Universität zu Köln

Kretzschmar, Franziska ORCID: 0000-0002-7800-2570, Prenner, Maria Katarzyna ORCID: 0000-0002-9729-0336, Primus, Beatrice ORCID: 0000-0003-2669-4963 and Bunčić, Daniel ORCID: 0000-0002-1090-8907 (2022). Semantic-role prominence is contingent on referent prominence in discourse: Experimental evidence from impersonals and passives in Polish. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 7 (1). pp. 1-44. Ubiquity Press. ISSN 2397-1835

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Abstract

The present paper reports two acceptability-rating experiments and a supporting corpus study for Polish that tested the acceptability and frequency of five verb classes (WATCH, SEE, HATE, KNOW, EXHIBIT), entailing different sets of agentivity features, in different syntactic constructions: a) the personal passive (e.g. zachód słońca był oglądany ‘the sunset was watched’), b) the impersonal -no/-to construction (e.g. oglądano zachód słońca ‘people/they/one watched the sunset’), and c) the personal active construction (e.g. niektórzy oglądali zachód słońca ‘some (people) watched the sunset’). We asked whether acceptability ratings would show identical acceptability clines across constructions affected by agentivity, as predicted from Dowty’s (1991) prototype account of semantic roles with feature accumulation as its central mechanism, or whether clines would vary depending on syntactic construction, as predicted from Himmelmann & Primus’ (2015) prominence account that uses feature weighting to describe role-related effects. In contrasting the applicability of these two accounts, we also investigated whether previous research findings from German replicate in Polish, thereby revealing cross-linguistic stability or variation. Our results show that the five verb classes yield different acceptability clines in all three Polish constructions and that the clines for Polish and German passives show cross-linguistic variation. This pattern cannot be explained by role prototypicality, so that the experiments provide further evidence for the prominence account of role-related effects in sentence interpretation. Moreover, our data suggest that experiencer verbs interact differently with the animacy of the subject referent, yielding different results for perception verbs (SEE), emotion verbs (HATE), and cognition verbs (KNOW).

Item Type:	Journal Article
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Kretzschmar, Franziska UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0002-7800-2570 UNSPECIFIED Prenner, Maria Katarzyna UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0002-9729-0336 UNSPECIFIED Primus, Beatrice UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0003-2669-4963 UNSPECIFIED Bunčić, Daniel daniel.buncic@uni-koeln.de orcid.org/0000-0002-1090-8907 107715209
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-558517
DOI:	10.16995/glossa.5697
Journal or Publication Title:	Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics
Volume:	7
Number:	1
Page Range:	pp. 1-44
Date:	2022
Publisher:	Ubiquity Press
ISSN:	2397-1835
Language:	English
Faculty:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Fächergruppe 5: Moderne Sprachen und Kulturen > Slavisches Institut
Subjects:	Language, Linguistics Other languages
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language agentivity English patientivity English sentience English volition English agent prominence English acceptability judgements English
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/55851