This study aims to account for the microvariation in aspect choices in factual imperfective contexts in Polish. To this goal an online questionnaire was conducted in which the participants from western and eastern Poland were asked to fill in the missing verbs in presuppositional and existential factual contexts involving an Elaboration coherence relation. The study shows that perfective aspect is preferred in presuppositional factual contexts and imperfective is preferred in existential factual contexts in both regions. Additionally, imperfective is generally more often used in factual contexts in eastern Poland than in western Poland. The study accounts for the observed preferences by resorting to the interaction between the Elaboration relation and (in)definiteness of the temporal variable (introduced at the level of AspP) with respect to the temporal trace of a complex event decomposed in the first phase syntax.

The aim of this paper is to compare two Polish predicative constructions with infinitival subjects, namely those with predicative adverbs and those with predicative adjectives. The latter construction, of the form “predicative adjective + copula + infinitival subject”, has hardly been noticed in Polish literature on predication, copulas, or infinitival subjects. On the basis of corpus data, mainly from the National Corpus of Polish, we demonstrate that this construction is much rarer than the analogous construction with predicative adverbs. We also show that roughly the same predicates may be expressed as either adverbs or as adjectives when the subject is an infinitival phrase – any observed differences are not systematic but rather stem from lexical gaps and differences in the meanings of particular adverbs and adjectives. In particular, certain modal predicates may only be expressed as adjectives because the corresponding adverbs do not express the same non-epistemic modal meanings. Finally, we provide new corpus evidence for an earlier claim that predicative adjectives are much rarer than adverbs when the subject is infinitival because they require this subject to undergo covert nominalisation; as adverbs combine with infinitival subjects directly, they are usually preferred.

This paper presents an acoustic study devised to investigate the effects of three presumably distinct prosodic position on the phonetic realisation of Polish front vowels in #CV (that is, following a prosodic boundary and a consonantal onset) and #VC sequences (that is, immediately following a prosodic boundary). The results of the experiment suggest that Polish does not seem to distinguish between utterance-initial and phrase-initial positions, with some contrasts present between these two positions and phrase-medial tokens with respect to F1. No effects of position have been found for F2 or vowel duration. There are also no clear differences on the acoustic realisation of vowels depending on whether or not they are adjacent to the prosodic boundary. These results raise questions about the nature of prosodic structure in Polish as compared to other languages which show more robust effects.