THE PASSIVE-LIKE ANTICAUSATIVE IN POLISH

In: Wiemer, B., Wälchli, B., Hansen B. (eds.): Grammatical replication and borrowability in language contact. Berlin – Boston (2012), 559-588. (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs 242), 2012

Among the European languages with a participial passive, there are some that tend to distinguish dynamic passive and object resultative through the use of different auxiliaries, e.g. English, Italian or German. In German, the difference is obligatory, and the German difference between the werden-passive and the sein-resultative had an influence on several neighboring languages (Polish, Sorbian, Swiss Retoromansh, Hungarian). Only partly compatible with this area, there is another subareal in which a recipient passive is built by using verbs with the meaning ‘get’ as auxiliaries. Again, the origin has to be sought in German, but more or less grammaticalized recipient passives can be found in Sorbian (with the auxiliary borrowed in dialects and calqued in the standard), Czech, and Slovak (the auxiliary is a calque here). In the paper, corpus material from Upper Sorbian is compared to former descriptions of the recipient passive in Czech and Slovak, all by taking into account the situation in different varieties of German. As a result of the comparison, it seems that there is stronger grammaticalization of the recipient passive in Sorbian dialects than in Czech, which is probably due to the fact that the Sorbian construction came into being earlier than the Czech one (evidence from 19th-century Upper Sorbian and Czech is given in the paper). While in Sorbian the construction perfectly resembles its German counterpart (including differences in grammaticalization and style between dialectal use and use in the standard language), in Czech there are some peculiarities in the choice of the full verbs used in the recipient passive that do not agree with either Standard German or East Middle German dialects. For these reasons, the process leading to the formation of the recipient passive can be analyzed as polysemy copying in Sorbian, but as replica grammaticalization in Czech. The recipient passive in Slovak seems to be dependent on Czech rather than on German. In: Wiemer, B., Wälchli, B., Hansen B. (eds.): Grammatical replication and borrowability in language contact. Berlin – Boston (2012), 559-588. (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs 242)

Vilnius University Open Series

This paper surveys Lithuanian impersonal constructions with predicative present passive participles containing non-promoted accusative objects. It is shown that the construction, hitherto considered very rare, is well-attested and productive with one verb class, namely, transitive reflexives. In terms of semantics, transitive reflexives in Lithuanian may be classified as autobenefactives. Autobenefactive reflexives do not exhibit a change in argument structure with respect to their non-reflexive counterparts. In the case of autobenefactives, the morpheme -si- attached to the verb adds the meaning that the subject, which mostly has the semantic role of an agent, benefits from the event expressed by the predicate. On the basis of corpus data, we have analysed how widespread impersonal constructions with accusative objects are within the domain of transitive reflexives and which pattern—the accusative or the nominative—is dominant when both are attested. Lastly, we briefly discuss the ...

Zeitschrift für Slawistik, 2000

The aims of this paper are twofold. The first objective is to check whether Polish anticausatives are causative in their lexical semantic or syntactic representation. Four diagnostics supporting the presence of a cause in anticausatives are examined against the Polish data, including cause PPs, modification by by itself, the interpretation of negation, and the occurrence of dative causes. Evidence is provided that none of these diagnostics proves the presence of a cause in syntax or semantics of Polish anticausatives. The causative meaning of anticausatives comes from the complex event structure built in the syntax, but interpreted as causative at the syntax-semantics interface. The paper also aims to offer a syntactic analysis of Polish anticausatives in the Minimalist Program of Chomsky (2000, et seq.). The validity of three approaches to the structure of anticausatives is tested against the Polish data, including the unaccusative analysis of Schäfer (2008), the reflexive account of Koontz-Garboden (2009) and Cuervo (2014, 2015), and the predication-based approach of Den Dikken and Dekány (2019). Schäfer's (2008) analysis seems to best fit the Polish data, since Polish anticausatives are unaccusative and contain a reflexive marker, equipped with w-features, but lacking a theta role, hence functioning as an A-expletive.

The paper deals with the limitations on omitting internal arguments of roz-prefixed verbs in Polish. Various linguistic factors influencing the distribution of overt internal arguments are considered, such as specific structures rearranging valency, selectional restrictions of the relevant verbs, semantic frame membership, contextual cosiderations (anaphor, existential INIs), and the presence of a specific morphological exponent, out of which the last two will be shown to bear on the occurrence of zero arguments with roz-verbs. Among the prefixed verbs these with the causative meaning are accountable for on the basis of their morpho-syntactic structure, but the remaining ones constitute a mystery. For these verbs explanations proposing additional predicational structures are analyzed and discarded. Then we consider a proposal concerning the maximization of the event information, following Filip (2013). The proposal assumes the existence of a maximizing semantic operator which, among others, underlies the notion of perfectivity in Slavic languages. The operator may find its place in the lexical representation of roz-and account for the proposition's reluctance to part with its internal argument.

2019

It has long been recognized that sentences with passive se obey a Person constraint:<br> the subject cannot be 1st or 2nd person. I discuss a further constraint on the subject,<br> manifest in Romanian: not only 1st or 2nd person pronouns, but all those DPs that<br> must be marked by the prepositional object marker accompanied by clitic-doubling<br> when functioning as direct objects are excluded from being subjects of se-passives.<br> Following Richards (2008), I propose that these DPs, which are high on the Person/<br> Animacy scale, have a Person feature (manifested by clitic-doubling when they are<br> case-licensed by v*), whereas those that can occur as subjects of se-passives lack the<br> Person feature completely. The ban on +Person internal arguments in se-passives is<br> due to the intervention of the Person feature associated with the external argument.<br> I argue that the element saturating the external argument...

