Od tradycji do nowatorstwa. Studia nad nazwami własnymi

Abstract

The decision to prepare the monograph Od tradycji do nowatorstwa. Studia nad nazwami własnymi (From Tradition to Innovation. Studies into Proper Names) was made in connection with the 70th jubilee of Professor Leonarda Dacewicz, a linguist from the College of Linguistics of the Faculty of Philology of the University of Białystok, and the 45th anniversary of her professional career. Our intention was not only to honour these extremely important anniversaries in the life of the honourable Jubilarian, but also to appreciate her long and fruitful research in the field of onomastics, aimed at discovering the multiple aspects of the functioning of proper names. We hope that this book will be welcomed by both the professor and other linguists involved with research on onomastics, as well as all potential readers who wish to learn about this field. Proper names, compared to other areas of vocabulary, are distinguished by strong connections to the time and place of their origin. They also belong to the culture in which they had developed. This means that they contain meanings, values, norms, and perceptions of reality that have formed over centuries in a given area and are bound to the culture that has developed there. They are also an expression of the relations between a given region and other countries, of the activities, aspirations, and emotions of its inhabitants. Thus, studies into the essence of proper names also reveal numerous facts from the field of history, geography, social and political realities. Proper names are an inexhaustible source of this knowledge. This wealth of content, accumulated by proper names, means that proprial terms can be analysed on many levels, with the use of various research tools and methods, not only strictly onomastic ones. It was the proper names, which allow for the possibility of multi‑directional interpretation, and the discipline exploring them – onomastics – which almost half a century ago attracted the attention of Professor Leonarda Dacewicz and have remained the main focus of her research to this day. She has devoted a vast number of various publications to these issues – over 200 separate items. Her body of work is dominated by studies on the formation of the anthroponymic system (primarily family names) in the Polish‑Lithuanian-East Slavic borderland in the fifteenth‑nineteenth centuries, based mainly on material obtained as a result of the Professor’s truly Benedictine work using source documents stored in domestic and foreign archives. These publications are widely known and very often quoted in the onomastic research community in Poland and beyond its eastern border. They significantly enrich Polish and Slavic onomastics, especially in terms of the description of regional personal names. Most of the works collected in this volume also deal with onomastics. The authors of the individual chapters of the book, representing the Professor’s home academic centre and other scientific circles in Poland (Lublin, Bydgoszcz, Gdańsk, Poznań, Olsztyn) and the Belarusian Vitebsk, are interested in various facets of proper names, along with their typological and chronological heterogeneity. The onymic – in particular anthroponymic – historical and contemporary material, occurring in the literary space and in vivid regional nomenclature, is analysed. The classic methods of researching anthroponyms, toponyms, and other proprial categories are discussed, as well as more innovative approaches, including those that emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of onomastics. There are also general summaries of the state of research on proper names. Studies into the historical, political, and linguistic conditions of the territories where the proper names considered by the Professor were born and function are an interesting element. Texts of a personal nature are a tribute to the distinguished Jubilarian, discussing the various stages of her professional work: research, teaching, and organization; her own name; assessing the undeniable value of her scholarly achievements; presenting her as an extraordinary personality, a teacher willing to pass on her knowledge and experience to students and young scholars, as well as an outstanding authority in the field of onomastics. Following a convention adopted by many jubilee publications, the presented volume is accompanied by a bibliography of previous publications by Professor Leonarda Dacewicz.