EN
The author of this article sees the so-called grammatical categories as semantic categories which transfer information of key-importance for a successful act of communication. This is the reason why this information is grammaticalized, i.e. it has regular and predictable formal markers. In the center of the author’s interest is the category of case in the Slavic languages, especially in Polish. She presents her concept of the semantic paradigm of the category of case and demonstrates a striking parallelism between the meanings of particular cases (= the quantums of information grammaticalized in the formal case paradigm) on the one hand and the meanings of the nominal mutational desubstantival derivatives on the other hand. In her view this parallelism confirms the assumption that impulses leading to grammaticalization are of a primarily semantic character.