Arkadiusz Jabłoński, prof.
(more officially: Arkadiusz Marek Jabłoński, since 1970,
more unofficially: Arkadiusz Yaboo Jabłoński, since no later than 1989)
currently holds the post of a professor in Japanese and general linguistics at the Department of Japanese Studies of the (links to the respective WWW services are given below):
Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU)
Faculty of Modern Languages and Literatures
Furthermore, as a visiting professor, A.J. is also professionally (and: emotionally) related to the:
Nicolaus Copernicus University
A.J. is interested in Japanese honorifics, the issues of Japanese-Polish translation/interpretation, the pragmatics of Japanese and Polish intra-cultural and cross-cultural communication, as well as in the contemporary Japanese grammar and morphology.
Above all, he is of the opinion that the task of a linguist is to seek for systemic rules, rather than to focus on isolated language facts. Japanese language is one of many languages of the world to be described in a systemic and comprehensible manner. Its description should be undertaken in the first place according to the typological properties of Japanese, which can be verified in a relatively easy and immediate manner, not necessary depending on the omnipresent English-centered approach to the linguistic facts of multiple non-English languages (yes, Japanese is different from English!)
For quite a long time, his activity was related mainly to the OPUS 10 grant,
obtained in 2016 from the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki):
"Towards a coherent description of Japanese grammar - Polish dictionary
(lexicon) of Japanese grammatical terms". And the Lexicon
(in Polish) is ready!
Another result of the grant, being its side effect, but at the same time marking a proposition of a new, systemic direction in the studies on Japanese linguistics, is the English monograph "Japanese Nominal Elements as Abandoned Parts of Speech" (2021), described more thorougly here and available directly from this link in PDF in free access.
In
2023, the Polish (full) professorship was conferred on A.J. Political
authorities of the Republic of Poland are involved in the procedure,
the title to be granted after the official approval of what is the
Academic Excellence Board, according to the most recent legal
terms. "Japanese Nominal Elements as Abandoned Parts of Speech"
(2021) and "Polish Lexicon of Japanese Grammatical Terms" (2021)
were submitted
for the purposses of official evaluation of the application submitted
by the
candidate. All 5 reviews of the academic achievements in the
procedure were positive, which may suport the
hypothesis that also Polish linguistic community's attutude towards the
description of systemic, inflectional properties of Japanese is
positive.
Regardless
of official titles, a
continuation of systemic studies over inflection in Japanese (often
classified as a language with prevailing agglutinative properties -
with uni-functional grammatical morphemes to be attached in a fixed
order to the lexical stems) is planned
also from now on. It is aimed at the description of finite,
paradigmatic
set of
morphological oppositions in regular word forms - and this is precisely
what the notions of declension and conjugation - frequently
disregarded or misunderstood in the contemporary, often
English-centered approach, are about. In other words, grammatical
values may not be mapped in a direct and unambiguous way onto the
instances of the actual usage of inflectional forms. Still, it is not
possible to describe effectively the actual usage, when no complete set
of markers and forms has been defined. The exceptions and variety of
particular functions of respective forms emerge from certain basic
rules, not the reverse. Accordingly, one may describe the basic rules
with the morphologial markers of grammatical values in a given
language. Agglutination is hence a sub-type of inflection, probably even
easier to describe in technical terms than the phenomena of fusional
type (sometimes described solely as 'inflectional'). Such view is
presented in "Case in Japanese. A
Morphological Approach" (2022). It's more detailed description by the
publishing
company is available here and its PDF version may be downloaded in free access from this link.
Further publications on Japanese grammar and morphology, including a systemic description of conjugation, are planned in future.
Years pass and people change, but his mottos (exactly as mentioned in the initial - and even more unprofessional - version of this page, dated 1996 - yes, it's the previous century!) remain constantly:
Practice what you preach.
and
Trahimur omnes studio laudis.
Accordingly, his favourite foundation, as its multi-time Fellowship beneficiary, is The Japan Foundation.
Tricky details (mostly in PDFs):
JAPANESE MISHMASH/JAPOŃSKI MISZMASZ
POLISH LEXICON OF JAPANESE GRAMMATICAL TERMS
E-mail (the below is a GIF, not a link):
Some content available also at ACADEMIA.EDU
Related projects are:
yaboo® since 1989