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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 55 | February 2002
Professor Anna Wierzbicka: Acclaimed Linguist
In November last year, the National Library of Australia was privileged to secure the cooperation of Anna Wierzbicka, Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University, in the recording of an interview about her life. The three-hour interview is a valuable addition to the Oral History Collection, as it provides insights into the various stages in, and influences affecting, the life of an eminent Polish woman in Australia.
Professor Wierzbicka's work as a semanticist spans more than three decades and has resulted in more than 20 books. The most recent, What Did Jesus Mean? Explaining the Sermon on the Mount and the Parables in Simple and Universal Human Concepts, was published by Oxford University Press in 2001. Her books have been published in Europe and the United States, in English, Polish and Russian. The central focus of her work has been the identification of the universal human concepts that she maintains are the basis of meaning in all languages. In the interview, she refers to this as 'the search for the alphabet of human thoughts through the study of human languages'.
Interviewer, Dr Barry York, said he aimed to capture the personal story behind the internationally-acclaimed scholar. The interview includes some discussion of ideas-'the search for linguistic universals'-but mainly follows a 'life story' approach, in chronological order. The interview begins with discussion of Professor Wierzbicka's birth in Warsaw, Poland, in 1938, her parents and grandparents, and her memories of the Warsaw Uprising (1944). In 1944, Anna was forcibly removed with her mother and sister to Germany, where her mother was a forced labourer in a factory.
After the War, she returned with her mother to Poland, to be reunited with her father. The value of oral history in revealing influences that might otherwise be overlooked is found in Professor Wierzbicka's recollection of her father playing word games with her from Polish dictionaries. Her early interest in language was also apparent through her childhood poetry. On tape, Professor Wierzbicka recites in Polish a poem she wrote about her family as a child.
Most of the Polish interviews in the Library's Oral History Collection are with representatives of the first wave of Polish arrivals after World War II; the period 1947 to 1955 when more than 70 000 settled here. The recording with Professor Wierzbicka is all the more valuable because it throws light on conditions of life in Poland after the War, including the period of liberalisation in 1956.
The recording discusses Professor Wierzbicka's formal education in Poland, including academic life at the University of Warsaw and her PhD research at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She pursued post-doctoral studies in Moscow in 1965 and in 1966 spent a year in the United States, studying and researching at MIT. Her approach to linguistics set her apart, fundamentally, from Professor Noam Chomsky, an eminent linguist at MIT. The interview includes discussion of her opposition to Marxism, which is based on her experiences in Poland and her strong Catholic outlook.
The final half of the recording deals with Professor Wierzbicka's settlement in Canberra in 1972 with her Australian husband, whom she had met in England in 1967; her impressions of the Australian way of life; issues of motherhood and the raising of two daughters in Canberra; the Australian National University since the 1970s (she describes the university as an exciting environment where many diverse languages were studied in depth or spoken by native speakers); the integration of her personal, family, religious and scholarly life; her reactions to returning to Poland on a number of occasions and her sense of ethnic identity today. In keeping with other interviews with Poles in Australia, Dr York invited Professor Wierzbicka to say a closing word in the Polish language.
Dr York points out that an interview such as the one with Professor Wierzbicka has significance beyond the borders of Australia. 'While focusing on an individual who has resided in Australia for most of her adult life', he said, 'the interview is relevant to historians of Poland, particularly of the period of the German occupation, the Warsaw Uprising and Poland during the two decades after the War.' It is also a record of the experience of migration, settlement and adaptation to a new land. Above all else, it is an 'inside view' of the experiences and influences that shaped one of the world's leading linguists.
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au