Nazwiska Polaków jako tekst kultury i źródło badań nad wspólnotową autonarracją

The article contributes to the research into the modern system of surnames of Poles as a culture text which can become a basis for reconstructing community self-narrations. The presented perspective takes into consideration the following assumptions: 1. Narration naturally accompanies cognition. 2. Personal proper names (i.e. anthroponyms) have a unique ontological and epistemological status in the anthropocentric cognitive system. 3. An anthroponym is a message determined by cognitive needs and the system of values of a given linguistic and cultural community. In order to reconstruct narrations embedded in surnames it is proposed that the following steps be adopted: 1) perform sta-tistical analysis concerned with the number of onymic derivation sets, 2) undertake semantic stud-ies considering the level of categorization of appellatives which motivate the creation of surnames, 3) adopt endocentric and exocentric perspectives in the analysis of descriptive functions of anthro-ponyms which belong to particular motivation-formal types.