Streszczenie:
The study is based on the assumption that human cognition is closely linked with natural language. One can therefore ask what conceptual content has found its way into linguistic expression, in what form it is expressed, and what motivates that expression. The study is concerned with the linguistic manifestation of the concept of number (one of the most important categories of human thinking), through grammatical (morphological, syntactic and lexical), highly conventionalised means. Elementary numerical meanings encoded in Polish include ‘one’ and ‘more than one’ (in former stages of the language also ‘two’), corresponding to first numerical concepts comprehensible to humans (both in the historical and the individual sense). Those meanings are obligatorily expressed by all speakers of Polish and their markers are inflectional morphemes that play a role – in accordance with the norm – in all inflected parts of speech. That numerical opposition is also broadly expressed at the world-formational plane: there exist special morphemes that code the singularity of something (e.g. grosz-ek ‘pea’) or the collectivity of items (e.g. pierz-e ‘feathers; plumage’). Similarly, specific morphemes accentuate the singularity of an event (e.g. kaszl-ną-ć ‘to cough once’) or the multitude (multiplication) of actions (e.g. na-obierać ‘peel a lot of’, po-wynosić ‘take out many/all’ the items).
