Professor Edmund Gussmann, an eminent Polish linguist, associated with the universities of Lublin, Gdańsk and Poznań, died in Gdynia on 2nd September 2010.

The article discusses selected problems connected with description of complex predicates (CPred), i.a., the still controversial issue of criteria applied to diff erentiate and classify elements of this category, their status in lexical-grammatical system and their relationship with synthetic entities belonging to the class of VERBUM. What makes CPreds interesting is the fact that they have been encountered in various languages (e.g. ispytywat’’voschiščenije (Russian) = mieć // odczuć podziw // zachwyt (Polish) = to feel admiration (for) (English); polučat’ pomošč (Russian) = otrzymać // dostać pomoc (Polish) = to receive help (from sb) (English); zaviazywat’ družbu (Russian) = nawiązać przyjaźń // zaprzyjaźnić się (Polish) = to strike up a friendship // to become friends (English), etc.). This situation calls for a search for complex solutions, also with the aid of new linguistic theories. Especially the cognitivist thesis about the prototypical character of lexical-grammatical categories allows to classify Cpreds as a typologically diversifi ed group of complex entities (characterised by varied degrees of fixedness) functioning within the class of VERBUM understood as a gradated and polycentric category. Such an approach allows for diff erentiation of several types (structural models) of Cpreds, i.e. entities representing a peripheral group of verbs and diff ering with respect to structure, lexical composition and degree of ‘fi xedness’ of their meanings, and, as a result, with respect to their global content: 1) [VCOP + NKONKR // Nabstr // Adj // Adv] (standard nominal predicates);  2) [VMOD+ VINF] + ... (modal predicates); 3) [VFAZ +V // NA] + ... (phase-aspectual predicates); 4) [VGENER + NA // NE // Nabstr] + ... (verbo-nominal analytisms); 5) [VMETAF // METAPRED + Nabstr // NA // NE ] + ... (periphrastic predicates as part of verbal phraseology).

This paper argues against the ‘what you see is what you get’ bias in laryngeal phonology. It contains a new analysis of voicing in modern Polish, which incorporates phonetic interpretation into representation based phonology, and which assumes that the relation between the two aspects of sound systems is largely arbitrary. It is demonstrated that Polish in fact possesses two opposite laryngeal systems, corresponding to its two major dialects and yielding virtually identical phonetic facts, except for the phenomenon of Cracow sandhi voicing. 

This article presents the vowel system of Kurpian, a dialect of Polish spoken in northern Poland. The data come from the fi eldwork that I conducted in Kurpia over a period of many years. Kurpian has a much richer system of vowel contrasts than Standard Polish, with three high vowels, five mid vowels and two low vowels. While in most contexts these vowels are contrastive, there are also contexts in which they can be derived by general processes of Kurpian. Two such processes are discussed here: Nasal Tensing and Nasal Backing. They are analysed in terms of Optimality Theory.

The present study addresses one of the theoretical problems of computer-assisted authorship attribution, namely the question which traceable features of language can betray authorial uniqueness (a stylistic fingerprint) of literary texts. A number of recent approaches show that apart from lexical measures — especially those relying on the frequencies of the most frequent words — also some other features of written language are considerably effective as discriminators of authorial style. However, there have been no attempts to compare the attribution potential of these features. The aim of the present study, then, was to examine the effectiveness of several style-markers in authorship attribution. The style-markers chosen for the empirical investigation are those that can be retrieved from a non-lemmatized corpus of plain text files, such as the most frequent words, word bi-grams, different letter sequences, and markers of different nature, combined in one sample. Equally important, however, was to compare usefulness of the chosen style-markers across a few languages: English, Polish, German, and Latin. The results confirmed a high attribution effectiveness of word-based style-markers in the English corpus, but the alternative markers are shown to be usually more effective in the other languages.

In this article we investigate suffix combinations in second- and third-grade diminutive nouns in Polish and Bulgarian. We show that the formation of double and multiple diminutives in both languages is subject to phonological, morphological, semantic and psycholinguistic constraints. Although diminutive suffixes constitute a semantically homogeneous set, they do not combine freely with each other and of all possible combinations of diminutive suffixes in a language only very few exist. Both languages under scrutiny in this paper ‘filter’ their relatively large sets of DIM1 suffixes and use very few of them for the formation of DIM2 nouns, and Bulgarian also for DIM3 nouns. Moreover, only suffixes that occur in DIM2 nouns can derive DIM3 nouns in Bulgarian. The combinations of diminutive suffixes in double and multiple diminutives are fixed and resemble to some extent a template order. The paper also contributes to morphological theory: to the proper understanding of diminutivization, to the definition of closing suffixation, and to revealing the way affix order is constrained in human languages.

The authors are interested in the semantic (= not formal) evolution of the dative case relationship. They carry their analysis in the framework of the anthropocentric case theory and argue that the referent of the dative NP (NPD) is the second (in the communicative hierarchy) human protagonist of the event (beneficiens and/or experiencer). Also the D ~ G opposition is analyzed on the semantic plane, with the referent of the NPG interpreted as the possessor in contexts when the possessor – possessum relation is realized at the level of a NP, and not at the sentential level. The syntactic, adverbal vs. adnominal position is understood as the basic, definitional difference between NPD and NPG at the formal plane.

It is argued that the meaning of Russian dative reflexive constructions, i.e. constructions of the type Ivanu ne rabotaetsja ‘Ivan does not feel like working’, is compositional. It is shown that the reflexive marker -sja in general signals reduced agentivity and/or increased patientivity of the subject. One of the possible particular construals of -sja is ‘the subject’s volitionality is decreased’. For reasons explained in the paper, purely “quantitative” reduction (‘the subject is less willing to carry out the action, and/or has less inner resources necessary for the action’) is improbable, which forces the speakers to look for other circumstances reducing the subject’s responsibility for the action. This is an easy task, since, on the one hand, one may always believe that the subject’s desires and/or inner resources are due to an external irrational force acting upon the subject, and, on the other hand, we tend to speak of such a force only where the action is indeed carried out, which attenuates the responsibility of the subject. As far as the subject in dative reflexive constructions stops to be the initial point in the relevant causal chain and becomes in some sense a beneficiary, the nominative-dative shift in its morphology is only the side effect of non-reflexive-to-reflexive transformation. Thus, both the meaning of dative reflexive constructions and their form turn out to be predictable from the general meaning of the reflexive marker -sja.

We address two methodological issues: 1) What is compositionality? We maintain the idea that if a linguistic unit is fully compositional, then in no place of the linguistic description do we need to refer to its existence. 2) How should the compositionality be demonstrated? We suggest that this demonstration should meet higher standards of logical rigor.