The author defends the thesis that the dative case relation in Indo-European languages represents the second man – participant of the act of the linguistic communication, i.e. the addressee of the information (and the factual consequences of the information) sent by the fi rst man – participant and initiator of the act. Arguments documenting her thesis derive from her analysis of the pronominal systems of Polish and Macedonian as represents of Slavic languages on the one hand and French and English as represents of West European languages.

The author states that the language functions in the service to the thought; it organizes the course of our thought and enables transfer of information. To attain this purpose, it has two mechanisms at its disposal: 1. lexicalisation, which enables us to give form to the results of our conceptualisation of the world, and 2. grammaticalization, which ensures that the information most important to the successful course of the linguistic communication gets regular transparent surface categorial markers (= markers of the so‑called grammatical categories). She discusses parallels and differences in the functioning of these two mechanisms in Polish and in Macedonian.