In this part of the paper we report the results of an ERP study on the processing of two types of compound future in Polish, with infinitival and participial complements. In the study we monitored the EEG correlates of two types of temporal mismatches. Tense mismatches between the future auxiliary and the past tense modifier wczoraj (‘yesterday’) relative to the jutro (‘tomorrow’) baseline resulted in a biphasic (LAN + P600) signature. Aspect mismatches between the future auxiliary and the perfective aspect of the lexical complement (relative to the imperfective baseline) triggered a widely distributed positivity with a posterior maximum (P600). In addition, we wanted to assess whether matching tense specifi cations in different words of a sentence can cause grammatical illusions. To this aim, we tested whether the presence of the adverb wczoraj (‘yesterday’) (specified for [past]) could give rise to an illusion of grammaticality for perfectives as l-participles (allegedly [past] marked), but not as infinitives (not having any [past] specification). Neither behavioral nor electrophysiological results of the present study provided support for this hypothesis. Rather, the findings seem to suggest that TENSE might not belong to the features that are relevant for grammatical illusions, unlike NEGATION, COMPARATIVE, CASE, NUMBER, GENDER, which have been shown to be suspectible to grammatical illusions. We conclude with a discussion of possible underlying reasons for this negative result.

This paper examines expressive sentences in Polish, such as Idiota, nie kierowca! (lit. idiot, not driver) ‘an idiot of a driver’ and Potwór, nie matka! (lit. monster, not mother) ‘a monster of a mother’. Variants of the “X, not Y” construction, its optional and obligatory elements are identifi ed. Differences are emphasised between the emphatic “X, not Y construction” and non-emphatic negative copular clauses. Moreover, relatedness is discussed between expressive NN juxtapositions, such as kierowca idiota (lit. driver idiot) ‘an idiot of a driver’ or matka potwór (lit. mother monster) ‘a monster of a mother’, and the “X, not Y” construction. Semantic-structural types of expressive NN juxtapositions are considered, following the cross-linguistic classification of multiword units proposed by Scalise and Bisetto (2009). The reversibility of NN juxtapositions is taken into account as well. The question is addressed which types of juxtapositions allow their constituents to appear in the “X, not Y” construction.