ABOUT THE SYNTACTIC-SEMANTIC PROPERTIES OF THE POLISH WORD WDZIĘCZNOŚĆ ʻGRATITUDEʼ

The feeling of gratitude was treated as a virtue as well as the measure of humanity by the ancient philosophers. In our times, it is not always perceived this way. The purpose of this article is to show the roots of the understanding of gratitude through a critical review of the dictionaries and proposals of Anna Wierzbicka, as well as to conduct syntactic-semantic analysis and to propose a semantic representation for the construction X is grateful Y for Z, equivalent to X feels gratitude to Y for Z. Dictionary definitions have much in common with the definition of St Augustine. The components of the Augustinian definition, namely, the recognition of goodness and the desire to reciprocate, are reaffirmed by Polish lexicographers. For Wierzbicka, gratitude is a love-like feeling. Lexicographers also speak of friendly feelings, adding, however, that gratitude also includes the desire to reciprocate the good received and, as with St Augustine, to remember it. Based on linguistic evidence, the author concludes that gratitude is the relationship between X’s knowledge: Y did something for him and X’s need to do something good for Y in return. A necessary component of the definition is the expression of one’s feelings. Without it, one could not speak of gratitude at all.