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.

The present study aims at differentiating between semantically-coded and pragmatically-conditioned meaning components of Polish and German sentence adverbs whose meaning is conventionally associated with hearsay (»Eng. allegedly, reportedly, supposedly). In the current part of the study, we argue why our objective should be reached on the basis of Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs), and we show which particular communicative principles distinguished in Neo-Gricean frameworks can sensibly be considered as triggers of GCIs that evoke ‘epistemic overtones’ in the use of hearsay adverbs. We differentiate between GCIs which work for all relevant adverbs and implicatures which only apply to more individual properties of hearsay adverbs on more specific, “deeper” levels of their meaning structure. In accordance with this more descriptive task, we discuss general issues concerning presumable hierarchies of factors that influence (trigger or cancel) epistemic implicatures in the usage of lexical markers of information source. We argue that many discourse properties on the semantics-pragmatics interface which are characteristic of grammatical evidentials also hold true for lexical markers of information source.

The goal of this paper is to investigate Polish phonotactics from the point of view of different measures of phonotactic preferability. The inventory of word-initial and -final clusters is extracted from a dictionary and analysed in accordance with two principles of phonotactic complexity, namely, the Sonority Sequencing Generalisation and Net Auditory Distance. Sonority entails measurements of distances between consonants expressed by the manner of articulation, whereas NAD uses the manner of articulation, place of articulation as well as the obstruent/sonorant distinction. These differences are likely to contribute to a different assessment of clusters, which is the main focus of this paper. Moreover, since a set of Polish clusters arise due to morphology, a distinction is drawn between phonotactic and morphonotactic clusters, i.e. phonologically and morphologically motivated. We are interested in verifying to what extent the principles under investigation reflect the relation between cluster preferability and morphological complexity. The analysis shows that NAD, as a more restrictive measure of phonotactics, rejects a larger portion of word-initial and -final clusters on well-formedness grounds. Secondly, we demonstrate that both principles generally show a strong relation between cluster preferability and morphological complexity.