Wojciech Witkowski

The current paper is an attempt to provide a syntactic account of the immunity of Polish stative Object Experiencer (OE) verbs to verbal passivisation. In search for the syntactic structure of stative OE verbs, and the hierarchy of their arguments, it is demonstrated here that the evidence based on Condition A, pronominal variable binding, and Condition C effects is inconclusive, and hence does not allow us to determine which of the two arguments – the Experiencer or the Target/Subject Matter (T/SM) – is projected higher in the structure. It is then suggested that the answer to the question why stative OE verbs do not form verbal passives crucially relies on their having a complex ergative structure as in Bennis (2004), where both arguments are internal, while the external argument is missing altogether. At the same time, it is assumed after Landau (2010) that the Experiencer is projected higher than the T/SM. 

The paper aims to verify Landau’s (2010) claim that the inability of stative Object Experiencer (OE) verbs to form verbal passives is directly linked to their unaccusativity. In the first part of the article it is shown that given the polysemous nature of OE verbs in Polish, the collected corpus data confirm that unambiguously stative OE verbs do not form verbal passives in Polish. However, it is argued that this fact cannot be taken as evidence for the unaccusativity of these predicates. A number of arguments are provided against the claim that Polish stative OE verbs are unaccusative. Firstly, in contrast to their English equivalents, stative OE verbs in Polish cannot co-occur with an expletive subject. Secondly, the accusative case of the Experiencer is clearly structural in Polish, as it is affected by the Genitive of Negation. The second part of the article (to be published in a forthcoming issue of this journal) focuses on the mutual hierarchy of the two arguments of OE verbs: the Experiencer and the Target/Subject Matter (T/SM). The evidence based on Condition A, pronominal variable binding, and Condition C effects is inconclusive, and hence does not allow us to determine which of the two arguments is projected higher in the structure. For this reason, it is assumed after Landau (2010) that the Experiencer is projected higher than the T/SM. The overall conclusion reached in the paper is that stative OE verbs in Polish are not syntactically unaccusative, and therefore their immunity to the verbal passive must be sought elsewhere. The answer to the question why stative OE verbs do not form verbal passives crucially relies on their having a complex ergative structure as in Bennis (2004), where both arguments are internal, while the external argument is missing altogether.

In modern times the subject of penal fiscal law, similarly as that of penal military law, holds a special status within the broadly understood branch of penal law. The beginnings of penal fiscal law are associated with the history of penal administrative law. The institution of the police in Europe took over the majority of the tasks concerning security and public order. The same system was also introduced in Prussia in the 18th century. The Prussian police dealt with the so called “police offences”, to which there also belonged fiscal offences, often referred to as “contraventions”. They were defined in the Prussian Landrecht (general code of law), as well as in specific provisions. Altogether, they made up a system of penal and administrative offences. Besides the French (judicial) and Austrian (judicial-administrative) model, there also arose a Prussian penal-administrative system which had an intermediary character; in the latter system, the above types of offences were handed over to the competence of administration with the option of vindicating one’s rights in a suitable court of law. In the 18th c. Prussia, the penal-fiscal offences belonged to the competence of Kammerjustiz which applied a court procedure. The Warsaw Duchy had standardized the penal fiscal law by adopting the Prussian model – penal and fiscal offences were left to the competence of administrative institutions, with the option of making an appeal in court. At the same time, substantive law, based on Prussian legislation, was applied. On the territory of the Kingdom of Poland, administration had been reorganized, leaving the penal fiscal cases in the hands of the administration. However, in everyday practice the right to vindicate one’s rights in a court of law had been retained. The system had been altered in 1824 in consequence of which court proceedings in courts of second instance had been done away with and some cases had been referred to the so called administrative penal courts. This model operated until 1867, though it was modified a number of times, for instance in connection with the abolition of customs borders with Russia in 1850. Substantive law was based on the legislative system of the Warsaw Duchy of 1809; the latter had been supplemented by special provisions. The defeat of the January uprising had led to the introduction of Russian regulations on the territory of the Kingdom of Poland