Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to our colleagues at the University of Lodz and the University of Applied Sciences in Konin for their intellectual support and encouragement throughout the process of our work on this book. Our institutions provided us with the academic environment and resources that made this research possible.

A special thank you goes to Professor Dr hab. Mikołaj Deckert for his help in data collection and to Ms Anna Wilson, for her invaluable assistance with the references and citations. Their dedication helped us to ensure the scholarly integrity of this work.

This work would not have been possible without the assistance of our families. Our deepest gratitude goes to our families. To Anna Wilson and to Jerzy Tomaszczyk - thank you for your endless patience and for creating the space—both physical and mental—for us to write. You took on extra burdens so we could focus on our work.

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the Benjamins Book Series Human Cognitive Processing Professor Klaus-Uwe Panther and Professor Linda L. Thornburg for their unwavering encouragement and for believing in the value of this project from the very beginning. Their guidance was instrumental in shaping the direction of the book.

​We also wish to thank the Benjamins Technical Editors, Susan Hendriks and Ymke Verploegen for their expert oversight. Their technical precision and constructive feedback significantly improved the clarity and quality of the final manuscript.

Special thanks go to our professional colleagues across various universities and events. The discussions we shared were instrumental in refining the core concepts of this work. We are grateful for the collective wisdom of this community and for the many opinions and reviews, as well as formal and informal conversations that helped us clear the path, sharpen the arguments and bring this project to fruition.