Jan Fellerer
"Competing" parameters of phrase structure in Early Modern Polish
University of Oxford, Wolfson College


"Competing" parameters of phrase structure in Early Modern Polish

It has been repeatdly noticed that the inflected verb appears at a high
percentage as the clause final constituent in Pre-Modern Polish. Word order
is also one of the most remarkable characteristics of Early Modern Polish
texts from the 19th c. So far, historians and grammarians of Polish have
conceived of V-final effects as a problem of stylistics, e.g. as an instance
of "wyrazenia zamkniete" (Wierzbicka 1966: 71-107, 170-175). In this paper
I explore the structural implications of V-final effects in 19th-c. Polish.
They seem to be rooted in the occurence of head-final VPs beside head-initial
VPs, on the one hand, and in movements that are induced by requirements of the
information structure (focus-background, topic-comment), on the other.

I depart from the following two assumptions. (1) illustrates the structural
description of Polish sentences

(1) [CP [AgrSP [TP [AgrOP [VP Spec [V' V ...]]]]]] (e.g. Fehrmann 1997: 31).

Overt morphology identifies surface syntactic functions and renders overt
movement of S and O unnecessary. In other words, Polish, like Russian, has
weak grammatical features (Junghanns; Zybatow 1995: 299). Movement of
arguments is induced by requirements of the information structure. In texts
undoubtedly written in the colloquial language of the 19th c., topicalization
could even lead to the violation of certain principles, such as the Theta-
criterion (2) or constraints on the operation of A movement. In more traditional
terms, (3) should be ruled out by virtue of the fact that the "gap corresponding
to the base-generated position of the sentence-initial NP may not occur inside
(...) a tensed indicative complement" (Willim 1989: 124).

(2) [[Te tedy rzeczy wziawszy [pominiony faktor oswiadczony deklarowal
[sprzedac t]]]]

(3) [IP [DP To pobicie] [IP powiedzial mi [CP ze [IP za tom otrzymal t [CP
zem sie mial zerwac do niego]]]]

Throughout the history of Polish there, however, occur cases of direct objects
which have been moved out of VP without satisfying requirements of the information structure or, as pointed out above, the principle of greed. If we
expect ditransitive verbs to project a VP as shown in (4), we are left with
the problem why the NP headed by "pozyczka" in the text-initial sentence (5)
should have moved out of the focus of VP and, presumably, to SpecAgrOP. Do have
IPs containing a non-inflected verb an information structure at all?

(4) [VP [V' [VP [V']]]]

(5) Poniewaz stan mego zdrowia wymaga niezbednej a kosztownej kuracji, na
prowadzenie ktorej szczupla moja pensja nie jest wystarczajaca, przez to mam
honor upraszac Rzad Gubernialny, aby [mi pozyczke z funduszu zelaznego w ilosci
R.s. 90 udzielic] raczyl.

As a result of language contact or language change Polish or certain registers
of Polish might have had a (certainly unequal) variation in the ordering of elements within VP. Hence, for example in the trivial case of monotransitive verbs, OV, known from German or Swedish (Travis 1991: 348), might have been an option beside VO.

Beside non-well-formed clauses in terms of information structure, context-free
evidence for head-final VPs in Early Modern Polish comes from strings which contain a participle and two auxiliaries. So far, it seems from the analysis of
Polish texts from the 19th c. that sentence (6), highly dubious in modern Polish
(Kakietek 1976), did not have (6') as a counterpart in Early Modern Polish.

(6) Stosownie wiec do tego rozporzadzenia [mundurowe przynalezytosci skonfiskowane i oddane byc maja].

(6') Stosownie wiec do tego rozporzadzenia [mundurowe przynalezytosci skonfiskowane i oddane maja byc].

Hence, the inflected verb must appear head-final, if the direct object is base-generated "to the left" of V. However, this hypothesis still needs to be checked
against more material and other types of compound predicates.


Fehrmann, Dorothee: Sekundarpradikate und Informationsstruktur im Polnischen, in: Junghanns, U.; Zybatow, G. (eds.): Formale Slawistik (Frankfurt/Main, 1997) 371-386.

Junghanns, Uwe; Zybatow, Gerhild: Syntax and Information Structure of Russian Clauses, in: Browne, E.W. et al. (eds.): Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics. The Cornell Meeting 1995 (=Michigan Slavic Materials 39, Ann Arbor, 1995) 289-319.

Kakietek, Piotr: Formal Characteristics of the Modal Auxiliaries in English and Polish, in: Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics 4 (1976) 205-216.

Travis, Lisa deMena: Parameters of Phrase Structure and Verb-Second Phenomena, in: Freidin, Robert (ed.): Principles and Parameters in Comparative Grammar (=Current Studies in Linguistics Series, Cambridge/Mass., 1991) 339-364.

Wierzbicka, Anna: System skladniowo-stylistyczny proz polskiego renesansu (=Instytut Badan Literackich PAN, Historia i Teoria Literatury, Studia, Teoria Literatury 5, Warszawa, 1966) 7-229.

Willim, Ewa: On word order: A Government-Binding Study of English and Polish (=Prace Jezykoznawcze 100, Krakow, 1989).