Bilingualism of the creators of the Polish literature as a research problem in the history of language

The article advances the Polish-French bilingualism of the creators of the Polish literature from the milieu of the Great Emigration, as a linguistic history research problem. On the one hand, the question concerns the Polish language which remains and takes shape in “one space with other languages”, while on the other, it finds a theoretical motivation in the paradigm of contemporary linguistics where bilingualism is considered to be a fundamental problem of the modern science of language, and it postulates the necessity of investigation into inter-cultural communication. As an object of research, bilingualism of eminent authors determines a series of special problems. The first set of issues pertains to the dimension of individual bilingualism of particular bilingual authors: the question of the author’s choice of one of the two (or more) languages to be the substance of his or her work, and the question of conditioning of this choice. Next, the question of how the author operates the norm characteristic of each of the two codes in a specific communication situation, which surfaces as a play on norms in bilingual authors, the question of analysis and description of the linguistic behaviour of the authors as bilinguals, and that of the connection of the languages which the authors use with the genres of the texts which they create in these languages. In a further perspective, the problem appears of the dimension of collective bilingualism of the authors from the milieu of the Great Emigration, and a possible diachronic reference of the investigated phenomenon to the contemporary dialect of Polish emigrants in France