PORADNIK JĘZYKOWY

ISSUE 9 / 2006

  • To Professor Marek Świdziński’s Jubilee
  • Bibliography of Published Scholarly Works of Marek Świdziński

ARTICLES AND DISSERTATIONS

  • Urszula Andrejewicz : Changeability of Accusative and Genitive in Polish Phrases
    Among verb forms building Polish phrases, predominant ones belong to paradigms of lexemes accommodating accusative. Some of them are accompanied by genitive forms instead of accusative ones. The article aims at examination of the phenomenon and an attempt to find its reason. Unfortunately, the analysis of the material does not allow a simple answer. It only leads to the conclusion that in certain structures there is a shift of accommodating requirements of the verb from accusative to genitive and that in most cases it refers to phrases containing noun forms of masculine gender. Apparently, it originates from former changes of endings between accusative and genitive in the history of Polish, as well as from the existence of partial genitive in Polish. However, it needs to be stated clearly that what occurs between verb forms accommodating accusative and the form of the required nouns within phrases is not far from such syntactic interrelations in typical syntactic structures.
  • Mirosław Bańko : About De-formed Words
    The article deals with words which have been deformed on purpose, so that their spelling imitated certain phonetic phenomena, e.g. lengthening of speech sounds, syllabizing, and stopping the articulation before the end of a word. Attention is drawn mainly to the role of linguistic invention and convention in forming this kind of words, their linguistic status, and the problems they arise in text processing.
  • Janusz S. Bień : Visualization of Parsing Results
    Syntactic structures obtained as parsing results are usually represented as trees. If the analysis is ambiguous, then the result has the form of a forest instead of a single tree. A transformation is proposed to represent such a 3-dimensional forest on a plan (for printing or displaying). It is intended to be used for the results of Woliński’s parser Świgra, which implements Świdziński’s grammar of Polish.
  • Małgorzata Gębka-Wolak, Andrzej Moroz, Marek Wiśniewski : About Constructions with the zamiast Component
    The article describes sentences with the word zamiast. In Polish this unit is connected with an infinitive or a noun, e.g. Koledzy wrzeszczeli na mnie zamiast zaczekać na dworcu. and Maria interesuje się geografią zamiast matematyką. It is interesting that zamiast constitutes two types of structures. Firstly, zamiast is the part of an exocentric structure like Wyszedł, zamiast zostać. or Jan kupił traktor zamiast samochodu. In these sentences zamiast accommodates a verb infinitive or a genitive of a noun. Secondly, it is possible to distinguish a coordinate construction with the zamiast conjunction e.g. Zamiast się gniewać, powinna pani mi podziękować. or Maria interesuje się geografią zamiast matematyką. In these sentences the whole coordinate construction, either the noun group or the infinitive one, usually depends on the finite form.
  • Maciej Grochowski : On Grammatical and Semantic Status of the Expression z osobna
    The paper contains syntactic and semantic analysis of the expression z osobna. The examined sequence is indivisible into meaningful parts. The main hypothesis which has been justified in the paper is as follows. Z osobna is not a separate unit of language; it is only a part of multiple ones, namely każdy X z osobna, żaden X z osobna, poszczególne Xs z osobna. They represent a class of adjectives. In order to point out a grammatical and semantic status of the expression z osobna, differences between the sequence under examination and the adverb osobno are described. The latter one is a separate linguistic unit. The distinguished adjectives of the type każdy X z osobna refer to an unlimited number of objects of the same kind but what is said in a given utterance refers to each object independently of the other ones. This is a relevant semantic feature of the unit described in the paper.
  • Dorota Kopcińska : The Category of the Polish Verb Gender: Values, Exponents and their Unusual Functions. The Outline of Specifying Modification of a Structural Description
    In the article there is a suggestion of another kind of a structural description of the category of the Polish verb gender. It is based on reflections on the reasons for lingering methodological misunderstandings associated with the category of gender in Polish.
  • Jadwiga Linde-Usiekniewicz, Magdalena Derwojedowa : “Attention! Stairs!” or about Syntactic Function of a Dash
    The paper discusses the syntactic function of the dash in a written text, similar to that of a comma postulated by Marek Świdziński in his work on Polish syntax. The syntactic role is postulated only for such dashes for which no substitution is possible. Such dashes overtly mark the boundary between phrases that are not immediate constituents and stop further parsing that would end in a crash.
  • Danuta Mikulska, Maciej Mrozik : Teaching Polish Sign Language at the Faculty of Polish Studies at Warsaw University
    This article is a presentation of the Polish Sign Language (PJM) courses conducted at the Faculty of Polish Studies at Warsaw University since 1998. According to the authors’ knowledge, these were the first such courses in Poland. In the 8 years of their existence, more than 1000 students from several schools and departments have attended them. The article discusses some methodological and technical problems involved in teaching PJM to hearing people: slow rate of progress, shrinking groups, lack of a sign writing system (which makes learning at home difficult), problematical status of the manual alphabet (a non-systemic element of PJM), the problem of “stiff” faces of most hearing people. The authors also consider the difference between the students’ expectations (sign learning as a form of intellectually stimulating entertainment) and the social needs that such a course could satisfy (educating future teachers and interpreters).
  • Tadeusz Piotrowski : A Chronological List of Polish Words
    The paper describes a list of Polish words, arranged according to their first occurrence (recording) in the language, made on the basis of data from the latest etymological dictionary of Polish, by Wiesław Boryś (Słownik etymologiczny języka polskiego, Kraków 2005). The list has 4369 entries. The paper also discusses consistency of dating in the dictionary, and provides details on the earliest words (65 in number) in Polish, from the 12th and 13th centuries.
  • Adam Przepiórkowski : On the Inherent Plural Number of the Fractional Numerals ĆWIERĆ %quarter&, PÓŁ %half& and PÓŁTORA %one and a half&
    The aim of the article is to show that Polish simple fractional numerals, i.e. ĆWIERĆ %quarter&, PÓŁ %half& and PÓŁTORA %one and a half& bear the intrinsic plural number, even though they combine with singular nouns. Simultaneously, it gives two new arguments for considering these lexemes as numerals (as opposed to considering them as unambiguous nouns).
  • Joanna Rabiega-Wiśniewska : Productivity and Automatic Text Analysis
    In the article, the nature of morphological productivity as a property of a morphological process to give rise to new derivational formations is discussed. We introduce the question whether productivity is a qualitative or a quantitative notion and how it can be measured. In the next sections we present not only theoretical statements given in Polish literature but also findings of various computational and generative works concerning productivity and its restrictions. The presentation is enriched with a description of the results of three tests of productivity on Polish empirical data.
  • Marcin Woliński : How not to Get Lost in a Forest or on the Results of Parsing According to Świdziński&s Grammar

    The subject of the article is the surprising numerosity of parse trees which are obtained by the analysis of Polish statements according to Gramatyka formalna języka polskiego (Formal grammar of Polish, GFJP) by Marek Świdziński. Parser Świgra, implemented by the author, provides a tool to generate GFJP parse forests (i.e. the collections of parse trees for a given sentence). This article presents an improved form of parse forest visualisation which allows to find the sources of sentence ambiguity easily.

    Świgra is available under the GNU GPL licence, hence anybody is free to use it. The program and some analysis examples are available on the web at URL http://nlp.ipipan.waw.pl/~wolinski/swigra.

  • Stanisław Szpakowicz : * * *