Polish Verbs Research Articles

Let’s Square the Accounts: the Use of Names of Shapes as Verbs in English and Polish

The paper analyses the use of names of shapes as verbs in English and Polish. In particular, the use of circle and square as verbs in English and the verbs related to the Polish names of these shapes, koło/okręg and kwadrat, is studied. The analysis shows that in English both circle and square function as verbs (often phrasal verbs), while in Polish these nouns cannot become verbs. Still, several verbs formed from the names koło and okręg were found while there is no verb related to kwadrat. In many cases the meaning of these “shape verbs” manifests a semantic relation to the shape itself.

The syntax of two existential unaccusative verbs in Polish

Abstract The paper examines the syntax of two unaccusative verbs in Polish – ubyć. perf/ubywać.imperf ‘to disappear, to decrease’ and przybyć. perf/przybywać.imperf ‘to arrive, to increase’ – with a view to shedding light on the structure of existential unaccusatives. The two above-mentioned verbs appear in two distinct paradigms – the disappearance/motion verb and the existential one – both of which are taken to represent subtypes of existential structure. Existential verbs are treated here as monadic predicates with a single small clause complement, whose internal structure may vary, depending on the predicate. The two existential unaccusatives analysed in the paper may select two different types of small clause complement, which are different from the small clause selected by the existential być ‘to be’. Thus, Polish seems to make use of three different small clause structures in existential clauses. The paper also provides evidence that in Polish, like in English, existential unaccusatives are structurally distinct from change of state unaccusatives, and thus in the two languages there is more than one way to be structurally unaccusative. The account bears on the analysis of the genitive of negation in Polish, especially the issue of its inapplicability to existential unaccusatives versus its presence with the existential być ‘to be’.

¿Por qué los españoles «saben» lenguas mientras los polacos tan solo las «conocen»? Los verbos de conocimiento en contraste polaco-español

The objective of the study is to delve into the main syntactic and semantic differences and similarities of the so-called verbs of knowledge, that is, the predicates, that denote the cognitive attitude of the sentence subject toward the acquaintance. The author will address the contrastive analysis of the main Spanish verbs –saber, conocer– with the corresponding Polish verbs –wiedzieć, znać, potrafić and umieć.

Latynizmy czasownikowe w staropolszczyźnie

VERBAL BORROWINGS FROM LATIN IN OLD POLISH The paper focuses on direct verbal borrowings from Latin into Old Polish. It attempts to determine the exact number of these borrowings and to describe the possible reasons for it being rather small in comparison with nominal borrowings. In the initial parts, some introductory remarks are made on verbal borrowings in general and Polish–Latin language contact in Middle Ages. The main part of the paper discusses the etymology of four Old Polish verbs: koronować ~ korunować, obligować się, ufundować and sylabizować. The final part contains general remarks and conclusions.

Accusative-instrumental alternation in Polish

Summary The present study provides a corpus account of the factors governing the choice between the accusative and the instrumental case for object marking in Polish. The two cases are near-interchangeable with a set of Polish verbs primarily expressing physical manipulation. Following profile-based approaches, a sample of representative usage data has been extracted and manually annotated for subsequent multivariate modeling. The results indicate the importance of construction-specific characteristics for the choice between the two forms and the complex nature of the influence of coarse-grained transitivity-related features. Specifically, two semantic features emerged as particularly associated with the choice of the instrumental: (i) holistic conceptualisation of the manipulated object and (ii) prominence of its physical contiguity to the acting force.

