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. The first part of this paper (Migdalski 2018), published in the previous issue of this journal, showed 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, the first part of Migdalski (2018) addressed 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. It showed that although this generalization is empirically correct, it does not account for the distribution of auxiliary clitics and is not supported by diachronic considerations. The second part of this paper proposes an alternative generalization, which restricts verb-adjacent cliticization to tensed environments.

This article reports on a study into epistemic strategies used in the trial on the 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 air crash which took the lives of many high-ranking Polish officials including the President of Poland. It follows the KUB model proposed by Bongelli and Zuczkowski (2008), in which three epistemic stances are distinguished: Knowing, Unknowing and Believing. Taking into account the political context of the trial, the study focuses on the ways in which the witness, Poland’s former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, communicates his knowledge (certainty), unknowledge (neither certainty nor uncertainty) and belief (uncertainty). As the data reveal, when referring to the circumstances of the crash itself, the witness most willingly communicates unknowledge and belief while his declarations of certitude (knowledge) concern mostly procedural matters which are not directly related to the crash. As regards the explicit marking of (un)knowledge with the verb wiedzieć (‘know’), both wiem (‘I know’) and nie wiem (‘I don’t know’) are used rather sparingly. By contrast, phrases including references to the witness’s memory (e.g. to, co mam w pamięci [‘what I can remember’]) – marking either unknowledge or limited/uncertain knowledge (belief) – resurface as the witness’s preferred strategy. The data also demonstrate frequent co-occurrences of ‘knowing,’ ‘unknowing’ and ‘believing’ markers, reducing the overall degree of certainty communicated by the speaker. In sum, the study reveals how Poland’s former Prime Minister skillfully avoids unequivocal or categorical answersand conveys a low degree of certainty in his testimony.