In this paper I will examine N+N juxtapositions in Polish, such as kobieta anioł (woman angel) ‘an angel of a woman’, praca marzenie (job dream) ‘dream job’, dziecko geniusz (child genius) ‘prodigy child’ and kierowca cham (driver lout) ‘a lout of a driver’. I will demonstrate that they exhibit properties of expressive combinations, as discussed for English by Potts (2007) and for German by Meibauer (2013). It will be proposed that Polish expressive N+N juxtapositions under analysis fall into two groups. Juxtapositions belonging to the first group, e.g. kierowca cham ‘a lout of a driver’, behave like coordinate compound-like units. Juxtapositions which form the second group of expressive complexes, such as kobieta anioł ‘an angel of a woman’ and praca marzenie ‘dream job’, can be treated as attributive-appositive (ATAP) combinations (in Scalise and Bisetto’s 2009 classification). The occurrence of a cline between coordinate and attributive multi-word units is postulated.

Based on diachronic data extracted from the available lexicographic sources and historical corpora of Polish, this paper aims at determining whether the initial stage of the adverbialization of indefinite quantifiers of nominal origin typically involves extent modification, degree modification being a posterior development. The results of an investigation into the evolution of the functionalstatusof the commonly used quantifiers trochę ‘a bit’, odrobinę ‘a bit’, as well as masę ‘a lot’ indicate that prior to establishing themselves as degree modifiers, the items function as extent modifiers, i.e. duratives or frequentatives. In their earliest adverbial attestations recorded in the analysed material, the quantifiers under scrutiny modify the duration or frequency of the action denoted by the associated verbal element, or, if the pertinent verb encodes a punctual event, of the resultant state, and only later do they start to combine with scalar predicates, i.e. degree verbs as well as gradable adjectives and adverbs, including adverbials in the form of prepositional phrases. Exceptional in this respect is masę ‘a lot’, as it (still) appears incapable of serving as a degree intensifier

Under any derivational approach, syntactic computations proceed from more complex to less complex domains. Though such multiple workspaces get to be resolved into a single – matrix – workspace, the issue of timing– i.e. the point when multiple workspaces must resolve to a single derivational space has not been addressed in the literature. I argue that not only the direction, but also the timing of syntactic computations is guided by a more general requirement to reduce the computational complexity and I propose Multiple Workspaces Earliness Hypothesis to address this issue. On the empirical side, the technical apparatus and the analysis I propose allow me to capture the seemingly contradictory binding facts involving locative PPs as well as to treat adjuncts as relation, rather than absolute notions.