Leon Zawadowski. A Draft Portrait from a Personal Perspective

Abstract

 

The author, first, reminds the Reader of the main points of Leon Zawadowski’s scholarly career, second, calls the Reader’s attention to some of the principal lin-guistic-theoretical tenets of his works, third, offers an outline of certain events in his pedagogical activity, in particular, as a visiting professor in Warsaw (in the mid-sixties), fourth, presents personal reminiscenses of encounters with Zawadowski at, roughly, the same time, and reports on certain facts concerning the influence that Zawadowski’s writings had on his own work in the fifties and sixties.

The remarks on Zawadowski’s contribution on the theory of language encompass: a short presentation of the fundamental linguistic-theoretical ideas outlined by Zawadowski, a high appraisal of the weight and style of his work, and a comparison of his theoretical approach with that of Wittgenstein as the author of the Tractatus, as well as with de Saussure’s works. Both Wittgenstein and Zawadowski are classed among proponents of the knowledge-centered logocentrism in the theory of language (which is a position the author endorses), as opposed to de Saussure’s and the later Wittgenstein’s „expressive logocentrism”. Certain doubts are raised on account of several claims made by Zawadowski, in particular, on account of his claim of the necessity of a unilateral approach to so-called „linguistic signs” in its contrast to de Saussure’s and Wittgenstein’s ideas of the primordial status of bilateral units of language (as emerging from Martinet’s „first level of (linguistic) articulation”).