Polish verb forms occurring with (what was originally) the pronominal clitic się constitute a notoriously heterogeneous group of constructions ranging from reflexive proper (widzi się ‘sees herself/himself ’) to impersonal (mówi się ‘they say’). This article deals with middle-voice reflexives, which cover the semantic domain extending between reflexives proper and passives. The Polish types of middle-voice reflexives are first situated on a semantic map reflecting a cross-linguistic analysis based mainly on Slavonic, Baltic and Germanic data. Then an analysis of the different types is given in terms of argument structure. We argue that most of the Polish middle-voice reflexives do not differ from the non-reflexive forms in argument structure but only in the assignment of grammatical relations. They are also characterized by construction-specific semantic modifications (more marked than in the case of the passive). As they are arguably not in the lexicon, a good case can be made for their treatment in terms of grammatical voice. At the same time these constructions are distinct from the passive: both middle-voice and passive constructions are agent-back-grounding devices, but they represent different types of backgrounding.

The article discusses the theory of laryngeal phonology exposed in Cyran (2014), Laryngeal Relativism. The basic assumption of this approach is that sonorants and vowels never bear phonological specifications for voicing: their voicing is only ever phonetic in nature. Therefore phonetic interpretation, i.e. spell-out of the output of phonology into phonetic categories, is central: this is where phonetic voicing leaks into neighbouring segments. In the first part of the article, the generative power of Laryngeal Relativism is evaluated, and its workings are compared with previous analyses. The impact of substance-free primes is also discussed.

This study is dedicated to the relationship between lexical meaning and lexical borrowing. It presents an analysis of the semantic fields of all documented German loanwords in the history of Polish written/standard language, following a classification scheme which was originally used for typological comparison (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009c). Firstly, the results are compared to a hierarchy of borrowing probability which was developed on the basis of typological studies (Tadmor 2009). The apparent differences to that hierarchy underline the need for both onomasiological and semasiological approaches in studying the connection between meaning and borrowing. Secondly, the results are compared to impressionistic judgments on the semantic fields of German loanwords in Polish. Although most of the traditionally mentioned semantic fields are well attested, there are other prominent fields as well, which shows that German loanwords are not limited to specialized terms of professional fields. The analysis is furthermore divided depending on: a) the time period and b) how well the loanwords are documented. It will be demonstrated that some semantic fields are typical for certain time periods while the contribution of other fields remains stable. Some semantic fields have a high quantity of poorly documented loanwords, suggesting that some fields are prone to extensive, but less intensive language contact.