Dorota Klimek-Jankowska

This study aims to account for the microvariation in aspect choices in factual imperfective contexts in Polish. To this goal an online questionnaire was conducted in which the participants from western and eastern Poland were asked to fill in the missing verbs in presuppositional and existential factual contexts involving an Elaboration coherence relation. The study shows that perfective aspect is preferred in presuppositional factual contexts and imperfective is preferred in existential factual contexts in both regions. Additionally, imperfective is generally more often used in factual contexts in eastern Poland than in western Poland. The study accounts for the observed preferences by resorting to the interaction between the Elaboration relation and (in)definiteness of the temporal variable (introduced at the level of AspP) with respect to the temporal trace of a complex event decomposed in the first phase syntax.

The main goal of the reported study is to test the cross-linguistic validity of the existing psycholinguistic models of morphological processing by contributing the results of a masked priming lexical decision experiment on the processing of Polish semantically transparent and opaque compounds. All these models are concerned with the question of whether morphologically complex words are decomposed during online processing or whether they are stored as chunks in the mental lexicon. We contribute new data from Polish showing that reaction times to target words semantically related to the heads of transparent compounds were significantly faster than to target words semantically related to the heads of opaque compounds in Polish. This may be interpreted as evidence in favour of the view that semantically transparent compound words are decomposed and we access the lemmas of their constituent elements whereas semantically opaque compounds are not decomposed and there is no access to their constituent lemmas.

This two-part paper bridges insights from psycholinguistics and from theoretical and computational lexicography to develop a fine-grained classification of polysemy organized along a wider spectrum of sense remoteness of ambiguous words in Polish based on the investigation of a large collection of linguistic data.1 In the first part, we equip readers with background knowledge on different psycholinguistic views on polysemy and we introduce the basic spectrum of sense remoteness proposed in earlier literature. We also present the methodology of our research and we report the results of our quantitative study based on a large sample of sense pairs randomly extracted from plWordNet This two-part paper bridges insights from psycholinguistics and from theoretical and computational lexicography to develop a fine-grained classification of polysemy organized along a wider spectrum of sense remoteness of ambiguous words in Polish based on the investigation of a large collection of linguistic data.1 In the first part, we equip readers with background knowledge on different psycholinguistic views on polysemy and we introduce the basic spectrum of sense remoteness proposed in earlier literature. We also present the methodology of our research and we report the results of our quantitative study based on a large sample of sense pairs randomly extracted from plWordNet  (Słowosieć) thanks to the resources received from the CLARIN-PL Language Technology Center (the Polish section of the European research infrastructure CLARIN ERIC). We show that the most widely represented polysemy types are nested polysemy, polysemy by metaphor and polysemy by metonymy. The second part proposes an extended spectrum of sense remoteness and presents insights on different types of polysemy included in this spectrum with a special attention paid to nested polysemy. 

This two-part paper bridges insights from psycholinguistics and from theoretical and computational lexicography to develop a fine-grained classification of polysemy organized along a wider spectrum of sense remoteness of ambiguous words in Polish based on the investigation of a large collection of linguistic data. In the second part, we show that polysemy is not a stable phenomenon and relations between senses may differ across language users. For instance, our fifty-fifty class or borderline cases may be represented differently by different language users depending on their perception of the world, world knowledge, associations. We point to some parameters of variation in the class of polysemy by metonymy and polysemy by metaphor which may affect their sense remoteness and consequently also the way they are represented in the mental lexicon.