Differential subject marking in Polish: The case of Genitive vs ...

imperfective viewpoint is taken, the situation (or eventuality, to use Bach’s 1981 terminology) is
understood to hold throughout and potentially to extend beyond the Topic Time (i.e., a time for
which the speaker wishes to make an assertion; recall footnote 4), that is, the situation is
presented as unbounded. Now, given that byt’ in Russian and byc in Polish are stative verbs and
given that the stative semantics is naturally compatible with the imperfective viewpoint, it
follows that byt’ and byc can naturally occur in “imperfective environments”, which gives rise to
the impression that they are imperfective verbs. This impression notwithstanding, they are – as
far as their grammatical/morphological aspect is concerned – perfective verbs. It is this
“perfective status” that determines their morphosyntactic behavior (recall the discussion above
about the structure of the periphrastic future in Russian/Polish). Later, in section 5, it will be
argued that it is precisely this “grammatical perfective aspect” which is relevant to the GEN-
marking in negated (existential)-locative sentences.
Assuming that the above observations are correct, the aspectual difference between byc
and bywac can be described as follows: bywac has properties of an imperfective verb as far as
both its lexical semantic properties (situation type aspect 33 ) and grammatical behavior
(grammatical/morphological aspect) are concerned. In contrast, byc has semantic properties
characteristic of an imperfective verb, but from the grammatical/morphological point of view it
behaves as a perfective verb. 34
3. Further factors responsible for the GEN/NOM split in (3)
In the previous section, the first factor responsible for the GEN/NOM split in (3) has been
identified, namely, the aspectual properties of the predicate: the GEN marking of the “subject”
appears to be dependent on the perfective aspect of the predicate (in the strictly
grammatical/morphological sense), while the NOM marking of the subject correlates with the
clearly imperfective aspect (in terms of habituality/iterativity; cf. also footnote 29). The question
33 Recall that bywac is habitual (or iterative) (Comrie 1976:27, fn. 1 remarks that “in Slavonic linguistics,
habitual forms are often referred to by the term ‘iterative’ (Russian mnogokratnyj), e.g. Russian pivat’,
znavat’, the habitual counterparts of pit’ ‘drink’, znat’ ‘know’”). Habitual sentences are semantically stative.
To see this, one should consider their truth conditions. As Smith (1997:34) points out, when “investigating the
truth of a habitual, one asks whether there is a pattern which holds over an interval, not whether a particular
situation occurred. The temporal schema holds for the interval, as is typical of statives.”
34 If this conclusion is correct, the situation in Polish described above would, in fact, in some sense resemble the
situation found with stative verbs in Finnish. Kiparsky (1998:283) points out that verbs like omistaa ‘to own’
in Finnish behave – as far as their morphosyntactic properties (especially their case syntax) are concerned – as
telic verbs, even though semantically they remain atelic verbs.
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