Polish Syntax

Paper Summary:

In this article, the writer looks at the Polish language which like other Slavic languages, represents an inflecting, or fusion type of language, in which single grammatical morphemes combine several functions: case, gender, and number in noun forms; person and number in verb forms. The writer claims that the Polish grammatical system closely parallels that of Russian.

Contents:
Introduction
Syntax in Polish Literature
Consider the Following Polish Examples (Giejgo 1981)
The Study and Results
Works Cited

From the Paper:

"Because Polish retains a rich inflectional system, morphology is the main device for expressing syntactic distinctions. Word order has grammatical functions only to a limited extent, and hence it can serve other purposes, namely, it performs pragmatic functions. Deviations from the standard (unmarked) SVO order serve the purposes of topicalization; and combined with focal stress, word order expresses special emphasis on certain elements, in a way independent from discourse structure. Furthermore, the rich inflectional system makes it possible to apply ellipsis to a much larger extent than in English. Passive participles are used in passive voice constructions. In spoken language, however, these have a limited range of use, as word order flexibility is sufficient for expressing focus, and a number of subjectless active constructions can be used for subject downgrading. Those occurring in spoken language typically involve perfective participles, used in order to refer to a resulting end state of some action, performed by an unspecified agent which is either unknown or evident or simply irrelevant. These cannot be called truncated passives, as full passives are practically never used. They are rather a subclass of attributive sentences making statements about objects."

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