Metacognitive verbs do not show a cross-language gap: An investigation of metacognitive and concrete verbs in bilingual children

Purpose: Previous research on bilingual vocabulary has focussed largely on words for imaginable objects and actions (e.g., ‘apple’, ‘write’), but did not consider abstract words. We looked for a disproportion across two languages (a cross-language gap) in bilingual children’s knowledge of concrete verbs (e.g., ‘jump’, ‘drink’) and metacognitive verbs (e.g., ‘think’, ‘know’). We also investigated the effects of language exposure and age on bilinguals’ knowledge of both concrete and metacognitive verbs. Methodology: Thirty-nine Polish–English children aged 4;0–7;7 living in the United Kingdom performed vocabulary tasks in both languages: subtasks from Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs) measuring concrete verbs comprehension and production, and metacognitive vocabulary task (METVOC) measuring metacognitive verbs comprehension. Information on children’s cumulative exposure (CE) to each language was collected via parental reports. The amount of metacognitive talk children received in Polish was obtained from parental oral semi-structured narratives. Data and Analysis: Mixed-effects regression models were fitted separately for each task. Findings: A cross-language gap was observed for comprehension of concrete verbs, but metacognitive verbs did not show a cross-language gap. In production of concrete verbs, the English scores showed a steeper increase over age than the Polish scores. CE affected only production of concrete verbs. Correlational analyses showed children’s knowledge of metacognitive verbs in Polish (but not in English) was related to parental metacognitive talk in Polish. Originality: To date, few studies on bilingual children focused on words beyond those referring to imaginable objects and actions, and no study has explored both concrete and metacognitive vocabulary knowledge in bilinguals. Implications: A cross-language gap was observed for bilinguals’ concrete verbs, but metacognitive verbs showed a carry-over effect across languages. The two categories of verbs were also related to different types of linguistic input. While CE affected production of concrete verbs, parental metacognitive talk supported children’s knowledge of metacognitive verbs, but only in the language it was provided in.

Przyczynek do teorii cytowania Jadwigi Wajszczuk

The article consists of two parts. In the first part, the citation theory outlined by J. Wajszczuk (2005) is recalled. The second part contains an analysis of three Polish verbs referring to abusive quoting: przekręcić [coś] ‘misrepresent [something]’, przeinaczyć [coś] ‘twist [something]’ i wypaczyć [coś] ‘distort [something]’. The first of the lexemes has the broadest reference. It refers to both citation and assertory speaking. The verb wypaczyć ‘to distort [something]’ refers to a situation of significant interference in someone else’s text in conjunction with a current speaker’s’ negative evaluation. The verb przeinaczyć [coś] ‘to twist [something]’ allows for the lessening of the speaker’s guilt, who infidelly updates someone else’s statement. The verbs of the tainted message describe the logical completion of faithful quotation. They emphasize the fact that a violation of the unwritten imperative to treat someone else’s speech may be more or less harmful.

Active verbs with inanimate, text-denoting subjects in Polish and English abstracts of research articles in linguistics

Abstract This article is concerned with “abstract rhetors”, i.e. inanimate nouns used as subjects of active verbs, in Polish and English academic texts. The few existing studies that deal with abstract rhetors in Polish indicate that their use is limited in comparison with English in both quantitative and qualitative terms. However, no suggestions have been offered so far as to the potential factors that may underlie these limitations, especially with regard to the qualitative differences. Focusing on a special type of abstract rhetors, namely active verbs used with text-denoting subjects, the article offers a comparable corpus-based analysis of Polish and English abstracts of research articles in linguistics with a view to determining their frequencies and shedding some light on the possible causes of the limited use of the structure in Polish. The results show that the use of active verbs with nouns referring to the abstracted article or its part is more than twice less frequent in Polish than in English, with considerable differences between the types of verbs employed in such contexts in the two languages. Three factors are proposed as potentially affecting the compatibility of the Polish verb with an inanimate, text-denoting noun: the type of agency, the supported metaphor/metonymy for the research article, and verb aspect/telicity.

MATHEMATICAL VERBS IN POLISH AND ENGLISH PHRASEOLOGY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

The use of mathematical vocabulary in phraseology is a topic of numerous papers as numbers indicate not only quantity but may also have a cultural connotation. In the paper, Polish and English phraseological units with the verbs indicating basic mathematical operations are analysed. The study shows the common phraseological expressions containing these verbs in Polish and English and if there is equivalence between the languages in question.

