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This book summarizes scholarly achievements of the author by confronting two descriptive models of linguistic research. Against the background of a language-centered view dealing with its external conditionings in the life of nations and nationalities the author puts forward a human-centered conception of grammar which focuses on the ecosystem of communicating individuals who aggregate into interpersonal and intersubjective groupings for the realization of common tasks. Such a grammar manifests itself in linguistic-communicational properties of people through changeable practices of meaning-creation and stabilizing patterns of meaning-interpretation: firstly, when they create observable relationships while transmitting and receiving the meaning-bearers, and, secondly, when they contribute to the formation of assumable associations while coding and decoding the meanings to the approximately similar extent.
List of contents
Contents: Language and man in the history of linguistic thought - An inquiry into the functional view of language as a tool of communication or a property of task-realizing communities - The linguistic properties of communicating individuals and their role in the construction of an intersubjective world of meanings - On the ecosemiotic existence mode of language in local and global linkage aggregations - Sociological aspects of linguistic pragmatics in the light of hard-sciences - In favor of the notion of grammar as a network of interpersonal and intersubjective linkages - Applying an ecological model of language to the external characteristics of Frisian - Exposing the markers of Frisian ethnicity through a semiotic perspective - Presenting West Frisians as an aggregation of ecological linkages.
About the author
The Author: Elżbieta Magdalena Wąsik is Associate Professor in the School of English at the Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań (Poland), where she teaches on Old and Modern Frisian, Ecology of Germanic Languages, and conducts seminars in Human Linguistics. She obtained her primary education in German and Dutch (1981-1986), along with Ph.D. in general linguistics (1995), from the University of Wroclaw. Subsequently, she completed her D.Litt. (habilitation) at the AMU in Poznań in 2008. As the author of two books and numerous articles on the conditionings of minority languages and ecological grammar of human linkages, she has marked her presence at international conferences in Poland, Germany, Slovakia, Slovenia, Belgium, Finland, and the United States.
