What the adnominal intensifier "sam" and Left Branch Extractions tell us about the structure of Polish nominal projections

Abstract

In this paper, I reconsider the nature of sam (a Polish counterpart to Russian and Serbo-Croatian sam, German selbst, Italian solo, Danish selv), a lexical item generally assumed to be adjectival. First, I focus on its use as an adnominal intensifier and argue that in this function it should be considered pronominal. Since intensifying sam has a history of appearing in analyses propagating the DP Hypothesis, my proposal sheds some light on these issues and leads to bigger questions concerning the structure of Polish nominals, in particular whether they project DP or not. Answers to these questions constitute the second part of the paper, where I argue that D equals Person (hence DP/PersonP) and that it is universally present in Polish nominals. I draw on the evidence from Left Branch Extractions and adjunct extractions and show that, while such extractions are quite freely available in Polish, they are nevertheless blocked whenever in the presence of overt D/Person heads, just like in languages with articles, projecting DP. I further show that the difference between Polish and English with respect to adjectival LBE reduces to the employment of distinct case-checking strategies and agreement options.