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Polish politeness markers as a window into person-feature valuation
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2019 |
| Abstract | This paper presents novel evidence for Polish nominals being phases. The core of the argument comes from the interaction between the size of a nominal domain and the corresponding person-feature valuation. While an nP-size nominal structure only exhibits feature valuation within the narrow-syntax module, the DP-size nominal structure exhibits interface feature interactions. Since interface interactions can only arise during spell-out, the corresponding nominal domain, i.e., DP, must be a phase and D must be a phase head that triggers spell-out. The empirical focus of this paper is on a syntactic variation in the domain of politeness markers in Polish (pan.M/ pani.F). 1 Polish nominal politeness markers The politeness marker pan.M/ pani.F, i.e., the Polish equivalent of the English ‘Mr/ Sir/ gentleman’ and ‘Ms/ Madam/ lady,’ has a surprising syntactic distribution. The inflectional properties of this item point to pan.M/ pani.F being a nominal. The item inflects for number, gender and case as other Polish nominals. In this guise, M/ pani.F can be used as a regular head noun, i.e., as the head of a nominal argument, as in (1). In this example, the pani.F head noun is modified by a demonstrative and the extended nominal projection can function as an antecedent of a referential pronoun. (1) Nie not znam know tej this panii, ladyi, ale but wiem, know że that onai shei tu here nie not pracujȩ. work.3.SG ‘I do not know this lady but I know she does not work here.’ However, the item can function as a nominal modifier as well. As seen in (2), it can modify nouns of profession, (2), and proper names, (3). As the example in (2) demonstrates, the This paper solely concentrates on syntactic properties of this item, leaving aside the corresponding politeness interpretation. For a recent in-depth account of cross-linguistic expressions of politeness see Portner et al. 2019. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/adam/files/kucerovaszczegielniak2019-panpani-faslproceedings-web.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