Sequence of tense and cessation implicatures: evidence from Polish

In English, past tense stative clauses embedded under a past-marked attitude verb, like Eric thought that Kalina was sick, can receive two interpretations, differing on when the state of the complement is understood to hold, i.e. Kalina’s sickness precedes the time of Eric’s thinking (backward-shifted reading), or Kalina is sick at the time of Eric’s thinking (simultaneous reading). As is well known, the availability of the simultaneous reading—also called Sequence of tense (SOT)—is subject to cross-linguistic variation. Non-SOT languages only allow for the backward-shifted interpretation. This cross-linguistic variation has been analysed in two main ways in the literature: a structural approach, connecting the availability of the simultaneous reading in a language to a syntactic mechanism that allows the embedded past not to be interpreted; and an implicature approach, which links the absence of such a reading to the presence of a “cessation” implicature associated with past tense. We report a series of experiments on Polish, which is commonly classified as a non-SOT language. First, we investigate the interpretation of complement clauses embedded under past-marked attitude verbs in Polish and English. This investigation revealed a difference between these two languages in the availability of simultaneous interpretations for past-under-past complement clauses, albeit not as large as a binary distinction between SOT and non-SOT languages would lead us to expect. We then address the question of whether the lower acceptability we observe for simultaneous readings in Polish might be due to an embedded cessation implicature. On the way to address this question, we show that in simple matrix clauses, Polish gives rise to the same cessation inference as English. Then we investigate Polish past-under-past sentences in positive and negative contexts, comparing their potential cessation implicature to the exclusive implicature of disjunction. In our results, we found that the latter was endorsed more often in positive than in negative contexts, as expected, while the cessation implicature was endorsed overall very little, with no difference across contexts. The disanalogy between the disjunction and the temporal cases, and the insensitivity of the latter to monotonicity, are a challenge for the implicature approach, and cast doubts on associating SOT phenomena with implicatures.

A Contrastive Study on Korean ‘ida (이다)’ and Polish ‘być’

The aim of this study is to contrastively analyse the Korean ‘ida’ and the Polish ‘być’, and then use a Catholic Bible parallel corpus to contrast ‘ida’ and ‘być’ sentences in order to examine their respective usage patterns. Being the most basic predicate element in the Korean sentence structure, ‘ida’ displays a very frequent use. Considering its ‘functional’ aspect, ‘ida’ corresponds to ‘być’ in Polish. ‘być’ is considered the only true irregular Polish verb. In contrary to ‘ida’ in Korean, it undergoes conjugation by person and number. Moreover, as it is the case with ‘ida’, ‘być’ can be combined with a noun, yet such a noun is normally used in the instrumental case. In addition, ‘być’ can also be omitted. The results of the Bible parallel corpus examination showed that in most cases ‘CN + ida’ in Korean corresponded to ‘być + CN’ in Polish. Cases of ‘CN + ida’ corresponding to ‘być + Adj’ were also common, and they can largely be categorised into two groups. The first are so called ‘CN-jeok (적, 的) + ida’ constructions, and the second are ‘CN + ida’ constructions that do not use ‘-jeok’. The former uniformly corresponded to ‘być + Adj’ in Polish, while the latter displayed a variety of corresponding patterns. In addition, we also observed cases of ‘CN + ida’ corresponding to exclamations, verb phrases, and adverbs in Polish, and also cases with no literal translation possible due to the absence of corresponding Polish vocabulary.

