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

3.4 Partial conclusions
‘Your constant being at home irritates me/makes me nervous.’
We can now answer the first of the five questions posed in the beginning of the paper, namely:
Q1: What factors determine the case marking of the nominal arguments in (3)?
The discussion so far has shown that the difference in the case marking of the nominal
argument correlates with further important differences between (existential)-locative byc
sentences and bywac sentences. The first difference concerns the aspectual properties of the
involved predicate. While bywac is clearly an imperfective verb, byc has been argued to be
“grammatically perfective” (recall the discussion in section 2).
The second difference concerns the subject properties of the nominal argument: Whereas
the NOM marked nominal argument in bywac sentences passes all subjecthood diagnostics, the
GEN marked nominal argument in existential-locative byc sentences shows no subject properties.
The GEN marks – in some sense – the absence of the “syntactic” subject (or looking from
another perspective: the presence of a dummy subject in the construction at hand; see section 5
for more details); the whole construction has, then, an “impersonal” flavor.
The difference in the subjecthood properties is related to the third difference between the
constructions under discussion, namely the difference in the interpretation of the nominal
argument. While the NOM nominal in bywac sentences is normally [+human], [+sentient],
[+volitional], thus having typical properties of an agent argument, the GEN nominal in
existential-locative byc sentences does not need to be [+human]; on the contrary, even [+human]
GEN-marked nominals lack agentive properties such as control and volitionality, thus showing
typical properties of an internal (theme) argument. The agentive vs. nonagentive interpretation of
the nominal argument seems to correlate with the fourth and last difference between existential-
locative byc and bywac, namely (un)ergativity. More precisely, on the basis of, among others, the
deep unaccusativity diagnostic, the -no/-to test, bywac was classified as an unergative predicate
and byc as an unaccusative predicate. The factors determining the GEN versus the NOM marking
of the nominal argument in (3a) and (3b), respectively, are summarized in Table 3 below.
Table 3: Factors determining the case marking of the nominal arguments in (3)
‘He lay on the sofa for days on end.’ ‘his lying on the sofa’
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