The authors analyze the new book The place of the Macedonian phonetics within the Slavic and Balkan linguistic area from Irena Sawicka and Anna Cychnerska. The book is trying to shed new light on the place of Macedonian phonetics regarding its Slavic heritage and also regarding the contact changes that appeared during development of the Macedonian language in the Balkan linguistic league. Their research is conducted on Macedonian dialects represented in Common linguistic atlas (OLA) and in Phonological bases of the Macedonian dialects from B. Vidoeski. In their book, Sawicka and Cychnerska state that they use diachronic data, but their main goal is to present selected synchronic features from the Macedonian phonetics. They explain most of the phonetic features in Macedonian from an areal-typological aspect with special emphasis on the Balkan convergences. The authors of the book state that the Macedonian phonetic should be included in southwest type of Slavic phonetics. They conclude that the modern form of Macedonian phonetic, to large extent, was influenced by areal position of the Macedonian language and to its development in the Balkan multilingual territory.

The subject of this review article is the monograph of the academician Zuzanna Topolińska Polski ~ macedoński: konfrontacja (nie tylko) gramatyczna. 10: Spirala ewolucji (Wrocław: Wrocławskie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 2015), dedicated to the history and typology of Polish, Macedonian and other Slavic languages, refl ecting the many years of fruitful experience of Zuzanna Topolińska in research in this area, as well as in linguistic theory. The author of the review article emphasizes the novelty of this monograph, and the relevance of the issues considered in it, as well as the great importance of the book for Slavic and General linguistics.

The author supports the thesis that the semantic derivation presents the basic mechanism enriching our lexical resources.

In the recent years the employees of the Research Center for Areal Linguistics at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts have been working on a new approach for the description of the word formation system in the Macedonian language. The approach consists of researching groups of lexemes derived from the same root attested in the Proto‑Slavic language. According to Markovikj and Topolińska (2019), one of the most important processes that present the systematic transfer of information from the semantic continuum to the lexicon of the language is the semantic derivation. This process allows the observation of the associative sequences, which retain the basic, initial semantic components, transmitted from the man and from the real physical world to the human mental world. In this paper, the author analyzes the formal and the semantic derivation of the Proto‑Slavic root * gor‑ in the Macedonian language, which has developed several variations since the Proto‑Slavic period. The analysis of the initial semantics of the word forms derived from the root * gor‑ and its variations, showed that they all share a common semantic concept ‘covered by fire’, which refers to the inseparable relationship between man and nature.