The main aim of the reported study is to establish the stage of grammaticalisation of the indefinite article in Polish by contributing the results of a corpus study. We selected and analysed 20.000 sentences containing the word jeden. The obtained results demonstrate that the uses of jeden as a presentative marker and a specific marker have been both attested, which would suggest that Polish numeral has already reached the specific marker stage. Based on the statistical analysis carried out for the obtained results, a statistically significant increase in the use of jeden as an indefinite marker has been revealed. This may be interpreted as evidence for the grammaticalisation phenomena, enhanced by language contacts with article-possessing languages (English and German).

This paper accounts for the distribution of two second position effects, the V2 (verb second) order observed in continental Germanic languages and second position cliticization, attested in some Slavic languages. It shows that it is necessary to distinguish two types of second position effects: one of them affects finite verbs and pronominal and auxiliary clitics, whereas the other one is restricted to the contexts of marked illocution and is observed among a small class of so-called operator clitics. Furthermore, this paper addresses Bošković’s (2016) generalization concerning the distribution of clitics, which states that second position pronominal and auxiliary clitics are found only in languages without articles. This paper shows that although this generalization is empirically correct, it does not account for the distribution of auxiliary clitics and is not supported by diachronic considerations. It proposes an alternative generalization, which restricts verb-adjacent cliticization to tensed environments.