On Aspect, Biaspectuality, and Tenses in the History of Polish

By common consent, one of the most characteristic categories of the Polish verb is aspect. There can be little doubt that the origin of the aspect category may lie in Proto-Slavic or much further back in the Proto-Indo- European language. It is a moot point whether the aspect was already a strong category in Proto-Slavic. Nonetheless, it is beyond dispute that the consequences of its emergence were far-reaching and took a relatively long time to clarify in the daughter languages. The various categories such as aspect, biaspectuality, and tense providing the main themes of the present paper were closely related and did interact, however, the essential effects of their interaction can only be identified by scrutiny. In Old Church Slavonic, a certain degree of competition between the category of aspect and that of tense can already be observed, and this is also evident in Old Polish, in which tenses like the aorist and the imperfect were slowly falling into disuse. Their occurrence is quite rare even in the earliest Polish written records. In due course, the perfect tense gained ground and the pluperfect became almost completely obsolete. In Modern Polish, the latter only serves to archaize literary texts. In the further stages of development, the aspectual opposition also extended to the future tenses thereby affecting the entire Polish tense system. Also, in the aspect-tense system of the Modern Polish language, the tendency of the category of aspect to prevail over the category of tense together with the gradual decline in the number of biaspectual verbs, still common in the 16th century, seems to be quite clear. Most of the originally biaspectual initial verbs were later perfectivized by means of prefixes. Thus, the simple verbal bases and their perfectivized derivatives could establish an aspectual partnership. In the case of verbs with foreign roots, the prefix z-/ s- played a pivotal role in perfectivation, while other prefixes such as za- and po- had a less important role. The process of perfectivation in Polish was so extensive that only few biaspectual verbs remained free of the opposition of aspect as reminders of the fact that the development of this category is still an ongoing process. This is also shown by the more recent biaspectual verbs with borrowed roots for which it can be anticipated that they will form their perfective counterparts soon. The paper concludes that the amount of verbs with an aspectually uncertain status is likely to be a reliable indicator of the development of the aspect category for the earlier periods in the history of the Polish language. An important role in this may play the diachronic corpus-based investigation, which, though for a long time considered a stepchild of Slavic aspectual research, may still help to clarify a number of issues related to the category of aspect.

Kilka uwag na temat nauczania aspektu polskiego czasownika

Some Remarks On Teaching Polish Verbal Aspect. The present paper draws attention to some problems related to the teaching of the Polish verbal aspect, while also shedding light on the possible theoretical linguistic back-ground of the description of the Slavic aspect category. The author examines the category of the Slavic verbal aspect in terms of two possible approaches: cognitive linguistics and functional grammar emphasizing the importance of teaching aids: a structural aspect dictionary of the Polish verb and teaching manuals presenting the theories about the Polish verbal aspect.

Verb-nominal collocations and synthetic verbs in Polish and Croatian

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.

Alternation of aspectual partners, or a few comments on the irrelevance of aspect

This paper discusses the issue of irrelevance of the aspect of the Polish verb. In specifi c contexts, the grammatical category of aspect, being obligatory in the Polish language, is in fact redundant. The identifi cation of such contexts (and hence review of the most important current observations and convictions in this respect), the attempt at ordering and describing them enabled systematic material research based on a (Polish–German and German–Polish) translation. The fi ndings presented in the paper might be a good starting point for a refl ection on the reasonability of including the described issue in curricula of teaching Polish as a foreign language. Due to its reach and frequency, the phenomenon of alternation of aspectual partners should be more frequently discussed in the literature dedicated to aspect and Polish glottodidactics

Verbs derived from interjections in Polish, Russian and German

The article discusses verbs derived from interjections in three languages: Polish, Russian and German. In particular, it presents an overview of derivation processes which are implemented while forming the analyzed lexemes, the most productive affixes in the three languages in question and specific characteristic features of the word formation processes involved therein. The present study is based on the material of Polish, Russian and German verbs derived from representative, impulsive and imperative interjections and shows that, as far as morphological processes are concerned, numerous analogies exist between Polish and Russian. For instance, morphemes -a(ć) /-a(ть) are highly productive, both languages implement the morpheme -ot-/ -от- as well as the infixes -k-/-к- and -cz-/-ч-. Because of the different properties of the language, which belongs to a different language family, German verbs derived from interjections display slightly different characteristic features.

The influence of aspect on the countability of Polish deverbal nominalizations: Evidence from an acceptability rating study

AbstractThe paper presents the results of a study investigating a possible influence of the viewpoint (perfective vs. imperfective) and lexical (telic vs. atelic) aspect of Polish verbs on the countability of eventive nominalizations (substantiva verbalia) derived from these verbs. Polishsubstantiva verbaliapreserve many properties of the base verbs, including the eventive meaning and aspectual morphology. Native speakers of Polish rated the acceptability of nominalizations in count and mass contexts. An effect of both viewpoint and lexical aspect was found in mass contexts, where aspectually delimited (perfective, accomplishment) nominalizations were less acceptable than non-delimited (imperfective, state) nominalizations. In count contexts, only an effect of the lexical aspect was clearly present, with accomplishment nominalizations being more acceptable than state nominalizations. The nominalizations were overall rated as more natural in mass than count constructions, regardless of the aspect. The results indicate that aspect plays a role in establishing the countability of a word, but it does not fully determine it.

