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Accusative-instrumental alternation in Polish

  • Piotr Wyroślak EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: April 4, 2023
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Summary

The present study provides a corpus account of the factors governing the choice between the accusative and the instrumental case for object marking in Polish. The two cases are near-interchangeable with a set of Polish verbs primarily expressing physical manipulation. Following profile-based approaches, a sample of representative usage data has been extracted and manually annotated for subsequent multivariate modeling. The results indicate the importance of construction-specific characteristics for the choice between the two forms and the complex nature of the influence of coarse-grained transitivity-related features. Specifically, two semantic features emerged as particularly associated with the choice of the instrumental: (i) holistic conceptualisation of the manipulated object and (ii) prominence of its physical contiguity to the acting force.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Nicole Nau, whose guidance made it possible for me to undertake the research project described in this work. I would also like to thank Dylan Glynn and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Any shortcomings are my own.

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Published Online: 2023-04-04
Published in Print: 2023-03-30

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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