Agent prominence in the Polish -no/-to construction
Daniel Bunčić · Kölner Universitäts PublikationsServer (Universität zu Köln) · 2019
The Polish -no/-to construction is an arb, i.e. a human impersonal with a similar meaning as the impersonal pronouns man in German or on in French or the 3pl impersonal in Russian. The common view that it can be formed from virtually all verbs as long as the referent is human is here contested by an acceptability judgement test. It shows that verbs assigning more agentivity features to the subject are significantly better than verbs assigning fewer agentivity features, and completely un-agentive verbs are just as bad as inanimate referents. This reveals a prominence relation. The details of the findings indicate that the -no/-to construction behaves in a similar but nonetheless different way from other arbs and that the list of agentivity features has to be revised in order to model the prominence relation exactly.