The paper presents the constraints on the formation of dispositional adjectives in Polish marked with the suffix -liw(y) and situates the process in a larger-scale picture of the entire class of deverbal adjectivizations. Derivatives with dispositional semanticsare argued to be a subclass of Subject adjectivizations/potential adjectives since both are one-participant eventualities, the sole participant being mapped onto the subject position of the main verb. The difference between dispositional and potential semantics is not categorical but a matter of degree. The domain of this process includes intransitive verbs of communication and emission, reflexively marked intransitive verbs referring to emotional states (deponents), (reflexively marked) decausatives, verbs denoting psychological/emotional/mental experiences which syntactically may be transitive but can be viewed as one-participant internal eventualities, non-prototypical transitive verbs which take genitive- and dative-marked objects and verbal roots which alternate between transitive and middle semantics. The dispositional semantics of the adjective depends on the personal/animate or inanimate nature of the participant involved in the eventuality. Thus, it rests with the base (or partly with the nominal argument) and is not supplied by the suffix.

The aim of this paper is to assess the change of Polish numeral jeden ‘one’ into an indefinite marker in the view of the grammaticalization theory. Although Slavic languages are principally believed not to possess articles, certain usages of one (e.g., in Bulgarian and Macedonian) demonstrate the same features as the ones ascribed to the usages of indefinite articles in non-Slavic languages, such as English, German or Italian. Language contact of article-possessing languages is often claimed to enhance the grammaticalisation process of an indefinite article (Heine and Kuteva 2006). This type of grammaticalisation is said to follow five distinctive stages: (i) numeral, (ii) presentative marker, (iii) specific marker, (iv) non-specific marker and (v) generalized article (e.g., Givón 1981, Heine 1997). We assessed that in the case of Polish, the grammaticalisation stage is that of a specific marker, with some occasional uses leaning towards the non-specific marker stage. The conclusion was supported by the results of 53 native speakers’ judgments as well as the diagnostic tests based on relevant literature.

Sandhi-voicing in dialectal Polish affects word-final obstruents in pre-sonorant and pre-vocalic environments. According to the standard descriptions, the process occurs irrespectively of the ‘underlying’ laryngeal specification of the consonant. The process has been problematic for phonological theory, with earlier accounts either requiring ad-hoc mechanisms to allow the ‘spreading’ of [voice], or providing an inadequate explanation of why the process is limited to word boundaries. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that sandhi-voicing dialects is a function of weaker word boundaries in the given dialects. Weaker boundaries go hand in hand with weaker initial syllables. We compare the speech of Standard Polish speakers (N=10) with speakers of the Poznań-Kraków dialect (N=10), who recorded sentences containing obstruent-sonorant sequences spanning word boundaries. We found acoustic evidence of weaker initial syllables for two prosodic parameters in the productions of dialect speakers. The relative strength of word-boundaries is described in the Onset Prominence model (OP; Schwartz 2010 et seq.), which also explains the role of manner of articulation in triggering the process.