The paper is constructed as a response to Cetnarowska, Pysz and Trugman’s (2011a) paper on classificatory adjectives in Polish. Cetnarowska, Pysz and Trugman (CPT) argue in it against Rutkowski and Progovac’s (2005) and Rutkowski’s (2007) account of classificatory adjectives in Polish and instead propose an alternative analysis, based on Bouchard’s (2002) representational model. In the present paper it is claimed that the controversy between those two approaches actually stems from differences in the understanding of the term ‘classificatory adjective’: Cetnarowska, Pysz and Trugman (2011b) seem to deem as ‘classificatory’ adjectives “restricting the denotation of the noun they modify,” while Rutkowski (2007) seems to consider ‘classificatory’ only those adjectives that establish at least two contrasting classes of possible referents. Crucially, for Rutkowski and Progovac only post-nominal adjectives are deemed classificatory, while Cetnarowska, Pysz and Trugman postulate a class of ‘migrating classificatory adjectives’ that can appear both pre- and postnominally. Th is paper presents some arguments that CPT’s view is better suited to Polish phenomena, but also suggests that neither the derivational model proposed by Rutkowski and Progovac nor the representational model is capable of fully accounting for syntacticsemantic phenomena involved in Polish nominal phrases with post-nominal adjectives.
