Walerego Pisarka metoda badania słów i wyrażeń sztandarowych – klucz do zrozumienia zmian społecznej świadomości
Walery Pisarek’s Method of the Banner Words Analysis – the Key to Understand the Dynamics of Social Awareness

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the analysis of banner words and phrases – the method of research originally conceptualized and tested by Walery Pisarek in the Press Research Centre in Kraków. The very methodology is pictured by its roots, basic features and lines of development, particularly within the context of the Centre’s research experiences and resources of the ‘golden era of 1970–1980’. Walery Pisarek himself attempted to develop this method in the close context of politolinguistics – a relatively new (in Poland) sub-discipline of the humanities, aiming at an explanation of the relations between extra-linguistic reality (mainly politics), the language used to describe politics and politicians’ language. In his conceptual works Pisarek was combining the general assumptions of philosophy of language and political speech with the assumptions of axiology, successfully trying to incorporate this methodology into empirical media and communication knowledge. The method of banner words analysis, thus, draws extensively from semantics, linguistics, key words analysis, philosophy of values but also from sociology, opening a convincing approach to an empirical diagnosis of social awareness, based on the respondents’ selection of their most relevant positive banner words (miranda), as well as the negative ones (kondemnanda). Following its methodological aspects, the text discusses the case of a national representative survey, carried out in the Press Research Centre between 1990 and 1999, with the focus on Polish banner words reconstruction, their rankings, systems and semantics. The original methodology of Walery Pisarek has been followed up by his students, who have been blazing the trail for future implementations of this method.

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