EN
Introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin, the notion of ‘speech genres’ (Bachtin 1979) is fundamental to discourse studies. It enables to describe messages from various fields within a uniform methodology, and discover (inter)dependencies between literary works and the repertoire of genres used in other areas of communication, whilst also providing tools for comparison of the repertoire of forms of speech used in various cultures. The article outlines the main threads of the research done in Poland in reference to the Bakhtin concept. The most essential accomplishments include: (i) a description of numerous speech genres which reveals the dissimilarities of their modal confines, proposed by Anna Wierzbicka (Wierzbicka 1983), subsequently taken advantage of in the ethnolinguistic studies by this author; (ii) numerous elaborations on individual genres and their repertoire as used in various fields of discourse (primarily, studies by the scholars based in Katowice, Opole, and Lublin); and, (iii) analysis of the content of the notions of ‘primary genres’ and ‘secondary genres’ and of genre contaminations (Dobrzyńska 1992).