CG 05: POLISH AND ENGLISH SYNTAX

1. Basic parts of a sentence:

subject (obligatory), verb (obligatory), object (obligatory for transitive verbs), complement
(obligatory), adverbial (optional)
The happy student did the homework in the evening.
Zadowolony student zrobił zadanie domowe wieczorem.
Kamil jest studentem.
verb vs. predicate
The boy read the book. The book was fantastic.
Chłopiec przeczytał książkę. Książka była fantastyczna.

2. Word order:
SVO as default:
Ala ma kota. You must have patience.
(A)VS(C) with intransitive verbs in Polish:
Przychodzi baba do lekarza.
non-SVO word orders are either marked or unacceptable in English:
Patience you must have. (OSV)
*Patience must have you. (OVS)

topicalization – movement of a constituent to the sentence-initial position for emphasis

given vs. new information (= presupposition vs. focus)
A: What are you looking at? B: I’m looking at [given] a book [new].
A: Na co patrzysz? B: Patrzę na książkę.
The answer I’ll give you in a minute.
To Piotrowi Michał dał klucze.

3. Sentence relations:
a) coordinated – coordinated clauses have the same ‘weight’
John plays the guitar and Mary sings.
Janek gra na gitarze a Maria śpiewa.
b) subordinated (embedded) – the clause after a subordinating conjunction has less ‘weight’
than the clause to which it is attached, i.e. the main clause
John plays the guitar because Mary sings.
Janek gra na gitarze, ponieważ Maria śpiewa.
4. Agreement:
dependence with matching
of features
“systematic covariance between
a semantic or formal property
of one element and a formal property of another”

agreement patterns:
conjoined NPs in English and Polish
collective nouns in English are interpreted as either a whole entity or a group of individuals:
This/*Those government is/are doing little to address the issue.

5. Government:
dependence without matching of features: a word governs (requires a form of) another word
transitive verbs (those that can take a direct object) require the accusative case for the direct object
She has fired him.
case alignment – choice of case marking on the verb’s arguments (subject and object)
main types: accusative, ergative, neutral
“in most languages, case marking follows either the accusative or the ergative alignment,
with accusative alignment being more frequent”

6. Syntactic contrasts:
a) structural contrasts:
presence / absence of lexical categories, e.g. articles
presence / absence of phrase structure rules
subjectless constructions (usually existential statements, without a specified / known agent)
Jest już późno. Burczy mi w brzuchu.
pronominal subjects in Polish and English:
Polish as a pro-drop language; lack of overt pronoun in deictic and anaphoric subjects
Idziemy na piechotę. Piotr pomagał rodzicom jak mógł. Był bardzo zapracowany.
obligatory presence of the subject on English
There is a book on the table.
b) categorial contrasts:
corresponding forms in equivalent / congruent sentences belong to different lexical categories
PL adverb vs. EN adjective: Czuję się źle : I feel bad
PL NP vs. EN PP: wierzchołek góry : the top of the mountain

c) functional contrasts:
equivalent forms have different syntactic functions
PL subject vs. EN direct object: Jankowi zginęły klucze : Janek lost his keys
PL indirect object vs. EN subject: Jest mu zimno : He feels cold