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

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(5) a. raam vah kitaabe parhtaa thaa. RamNOM.M those booksPL.F readIMPERF.SG.M bePAST.SG.M ‘Ram used to read those books.’ b. raam-ne vah kitaabe parii thii. Ram-ERG.M those booksPL.F readPERF.PL.F bePAST.PL.F ‘Ram had read those books.’ The main goal of the paper is to investigate in more detail the conditions responsible for the GEN vs. NOM split observed in (3). The main questions to be answered are the following: Q1: What factors determine the case marking of the nominal arguments in (3)? Q2: Why does the nominal argument in (3a) occur in GEN and why is such a marking not possible in cases like (3b)? Q3: Where does the GEN marking come from? Q4: Do the sentences in (3a) and (3b) have the same or rather different syntactic structures? Q5: Is there any deeper connection between the Polish facts in (3) and the facts found in split- ergative languages (as in (5))? The paper is organized as follows. I start in section 1 with the question of the origin and nature of the GEN marking in (3a). The result of this investigation is that the GEN marking in (3a) must be regarded as resulting from the specific structural properties of the construction in question and cannot be reduced to some general mechanism of GEN or Partitive marking of nominal arguments in Polish. Since, as already pointed out above, the GEN/NOM split in (3) at first sight seems to be triggered by different aspectual properties of the respective predicates, in section 2, I will look in more detail at the aspectual differences between byc in (3a) and bywac in (3b). Then, in section 3 I will investigate the question of whether there are some other factors responsible for the GEN/NOM split in (3) apart from aspect. It will be shown that the GEN vs. NOM marking of the nominal argument in negated (existential)-locative clauses as in (3) in fact correlates with further differences concerning the interpretation and structural properties of the nominal argument. In ‘Ram beats Ravi.’ (v) raam ravii-ko piiTegaa. RamNOM Ravi-ACC beatFUT 6
section 4, I will try to answer the question of why there should be a correlation between aspect and syntactic structure. It will be shown that there is in fact a deeper connection between the split-ergative structures like the one in (5) and the Polish sentences in (3). Based on these insights, I will propose in section 5 what the underlying syntactic structures for (3a) and (3b) should be like. Finally section 6 will conclude the paper. The main result of the paper is that in Polish negated (existential)-locative constructions, bywac ‘to beHABIT’ with its NOM NP is an unergative verb, whereas byc ‘to be’ can be both an unergative (when it has an agentive NOM NP) and an unaccusative (when it has a nonagentive GEN NP). Thus, unergative and unaccusative frames depend on two crucial factors equally (i.e., both of these factors must be present): (i) the aspectual properties of the predicate, and (ii) the agentive interpretation of the nominal argument. Crucially, for byc ‘to be’ to be an unaccusative, it must be a perfective and its NP must have a nonagentive interpretation. It should be stressed that the claim about the link between the perfective aspect and unaccusativity is made only for BE in Polish. No claim is made in this paper about the unaccusative/unergative status of (im)perfective intransitive verbs in general. This is a matter for future research. Given the observation that byc ‘to be’ can be an unaccusative or unergative verb, depending on the interpretation of the NP, this essentially amounts to the claim that Polish has at least two verbs for BE (three if one includes bywac ‘to beHABIT ’). 10 In this sense the present paper can also be seen as a contribution to the discussion of a rather controversial issue, namely the question of how many different BEs should be distinguished in general and in Slavic languages in particular. 11 1. On the origin and nature of the GEN marking in negated existential-locative clauses Given that subjects are normally marked for NOM in Polish, the question that we need to answer first is where the GEN marking for the nominal argument in negated existential-locative sentences, as in (3a), comes from. Potentially, the GEN in such cases could be (i) an instance of ‘Ram will beat Ravi.’ 10 The present paper does not discuss the canonical copular constructions with BE and an AP or NP predicate (as, e.g., ‘John is nice’ or ‘John is a student’) in Polish. This is also a question for future research whether the BE in such constructions is a different BE from the one used in the (existential)-locative constructions discussed in this paper. But see Blaszczak (2004) and Blaszczak (to appear) for some suggestions. 11 The opinions vary here from the view that there is no lexical verb BE (BE is rather just the spell-out of various functional heads in the syntax) (cf. Freeze 1992, Kayne 1993, den Dikken 1995, Kondrashova 1996) to the opinion that there are actually two or more different verbs BE (cf., e.g., Chvany 1975, Franks 1995, Geist 1999, Pereltsvaig 2001); see Harves (2002:169ff.) for a detailed discussion. 7
Page 1 and 2: Differential subject marking in Pol
Page 3 and 4: that is neither intrinsically telic
Page 5: ‘John used to come to parties.’
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

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

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