Jerzy Kuryłowicz

Building on prior work by Antoine Meillet, Kuryłowicz's is also known for his "Six Laws of Analogy" that have been widely used in historical linguistics to understand how analogical grammatical changes work.[2] The laws consist of six predictive statements about the direction of analogical changes:

1. A bipartite marker tends to replace an isofunctional simple marker.
2. The directionality of analogy is from a “basic” form to a “subordinate” form with respect to their spheres of usage.
3. A structure consisting of a basic and a subordinate member serves as a foundation for a basic member which is isofunctional but isolated.
4. When the old (non-analogical) form and the new (analogical) form are both in use, the former remains in secondary function and the latter takes the basic function.
5. A more marginal distinction is eliminated for the benefit of a more significant distinction.
6. A base in analogy may belong to a prestige dialect affecting the form of a dialect imitating it.[3][4][5]

In this theory he proposes the division into grammatical and concrete cases. According to Kuryłowicz, the case is a syntactic or semantic relation expressed by the appropriate inflected form or by linking the preposition with a noun, so it is the category based on a relation inside the sentence or a relation between two sentences.

The category of case covers two basic case groups:

1. Grammatical cases: their primary function is syntactic, the semantic function is secondary. If we take the sentence: ‘The boy sat down’ (Fisiak 1975: 59) with an intransitive verb ‘sit’, we may notice that the sentence can be changed into causative construction: ‘’He made the boy sit down’’ (ibid), where the word ‘boy’ is changed from nominative into accusative, with the superior position of nominative. (Nominativus, accusativus)
2. Concrete cases: they include instrumentalis, locativus and ablativus, whose primary function is the adverbial semantic function. They answer the questions: with what?, where?, from where?. The syntactic function of concrete cases is secondary. These cases are governed by semantically determined verbs.

For example, the Polish verb kierować (to drive) governs the direct object in the instrumental case, as in the expression kierować samochodem (to drive a car) (Fisiak 1975: 60)

While studying the phonology of Indo-European languages, Kuryłowicz pointed to the existence of the Hittite consonant ḫ in his 1927 paper "ə indo-européen et ḫ hittite". This discovery supported Ferdinand de Saussure’s 1879 proposal of the existence of coefficients sonantiques, elements that de Saussure reconstructed to account for vowel length alternations in Indo-European. This led to the so-called laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics and a confirmation of de Saussure's theory.

In 1936 Kuryłowicz introduced the idea of syntactic transformation, pointing at the same time that this syntactic (transformative) derivation does not change the meaning of syntactic form. Therefore, if we take the sentence like: Kate washes the car. and change it into passive: The car is washed by Kate. we can notice that the second sentence has the same meaning as the first one. They differ just in terms of style. The idea of transformative derivation proves that Kuryłowicz was ahead of his times, because what he described resembles one of the main assumptions of Chomsky’s Transformative – Generative Grammar postulated several years later.

Kuryłowicz was also interested in the element hierarchy and the function of the language system. Analyzing the problem of hierarchy he introduced the concept of foundation, which is the relation between two forms or functions in a language. One of the forms or functions, so-called founding, always results in the presence of the founded, not conversely. For instance, in Latin, the endings -os and -or in the nominative singular both always correspond with the ending -orem in the accusative singular. This does not work the other way round, because the ending in the accusative does not allow one to predict the ending in the nominative case: it can be either -os or -or. (Fisiak 1975: 56)