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

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dependency between the aspectual properties of the predicate and the case marking of its nominal argument. The case to be discussed below is interesting and rather unusual since, unlike the cases of Partitive marking mentioned above, which are not restricted to just one particular verb, but, on the contrary, show quite a broad (but by no means unrestricted) distribution, the Polish case concerns exclusively negated (existential)-locative constructions. Depending on the aspectual properties of the verb byc ‘to be’, the “subject-NP” 7 is marked either for NOM(inative) or GEN(itive). Whereas the nominal argument of a negated (existential)-locative sentence is normally marked for GEN in Polish, on the habitual (or iterative) reading it is marked for NOM, as the contrast between (3a) and (3b) shows. 8 In the affirmative variants the nominal is marked for NOM in both cases; cf. (4a) and (4b), respectively (see section 3.1 for more details). (3) a. Jana nie bylo na przyjeciu. JohnGEN NEG BE3.SG.N.PAST at party ‘John was not at the party.’ (Lit.: ‘There was no John at the party.’) b. Jan nie bywal na przyjeciach. JohnNOM NEG BE3.SG.M.PAST.HABIT at parties ‘John didn’t use to come to parties.’ (Lit.: ‘John was not (from time to time) at parties.’) (4) a. Jan byl na przyjeciu. . JohnNOM BE3.SG.M.PAST at party ‘John was at the party.’ b. Jan bywal na przyjeciach. JohnNOM BE3.SG.M.PAST.HABIT at parties 7 The term “subject” is used here in a purely descriptive, pre-theoretical sense. It will be made more precise in the course of the argumentation; see especially section 3.2 and section 5. 8 It should be noted that whereas in cases like (3a) (i.e., with definite, animate subjects) a NOM marking is also possible (resulting in a different interpretation), the GEN marking is totally excluded in (3b); cf. (i-a) and (ib), respectively. I will return to these issues in more detail in section 3.1.3. (i) a. Jan nie byl na przyjeciu. JohnNOM NEG BE3.SG.M.PAST at party ‘John was not at the party.’ b. * Jana nie bywalo na przyjeciach. JohnGEN NEG BE3.SG.N.PAST.HABIT at parties 4
‘John used to come to parties.’ (Lit.: ‘John was from time to time at parties.’) That the aspectual marking of the predicate in (3) seems to matter for the case marking of its nominal argument is somewhat surprising given the Polish facts. Even though – as we will see below in section 1 – Polish has both GEN marked “subjects” and the phenomenon called Genitive of Negation, which is a GEN marking of the internal argument triggered by negation, neither of them seem to be affected by the aspectual properties of the predicate. On the other hand, Polish also has Partitive objects which in fact show some affinity for perfective aspect. However, as we will see below, such Partitive NPs have a special interpretation which seems to be lacking in the case of the GEN marked NP in (3a). While examples like (3) above might be somewhat unexpected from a strictly Polish point of view, there is in fact nothing strange about them once a broader crosslinguistic perspective is taken into account. That the subject might be differently marked depending on the aspectual properties of the predicate is found in so-called split-ergative languages like, e.g., Hindi. In this language the “special” case marking (here: the ERG(ative)) is triggered by perfective aspect as opposed to the unmarked (NOM/ABS(olutive)) marking in imperfective aspect; cf. (5) (Mahajan 1994:318, 323). 9 9 More precisely, the subjects in transitive sentences in Hindi are ERG if the verb is in the simple past tense (cf. (i)), or in perfective aspect (cf. (ii) and (iii)). Otherwise, they are NOM (cf. (iv) and (v)) (Mohanan 1994:70). Notice that the marking -aa in (ii) and (iii) indicates perfective aspect (-taa in (iv) is the marking of the imperfective aspect); tense information is borne by the auxiliary ho ‘be’. Notice also that the perfective marking, when not accompanied by a tense bearing auxiliary (as in (i)), signals past tense. Observe that verbs might have different morphological shapes since they agree in number, gender and person with their nominative subjects (or in the case the subject is not nominative the verb agrees with the nominative object, as in example (5b) below). See Mohanan (1994) for details. Given the above observations, Mohanan (1994:70) states the following condition on ERG marking in Hindi: “Assuming that the inflection -aa bears the morphological feature PERF, the surface condition for ERG case may be identified as PERF on the main verb.” (i) raam-ne ravii-ko piiTaa. Ram-ERG Ravi-ACC beatPERF ‘Ram beat Ravi.’ (ii) raam-ne ravii-ko piiTaa hai. Ram-ERG Ravi-ACC beatPERF bePRES ‘Ram has beaten Ravi.’ (iii) raam-ne ravii-ko piiTaa hogaa. Ram-ERG Ravi-ACC beatPERF beFUT ‘Ram must have beaten Ravi.’ (iv) raam ravii-ko piiTataa hai. RamNOM Ravi-ACC beatIMPERF bePRES 5
Page 1 and 2: Differential subject marking in Pol
Page 3: that is neither intrinsically telic
Page 7 and 8: section 4, I will try to answer the
Page 9 and 10: ‘(In this hospital) no patient di
Page 11 and 12: waterGEN decrease3.SG.N.PAST.PERF /
Page 13 and 14: e dependent on the perfective aspec
Page 15 and 16: (14) a. b. (15) a. OK czytajacIMPER
Page 17 and 18: In fact, there is diachronic eviden
Page 19 and 20: JohnNOM BE3.SG.M.PRES.HABIT at part
Page 21 and 22: of why there should be a correlatio
Page 23 and 24: ywac has to be [+animate] (preferab
Page 25 and 26: prototypical subject (agentivity, v
Page 27 and 28: (32) a. Sera nie bylo w sklepie. (D
Page 29 and 30: NEG BE2.SG.IMP.HABIT as often in ni
Page 31 and 32: (38) a. Bozenki nie bylo wczoraj u
Page 33 and 34: discussion above; a “theme-like
Page 35 and 36: a. przybyly ‘arrived’ b. upadly
Page 37 and 38: able to nominalize into complex eve
Page 39 and 40: GEN marked nominal in (3a) NOM mark
Page 41 and 42: more prominent than an argument whi
Page 43 and 44: some sense “externally” to the
Page 45 and 46: Spec,TP position is concerned, it c
Page 47 and 48: What about negated locative bywac a
Page 49 and 50: In the previous section we arrived
Page 51 and 52: Cetnarowska, B. (2000b). The Unerga
Page 53 and 54: Lakoff, G. (1966). Stative Adjectiv
Page 55:
Spencer, A. and M. Zaretskaya (1998
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Differential subject marking in Polish: The case of Genitive vs ...

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