Verb-nominal collocations and synthetic verbs in Polish and Croatian

Abstract

Analytical structures which are verb- nominal collocations cause a problem in translation, especially when equivalents in languages translated differ grammatically. The article focuses on the forms which are an analytical structure in at least one of the languages, while in the second language they are synthetic verbs. It is rare to find analytical forms which do not have their synthetic counterparts - some researchers believe that they are not collocations then. Croatian synthetic verbs such as nadati se, tuširati se are translated into Polish in the form of analytical structures - to hope or to have a shower, because Polish lacks oneword equivalents. The aim of the paper is to discuss the linguistic phenomena mentioned above. It is based on selected forms of Polish and Croatian. The direct source of excerption material was the publication of Maria Cichonska Contrastive Dictionary of Polish, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian verbs, in which the author focuses on the discussion of verbs whose equivalents are different from each other in at least one of the languages. There are a few types of collocations, but this analysis concentrates only on verb-noun ones, which significantly depleted the amount of structures excerpted from the dictionary.