, i.e. on those properties that are responsible for the tasks to be accomplished by a given class of expressions in making up a higher order unit, i.e. a syntagm. The authors centre on uninflected language units, proposing eight sentence classes and three discursive classes. Among them: uninflected participles, metapredicative operators, adverbs, infinitives, prepositions, uninflected pronominal substitutes of space and temporal expressions and whole sentences, conjunctions, particles and restrictors, contextualizators, connectors.

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