Images from the Polish cognitive scene

The present title is a travesty of the one given to a pioneering publication on CL which appeared on the Polish market: a 1993 collection of papers, called "Images from the Cognitive Scene" and edited by Elzbieta Gorska. Characteristically, out of ther eleven papers that constitute the book (all written by Polish authors) only one takes up a topic relating to Polish. Other discuss various aspects of English. This "anglicisation" is very typical of contemporary Polish scene. Among the few authors working within the cognitive framework the most prominent names are those of Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn (case) Ewa Dabrowska (verbal aspect, case) and Anna Wierzbicka (pragmatics, ethnolinguistics) - characteristically again, all of them working in a non-Polish milieu. Otherwise, Polish data appears only occasionally, in the form of simplified (and sometimes distorted) single examples. This is quite discouraging, considering the fact that the insights of many Polish representastives of "traditional" (pre-structuralist) linguistics may be in fact seen as fully compatible with Langacker's theory of language and grammar. Among contemporary Polish scholars, reservations about the cognitive framework stem from the unwillingness of the older generation to adopt new theoretical approach (terminology, notation, etc.), and, on the other hand, from the preoccupation of younger linguists with generativist theories. Those willing to adopt the cognitivist framework face two kinds of problems: they are not fully familiar with the traditional Polish "roots" and/or find the "anglicised" tools difficult to adopt to the exotic Polish material. As the result, contributions produced so far focus upon a few traditional areas (aspect, case and prepositions),while others, like gender, definiteness, discourse markers, various aspects of iconicity etc. are never tackled. It is claimed that re-focussing scholarly interests towards such topics - in cooperation with scholars working on other Slavic languages - could add validity to the thory while at the same time providing valuable feedback. Some examples will be given to substantiate this claim.