Among the highlights of Professor Janusz Siatkowski’s scholarly activity in the field of Polish and Slavic studies, there are his consistent development of the areal paradigm of linguistic research and his establishing and interpreting correlations between the areal distribution of linguistic phenomena and their chronological features, as well as between language‑internal and extralinguistic factors influencing language evolution processes.
The method of topochronographic analysis, which primarily emerged in Siatkowski’s numerous studies of Slavic dialect lexis, was then adopted and further developed by other linguists. Using exhaustive synchronic and diachronic linguistic data, and also taking into account the specificity of every linguistic item under scrutiny have resulted in the efficiency of his reconstruction and interpretation of structural, areal, and functional changes in linguistic inventories, their variation within individual Slavic languages and the common Slavonic area. Siatkowski’s analysis of a wide range of structural elements of various languages, differing in their genesis and history, testifies to the high informative value of all kinds of linguistic items, something that, while not denying the existence of general regularities of language development, brings into clearer relief their shared as well as exclusive properties. From the viewpoint of their content, Siatkowski’s works are twofold: firstly, they involve detailed analysis of linguistic items, and secondly, they employ a rigorous theoretical and methodological apparatus, which includes a set of relevant analytical procedures and is fit to be applied to other linguistic objects and in other research areas. Many studies in the 2019 volume “Prace Filologiczne” demonstrate the further proliferation and development of his ideas and methods – of what may be termed Siatkowski’s approach. Heuristically, many papers in this volume are valuable for the new material of Slavonic dialects and languages they bring, as well as the way this material is structured and interpreted. The inventories of linguistic items presented in dialect descriptions then turn into a matrix applicable in checking up other Slavonic linguistic areas, finding their common and distinctive elements, and establishing cross‑dialectal and cross‑linguistic isoglosses of various structural levels as well as exclusive features. The authors of the papers arrive at new theoretic generalizations concerning the regularities and scale of structural and functional changes in the common Slavonic dialectal area, effectively elaborating the areal paradigm of language study as an important direction in modern linguistics.