WARA OD MIOTŁY? Odpowiedź na polemikę profesora Władysława Miodunki

This text is a reply to prof. Władysław Miodunka’s polemic on the proposition previously put forward by this author, to systematize the basic language pedagogical terminology. The opponent resents the use of the phrase “terminological chaos”. The author explains why he had used it, and answers several other minor objections. In this case, terminological chaos results not from that one term has multiple meanings, as this is the relatively widespread situation in many disciplines, but from that the terms used in language pedagogy are not defined in the classical sense, and therefore do not discretely distinguish the respective phenomena. Instead, definitions describe prototypes. Adopted from cognitive linguistics, this custom has the undesirable effect that everything that is not prototypical, eludes the terminology – even if such descriptive definitions do provide many important pieces of information on the essence of the respective phenomena.