The author states that the grammatical description of a language should be conceived in the frame of the theory: “meaning > form”. As an example to prove the adequacy of that statement she presents an outline of the semantic analysis of the grammatical category of person. The traditional grammar presents ‘person’ as an infl ectional category of the verb, exponent of the formal congruency of the verbal predicate with its implied argument in the form of the nominative noun phrase. From the semantic point of view ‘person’ is the central category guaranteeing success full act of linguistic communication: it enables us to identify correctly active participants of the speech event, as also those active in the spoken of event.

The author presents basic lines of semantic derivation from Proto-Slavic root *ži-/*živ- in Polish. Working on her theme she discovers an interesting old Slavic isogloss: while in West-Slavic languages the names for concepts ‘life/live’ and ‘animal’ have different etymology, in South- and East-Slavic, with the exception of the Ukrainian language – they have common origin.

The author defines the semantic category of diathesis as grammaticalized information about the hierarchy of arguments inscribed into the semantic structure of a predicate. She demonstrates that we can perceive an event from different perspectives depending on which argument is for the moment in the center of our interest. Thus, unlike aspect, mood or tense, diathesis is not an inflectional category of the constitutive predicate of a proposition, but a category of a pro-position as such, notwithstanding the fact that there are oppositions as active ~ passive, or possession ~ appertainance/belonging to which affect directly the surface form of the constitutive predicate. There is also something as a natural diathesis depending on the semantic role of the top argument - it is characteristic of propositions with argument referring to the agens at the top of the hierarchy. Understood this way diathetical hierarchy can serve as a criterion for a fun-ctional classification of propositions and the place of an argument in that hiararchy as a criterion for a functional classification of arguments.

The author analyses the structure of the predicative expression, i.e. a mor-phosyntactic construction functioning as the so-called constitutive predicate of the proposition in question. She illustrates her analysis with examples from Polish and from Macedonian – two languages whose grammatical systems are maximally typologicaly opposed in the frame of the Slavic linguistic group. She states that the predicative expression is composed of 1) constitutive form of verbum finitum and 2) its adjuncts formalized as adverbia and/or adverbialia responding to the questions: when? how long? how? in which mood? in which way? and carrying supplementary information from the semantic domains of the grammatical categories characteristic of the finite verb, such as ‘time’, ‘aspect’, or ‘mood’; most numerous are those informing (a) on the location of the referred to event on the time-axis or (b) on the procedure leading to the realization of that event.

The author presents the thesis that the referent of the dative noun phrase is ‘a second human participant’ of the event ‒ referent of the proposition in question. The same applies to the referent of the genitive noun phrase. The two constructions differ only in their syntactic distribution ‒ dative is an adverbal case, while genetive is adnominal, which is the result of their semantic roles ‒ ‘recipient’ for dative and ‘possessor’ for genetive.

The author defends the thesis that the dative case relation in Indo-European languages represents the second man – participant of the act of the linguistic communication, i.e. the addressee of the information (and the factual consequences of the information) sent by the fi rst man – participant and initiator of the act. Arguments documenting her thesis derive from her analysis of the pronominal systems of Polish and Macedonian as represents of Slavic languages on the one hand and French and English as represents of West European languages.

The author states that a “biography” of a language presents de facto its capability to adapt to natural and/or man‑made changes in the environment of the community speaking the language in question.

In the frame of the grammatical description “from meaning to form” the author promotes the thesis that arguments implied by verbal predicates stand in the syntactic position primarily designed for noun phrases.

The author states that the language functions in the service to the thought; it organizes the course of our thought and enables transfer of information. To attain this purpose, it has two mechanisms at its disposal: 1. lexicalisation, which enables us to give form to the results of our conceptualisation of the world, and 2. grammaticalization, which ensures that the information most important to the successful course of the linguistic communication gets regular transparent surface categorial markers (= markers of the so‑called grammatical categories). She discusses parallels and differences in the functioning of these two mechanisms in Polish and in Macedonian.

The author supports the thesis that the semantic derivation presents the basic mechanism enriching our lexical resources.

The author discusses the importance of Wiesław Boryś' etymological dictionary of the Polish language for research on the semantic derivation in Polish and Macedonian conducted at the Research Center of Areal Linguistics at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Skopje.

The author defends the thesis that language is an attribute of a nation and as such it is offi cially protected by the international legal system irrespective of the number of its speakers; thus, there is no such phenomenon as a “little language”. Linguistic minorities speak their mother languages or some dialectal variants of those languages

The author states that there are in our vocabulary three, and only three, classes of semantic units: a) predicates, i.e. generic concepts – the result of our conceptualization of the world; they represent more than 90% of the vocabulary; b) operators of reference – a small, almost closed set bounding predicates to their concrete denotates; c) proper names, which are by defi nition referentially bound and are object of research of a specialized linguistic discipline. Thus, the main tasks of our grammar are (1) to defi ne and to describe the scope of the grammaticalization in the language in question and (2) to present the semantic classification of predicates, the description of their – bound and/or free – functioning in the text included.