Przyimki na, w oraz do przed nazwami państw, krajów i krain. Historia i współczesne wahania normatywne

Abstract

The article presents historical changes of prepositions preceding names of states, countries, and regions in Polish with the main focus on the contemporary discussion about the choice of the prepositions with names of eastern neighbours of Poland. According to dictionaries and grammars these names: Ukraina, Białoruś, and Litwa require the preposition na instead of the locative w and the adlative do, which are typical for the vast majority of land names, except for islands and peninsulas. Query in historical corpora since the 17th century showed that the preposition na had proliferated in reference to regions which belonged to the same country, importantly, not only with reference to Poland. It is also attested for pats of the Jagiellonian dynas-tic union or lands that had belonged to states that ruled parts of Poland under Partition. Despite this ten-dency, before the 19th Century, the preposition most frequently used with the names Litwa and Ukraina were the locative w and the adlative do. The traditional use of w and do in the past, typical colocations of na with regions rather than independent states, an animated discussion in the media, and the fluctuation of norm attested in the dictionaries of the last century – all these factors weigh in favour of admitting both preposi-tional patterns: na and w/do with the names of three states, eastern neighbours of Poland.