EMPIRICAL

Bisang W., Himmelmann NP, Wiemer B.(ред.). What …, 2004

Studies in Polish Linguistics

The paper aims to verify Landau's (2010) claim that the inability of stative Object Experiencer (OE) verbs to form verbal passives is directly linked to their unaccusativity. In the first part of the article it is shown that given the polysemous nature of OE verbs in Polish, the collected corpus data confirm that unambiguously stative OE verbs do not form verbal passives in Polish. However, it is argued that this fact cannot be taken as evidence for the unaccusativity of these predicates. A number of arguments are provided against the claim that Polish stative OE verbs are unaccusative. Firstly, in contrast to their English equivalents, stative OE verbs in Polish cannot co-occur with an expletive subject. Secondly, the accusative case of the Experiencer is clearly structural in Polish, as it is affected by the Genitive of Negation. The second part of the article (to be published in a forthcoming issue of this journal) focuses on the mutual hierarchy of the two arguments of OE verbs: the Experiencer and the Target/Subject Matter (T/SM). The evidence based on Condition A, pronominal variable binding, and Condition C effects is inconclusive, and hence does not allow us to determine which of the two arguments is projected higher in the structure. For this reason, it is assumed after Landau (2010) that the Experiencer is projected higher than the T/SM. The overall conclusion reached in the paper is that stative OE verbs in Polish are not syntactically unaccusative, and therefore their immunity to the verbal passive must be sought elsewhere. The answer to the question why stative OE verbs do not form verbal passives crucially relies on their having a complex ergative structure as in Bennis (2004), where both arguments are internal, while the external argument is missing altogether.

We provide a constructional account of unselected objects in Polish with special focus on valence augmentation and valence creation processes (Michaelis and Ruppenhofer 2001a, 2001b) involved in prze-prefixed predications. Unselected objects appear in two transitive patterns, which we label Object-as-Figure and Object-as-Ground constructions. Unlike most non-cognitivist approaches (cf. Spencer and Zaretskaya 1998) and in accordance with Cognitive Grammar proposals (cf. Janda 1985; Dąbrowska 1996), we argue that prefixes do not have a vague meaning nor are sometimes mere aspectual markers. In particular , we show that the semantics of both prze-patterns is based on an image schema, where a Figure physically crosses a Ground. Furthermore, we show, through a corpus study, that this spatial configuration provides the basis for a number of metaphorical extensions of the central constructional meaning. However , in contrast to some Cognitive Grammar approaches (cf. Dąbrowska 1996), we propose that the prefix is not added to the verb, changing its valency, but rather it is the verb (or other grammatical category) that is integrated into the prefixed construction. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the analytical machinery of Construction Grammar that is used to account for irregular patterns, i.e., direct objects not involved in the verb's argument structure, can also be used to account for regular syntactic patterns, i.e., prze-constructions with prototypical direct objects.

2019

The paper examines Object Experiencer (henceforth, OE)/Subject Experiencer (henceforth, SE) verb alternations in Polish in order to check whether Polish exhibits the causative/ anticausative alternation in the psych domain (psych causative alternation of Alexiadou and Iordăchioaia 2014, henceforth A&I 2014). The focus is on two types of SE reflexive alternants of OE verbs, i.e., (i) SE forms with an obligatory instrumental case-marked DP derived from stative OE roots, and (ii) SE forms with an optional instrumental DP derived from eventive OE roots. It is argued that in both cases the reflexive SE alternants of either stative or eventive OE verbs have an obligatory or optional instrumental DP which acts as a complement and represents a Target/Subject Matter (henceforth, T/SM, cf. Pesetsky 1995), not a Cause. Therefore, the reflexive OE/SE verb alternation cannot be of the causa-tive/anticausative type. Monovalent reflexive SE verbs, lacking an instrumental DP altogether , are unergative (Reinhart 2001), not unaccusative (contra A&I 2014). The overall conclusion reached in the paper is that the psych causative alternation is absent in Polish.

2014

This thesis presents a description and analysis of non-canonical case-marking of core arguments in Lithuanian. It consists of an introduction and six articles, providing historical and/or contrastive perspective to this issue. More specifically, using data from Lithuanian dialects, Old Lithuanian and other languages such as Icelandic, Latin and Finnic for comparison, the thesis examines the development and current state of non-canonical case-marking of core arguments in Lithuanian The present work draws on empirical findings and theoretical considerations to investigate non-canonical case-marking, language variation and historical linguistics.Special attention is paid to the variation in the case-marking of body parts in pain verb constructions, where an accusative-marked body part is used in Standard Lithuanian, and alongside, a nominative-marked body part in Lithuanian dialects. A common objective of the first three articles is to clarify and to seek a better understanding for the...

2005

This talk will examine the application of the Movement Theory of Control (Hornstein 2001, inter alia) to Russian, Polish, and Bulgarian reflexive data and consider where it can handle the data and where it cannot. Difficult issues within Slavic include long-distance antecedents, homonyms with either reflexive or reciprocal interpretation (i.e., Polish siebie), and the (non-standard) Bulgarian nego si, which seems to behave both as a reflexive and as a pronoun. This theory has difficulties in accounting for the full range of Slavic data. For example, the MTC states that the reflexive is a lower copy of the antecedent, which is changed into a reflexive to save the derivation at Spell-Out. This can easily account for the binding interpretation between a reflexive and a local antecedent, but greater distances of hypothetical movement become difficult with respect to the principles of shortest move and move-over-merge, especially given the optionality of coreference. Some work has been done on reflexives using the MTC (Boeckx, Hornstein, and Nunes 2008, Drummond 2011, among others), but little or none within Slavic.