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

(45) a. * Byto na przyjeciu.
to-was at party
b. � Bywano na przyjeciach.
no-wasHABIT at parties
‘They were at parties./They used to be at parties.’
This would mean that bywac indeed has properties of an unergative verb. Note, however, that
there is something special about the iterative/habitual interpretation; cf. (46) vs. (44c). Example
(46) actually shows that if an unaccusative verb has an iterative or a habitual reading, it is in fact
possible to build a -no/-to form from it. This seems to indicate that on the habitual/iterative
interpretation, an unaccusative verb no longer behaves as “unaccusative”. 51 Why this should be
the case is not clear to me at this point. More research is needed here to offer some insightful
explanation.
(46) Podczas wojny umierano z glodu. (Cetnarowska 2000a:90)
BUT:
during war no-diedIMPERF from hunger
‘People would die from hunger during the war.’
(44c) * Umarto z glodu.
to-diedPERF from hunger
‘They died of hunger.’
Before concluding this section, let me briefly mention another potential test for unaccusativity
which is based on Grimshaw’s (1990) theory of nominals. According to Grimshaw (1990),
nominalization – just like passivization – is an operation that affects an external argument. More
specifically, the external argument of the base verb is suppressed in both passivization and
nominalization. From this it follows that verbs with no external argument will neither passivize
nor nominalize (into complex event nominals). Thus unaccusative verbs are expected not to be
51 This observation corresponds to the conclusion reached by Aljovic (2000) in her paper on unaccusativity and
aspect in Serbo-Croatian that “imperfectivized unaccusatives do not behave any longer as typical
unaccusative verbs” (p. 14).
36