Славянские языки перед лицом challenges: семантическая и словообразовательная история слов вызов и wyzwanie (на материале русского и польского языков)

The article deals with the semantic history of the group of lexical units in closely related languages (Rus. vyzvat’, vyzov, Pol. wyzwać, wyzwanie, wezwać, wezwanie). Despite etymological relationship between these words, they distribute and embody the same meanings differently. Among other things, this concerns the representation of the sense that has been described as a result of semantic calquing of the Eng. challenge. It is shown that the latest tendency of the use of vyzov is not entirely new and continues, in a logical and consistent way, semantic history of the word. A fertile ground for its new sense has been provided by the “competitive” meaning of vyzvat’, which requires the semantic role of “counterpart” within argument structure of the verb. That said, however, the new meaning of vyzov is generally found in contexts related to global forces that threaten the stability of the world. The pieces of conceptual structure that are embodied by Russian vyzvat’ and vyzov are distributed between two Polish verbs (wezwać and wyzwać) and the noun wyzwanie. The meaning in question (that one loaned from English), despite its novelty, seems to be conveyed by Polish deverbal noun more accurately than by its Russian equivalent. This is evidenced by its use in more diverse contexts including speaking of everyday activities. All things considered, it appears that in this case the Polish semantic system offers the perfect example of semantic calquing and that the explication of the calqued meaning in Russian requires more caution.

Kimian States: The Case of Stative Passive Participles Corresponding to Roz- Object Experiencer Verbs in Polish

In this text we consider properties of stative passive participles corresponding to roz- Object Experiencer verbs in Polish. They are viewed in the light of the distinction between Davidsonian states (Davidson 1967) and Kimian states (Kim 1976). Polish statives with roz- passive participles seem to show features of both Kimian and Davidsonian states. We will consider the results of various tests proposed in the literature to discover the properties of the relevant Polish structures and offer an explanation for the areas in which roz- structures diverge from the characteristics of Kimian states.

Kategoria jednokrotności w polskich czasownikach

The Category of Semelfactivity in Polish Verbs
 Iterativity occurs in opposition to semelfactivity; when no contrast is present, these terms lose their meaning. Iterativity may be difficult to perceive in verbs such as robić ‘to do’, smucić się ‘to be sad’, malować ‘to paint’, which can be used both in an iterative and a semelfactive capacity. It is therefore worthwhile to consider the problem of the opposition between iterativity and semelfactivity; it is worthwhile to investigate the morphological form of verbs which refer to actions that only happen once; it is worthwhile to examine the role of the aspect in those verbs, and to analyse their semantic marking (apart from semelfactivity). The issue is important for the Polish language, and yet it is commonly said that iterativity is in Polish in a state of decline. It is, however, only one certain type of the iterative : semelfactive pairs that is in decline; the emergence of the aspect changed the morphological nature of these pairs.
 The final part of the article (Section 6) poses the problem of word formation properties of verbs that refer to one-time acts. In those verbs in which the prefix only has an inchoative or final value in reference to the base (pomyśleć ‘to think’, zrobić ‘to do’), a blocking of the formation of iterativa can be observed. It might be even said that if such a verb is formed, it is an indication that the prefix introduced not only the value of perfectiveness, but perhaps another meaning as well. The peculiarity of semelfactivity has further consequences for the derivational system. It turns out that verbs which refer to actions that happen only once are incapable of creating substantive derivatives apart from names of actions, e.g. kopnięcie ‘a kick’, przewrócenie się ‘falling over’, zmartwienie się ‘becoming worried’. The problem is illustrated on the basis of examples furnished by dictionaries of word formation nests edited and developed by Mirosław Skarżyński.