Polish 'Partner Nouns': Their Varieties, Countability, and Gender

Abstract

This paper examines the varieties and gender status of ‘partner nouns’ in Polish, including wujostwo ‘uncle and wife’, profesorostwo ‘professor and wife’, and other such nouns which belong to a dying breed of nouns referring to marital partners. As small as this class of nouns is, their examination raises several issues. Among other things it involves us in an examination of whether or not partner nouns can combine with numerals, for on this question, according to Saloni 1976, their gender, or agreement class (soglasovatel'naja klassa, after Zaliznjak 1964), depends. After discussing partner nouns as a lexical-semantic class, including their socio-linguistic aspect (from the contemporary point of view, their commonly perceived sexism), we direct attention to the question of the agreement class of partner nouns in - (o)stwo based on their combinability, or lack of it, with numerals. We conclude that they are logically countable, but that in practice they are not counted for lack of need, the lack of an appropriate counting model, and because of the existence of a serviceable paraphrase model for avoiding having to count them. In the end, we conclude that, in any case, numerical combinability cannot be used as a reliable indicator of gender in Polish, because the system of collective numerals on which it is mainly based is atrophying and unstable. As to their gender, in Contemporary Standard Polish partner nouns in -(o)stwo appear to be in the final stages of changing from masculine personal plural gender to neuter¸ a changeover that seems largely to have escaped the notice of normative grammarians.