Irena Sawicka, the leading scientist for the study of Albanian in Poland

Irena Sawicka's contribution to Albanianology has been highly valued, as well as in the organization of Albanian language studies in Poland. On Tuesday, she was handed the certificate of acceptance as an external member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo, where she held a lecture on the topic "Isochrony in the Albanian language". Before starting her inaugural lecture, Sawicka said that Kosovo has a special place in her heart and mind.

The Polish Albanologist, Irena Sawicka, has officially become part of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo. At the ceremony, the president of the Academy, academician Mehmet Kraja, handed Sawicka the certificate of acceptance as an external member of AShAK. In addition, Sawicka held the inaugural lecture on the topic "Isochrony in the Albanian language".

Academician Rexhep Ismajli spoke about her contribution in the field of Albanian studies.

"At the end of 2020, the Assembly of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo, based on the proposal of the report of the section of linguistics and literature, drafted by the member of the presidency, professor Bardh Rugova, and academician Eqrem Basha, for the merits her in language studies, with a special emphasis on Albanian studies, was chosen by professor Dr. Irena Sawickan, professor of linguistics from Poland, external member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Kosovo", Ismajli read in front of the academic audience. According to him, the help of Professor Sawicka, for the organization of Albanian language studies in Poland, has been and continues to be of great importance.

Before starting her inaugural lecture, Sawicka said that Kosovo has a special place in her heart and mind. In the lecture, he first gave explanations and notions related to language rhythm.

"In describing language, the concept of rhythm is of fundamental importance. We define linguistic rhythm as the repetition of equivalent fragments in the structure of language. The centers of these fragments, the centers of syllables, the accents of words, the accents of phrases, they divide the speech into isochronous fragments. Linguistic rhythm is thus realized by a set of temporal, melodic and dynamic characteristics. The precise timing organization of all phonetic components is an important feature of rhythm," Sawicka explained. He found that the rhythm actually has a connection with the cognitive centers of the human brain, as a result of this, linguistics creates a close connection with psycholinguistics.

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"Today, thanks to great advances in brain research, many ideas about rhythm can be put into a new context. The obtained knowledge allows to assume that the rhythm of the language is conditioned neurobiologically. According to some researchers, the temporal structure of language can be predicted more easily based on data from psycholinguistics than phonology", she said.

In this regard, Balkanology from Poland has also provided some evidence which strengthens its study even more.

"The final temporal arrangement of linguistic units is not determined by the rhythm of the language, but by the 'cognitive rhythm', regulated by mental operations. The neurophysiological motivations of some speech defects are particularly mentioned as evidence. The prosodic form of expression is the result of the cooperation of many centers in the brain. Thus, the rhythm of speech has a linguistic and biological aspect", she announced.

Sawicka, who is known for her very important studies in the field of phonology, has also mentioned the two-sided attitudes of linguistics researchers in relation to the phonological qualification of the above concept.

"In the literature, on this topic, there is a controversy regarding the phonological qualification of this concept. Some linguists are of the opinion that rhythm is an automatic consequence of purely phonetic and perceptual phenomena, such as reductions, word stress and phrase stress. This means that rhythm is a purely superficial phenomenon. According to most linguists, this approach is insufficient: the fact that rhythm perception is not based on phonetic correlates does not necessarily mean that it is not based on the phonological mechanism", she said. He added that, according to them, the linguistic rhythm is an independent network that imposes certain requirements on the spoken text. But, apart from these two groups, according to Sawicka, there are also linguists who completely deny the existence of isochronism in language and treat it as a random phenomenon.

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In the role of a connoisseur and researcher, who has made a great contribution to deepening the linguistic studies of Albanian, Sawicka has also spoken about rhythm in the context of the Albanian language.

"I have done a short survey and checked the Albanian rhythm, comparing the manipulations of the duration of the chronems in different speech rhythms. The result was the observation that in Albanian there is a tendency to equalize the lengths of accent units - so the Albanian language would be a stress-timed language. The obligatory element of the metric foot (or of the beat) is the accented syllable, which represents the rhythmic top of the rhythm unit", she concluded.

She also talked about how she had segmented speech and the metrical feet of words in the Albanian language.

"Obviously there can be different number of syllables between stressed syllables. In linguistics, in practice, there are two ways to segment speech into metrical feet. I chose this one, in which the length of the metrical foot is counted from the stressed vowel to the next stressed vowel," explained Sawicka.

Irena Sawicka is a Polish linguist, Balkanologist, Slavist with strong interests in Albanian studies. Her main contribution to Albanian studies is in the field of phonology, especially in discussions about the structure of the Albanian syllable. She is among the world's most authoritative linguists who also dealt with Albanian and who contributed a lot to the spread, cultivation and study of Albanian in Poland, but also to the promotion of Albanianology in the world.

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Sawicka was born in 1944, in Warsaw. From 1968 to 1992 he worked at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and in 1992 he was employed at the Department of Comparative Slavic Studies at the "Nikolas Copernicus" University in Torun, where for many years he directed the Institute for Slavic Studies. Slavistics and Balkan Studies. Within this university, he also held Albanian courses, qualifying some of the most prominent Polish Balkanists of today in Albanian studies. She is a specialist in phonetics and phonology of Slavic and Balkan languages, including Albanian, as well as typology and geographic linguistics with a special focus on South Slavic languages ​​and Albanian.

He started dealing with Albanian since the seventies, when he first visited the International Seminar on Albanian Language, Literature and Culture. Among her most important studies on Albanian are the one on the structure of the syllable in the Albanian language and the one on the structure of the syllable among the Arbëresh people of Italy. These are included in the monograph "Structure of the Albanian syllable", as a co-author with her former student Karolina Dargiel. He also published "Paradigmaty Fleksiji Albanskej" (Paradigm of Albanian inflection) and "Albanystika Polska" (Polish Albanianology).