Stative and eventive passives of subject experiencer verbs in Polish

Abstract

AbstractThe paper addresses the question whether Subject Experiencer (henceforth, SE) verbs can form the stative and eventive passive in Polish. The analysis shows that SE verbs in Polish only sporadically give rise to the stative passive, and whenever this is possible, the stative passive derived from an SE verb can be classed as the target state passive in Kratzer’s typology (2000). Polish SE verbs are susceptible to two types of eventive passive – (i) with the auxiliaryzostać‘to become’, co-occurring with the perfective passive participle; and (ii) with the auxiliarybyć‘to be’, followed by the imperfective passive participle. The fact that SE verbs can give rise tozostać-passives is unproblematic, as this type of passive contains the passive participle derived from the perfective form of the verb, which is always eventive. Stative SE verbs can serve as good inputs to thebyć+ imperfective passive on account of the fact that they can be coerced from states into non-dynamic events, as proposed for Spanish in Fábregas and Marín (2017).