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Deriving Morphologically Irregular Passive Potential Adjectives in Polish

Publication date: 2023

Studies in Polish Linguistics, Volume 18 (2023), Vol. 18, Issue 4, pp. 169 - 192

https://doi.org/10.4467/23005920SPL.23.008.18683

Authors

Sebastian Wasak
Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II
, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0933-7473 Orcid
All publications →

Titles

Deriving Morphologically Irregular Passive Potential Adjectives in Polish

Abstract

In Polish, passive potential adjectives are productively formed by means of attaching the suffix -alny to transitive verbs (Szymanek 2010). They have been shown to project the external argument of their verbs, as well as being able to co-occur with agentive przez-phrases and instrumental phrases (Bloch-Trojnar 2019). Hence, under a syntactic approach to word formation such as Distributed Morphology, they are derived via outer affixation, with their structure containing the vP and VoiceP heads. A small subset of Polish passive potential adjectives are derived with affixes other than -alny. These include czytelny ‘legible, readable, understandable’, strawny ‘digestible’ and zrozumiały ‘understandable, comprehensible’. In this paper, it is demonstrated that while these adjectives behave similarly to -alny adjectives in terms of licensing Voice-related modifiers, they are excluded from a wide range of verbal contexts available to regularly derived passive potential adjectives. As such, czytelnystrawny and zrozumiały offer evidence for the claim that the layer that introduces event implications is distinct from the verbal head that triggers spell-out. Specifically, adjectives such as czytelnystrawny and zrozumiały can be argued to contain the little head, but not the cyclic vP projection, which is in line with the architecture of grammar as proposed by Embick (2010).

References

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Information

Information: Studies in Polish Linguistics, Volume 18 (2023), Vol. 18, Issue 4, pp. 169 - 192

Article type: Original article

Titles:

English:

Deriving Morphologically Irregular Passive Potential Adjectives in Polish

Authors

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0933-7473

Sebastian Wasak
Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II
, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0933-7473 Orcid
All publications →

Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II
Poland

Published at: 2023

Article status: Open

Licence: CC BY  licence icon

Percentage share of authors:

Sebastian Wasak (Author) - 100%

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Publication languages:

English