Volume 59, Issue 4 - Special Issue: A Festschrift for Professor Jacek Witkoś on his 60th birthday; Guest Editor: Przemysław Tajsner and Bartosz Wiland

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’.

The aim of this paper is to highlight certain similarities between Polish and Bulgarian with respect to the selected NP/DP criteria compiled by Bošković (2012. On NPs and clauses. In Günther Grewendorf & Thomas Ede Zimmermann (eds.), Discourse and grammar: From sentence types to lexical categories , 179–242. Berlin: De Gruyter). In the course of the discussion, Negative Raising with idioms and quantifier – negation interaction, definite/indefinite contrasts in the context of sub-extraction, as well as exhaustive presupposition are taken into consideration. On the basis of the data, I put forward an analysis of the Polish facts which draws upon Tasseva-Kurktchieva and Dubinsky’s (2018. On the NP/DP frontier: Bulgarian as a transitional case. In Steven Franks, Virinda Chidambaram, Brian Joseph & Ilyana Krapova (eds.), Studies in Bulgarian Morphosyntax in Honor of Catherine Rudin , 287–312. Bloomington, IN: Slavica) account of the DEF(initeness) feature on the D head (which they use to argue for Bulgarian as a ‘weak’ DP language). Despite certain similarities between the two languages, Polish actually seems to resemble English in terms of the specific coding of this feature. The analysis suggests that (unlike in Bulgarian) DEF on D in Polish is not intrinsically valued (+int, +val), but rather receives a specific value in the course of the syntactic derivation.

This article aims to provide a concise overview of the most relevant topics concerning the implementation of acceptability judgments in generative research. The first part focuses on theoretical issues, including the reasons underlying the prevalence of acceptability judgments, the skepticism towards the wide use of informal judgments, the arguments for and against the continued use of informal data points and the challenges related to experimental data collection and the gradient nature of judgments. The second part further explores the concept of gradient acceptability and its different sources. We suggest that violations of soft constraints correspond with partial acceptability, unlike violations of hard constraints, which cause strong unacceptability. Based on our investigation of selected partially acceptable syntactic phenomena in Polish, we show that their syntactic accounts can also benefit from the inclusion of non-syntactic factors, which can be more reliably identified via experimental methodology. More specifically, we propose that (i) the lack of subject orientation of pronominal possessives could be attributed to lexical ambiguity, (ii) coreference of possessive cataphora is facilitated by antecedent backgrounding and (iii) WCO is improved by focus marking of the possessive pronoun, (iv) while processing of the last two structures could be ameliorated with more informative fillers.

I provide an extended review of the monograph, focusing on issues that are connected with the experiencer puzzle. The insights presented in the book are presented chapter by chapter. The approach developed in the monograph is briefly summarized and critically evaluated as innovative and important, targeted at specialists in the generative syntax. Some drawbacks are highlighted. The theory presented in the monograph is inspiring and invites further questions and answers to be validated in cross-linguistic perspective. The analysis is well informed and constitutes an important synthesis of reflexivization patterns and their account in the generative tradition.

Infinitival clauses are known to represent a caseless domain for the subject. Nevertheless, Russian is often cited as an exception to this property. It has a so-called “dative-infinitive construction” (DIC), in which an overt subject appears in dative case. Dative morphology also appears in certain control environments, resurfacing on a semi-predicate, which has been taken as evidence of case presence on PRO. This paper scrutinizes various types of DIC and proposes their unified analysis, relying on two theoretical tools: the framework of Distributed Morphology and the Universal Spine Hypothesis. Examining the building blocks of the infinitival clause in Russian, this paper argues against a covert-modal hypothesis. The dative case is attributed to a to -like functional head, Goal, which anchors the infinitival clause to a contextually salient point in time or a world of evaluation. Within the clausal spine, GoalP can either immediately dominate VoiceP or be immediately dominated by CP. The proposed analysis builds upon the concept of “goal-oriented directedness”, borrowed from the cognitive-functionalist literature and formalized in a generative perspective. Application of this analysis to control environments leads to a conclusion that two types of infinitival domains should be differentiated in Russian: full-fledged (GoalP-containing) CPs and bare infinitival phrases.