Chapter Antoni Krasnowolski – nineteenth-century proto-communicativist?

Overview & Synopsis

Communicative grammar introduces functional criteria for distinguishing parts of speech. Similar criteria can be found in the nineteenth-century grammar of Antoni Krasnowolski. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate to what extent Krasnowolski's grammar was a new, coherent and, from a contemporary point of view, functional approach. I compare Krasnowolski’s perspective and the communicative approach of A. Awdiejew and G. Habrajska to selected issues, such as: predicates, metapredicates and predicatives, non-inflectional verbs, adjectives, case functions (on the example of the genitive), temporal updaters, interactive operators called by the author "formal adverbs". I also show how intuition allowed the author of Systematic Syntax to see the problem regarding the divergence of form and function, a phenomenon that is currently described as isomorphic and non-isomorphic forms.