THE UNERGATIVE/UNACCUSATIVE DISTINCTION IN POLISH

	The split of intransitive predicates into unergative and
unaccusative (the so-called Unaccusative Hypothesis of Perlmutter 1978) is
postulated, among others, for Dutch and German in Perlmutter 1978 and
Hoekstra 1984, for Italian in Burzio 1986, for English in Levin and
Rappaport Hovav 1995 and for Russian in Pesetsky 1982 and Babyonyshev
1996. The aim of the present paper is to argue that the intransitivity
split characterizes predicates in Polish. 

	The term "intransitive" refers here to intransitives proper
(e.g. upasc 'to fall down') as well as to verbs occurring with the
reflexive clitic sie (e.g. spoznic sie 'to come late'). Subjects of
unaccusative verbs pattern syntactically together with objects of
transitive verbs, while subjects of unergative verbs share many
characteristics of subjects of transitive verbs. 

	Various ways of representing the unaccusative/unergative
distinction in syntax are compared (e.g. Burzio 1986 vs. Hale and Keyser
1993). A brief review is offered of tests proposed to identify unaccusative
verbs in Dutch, English, Italian and Russian. These include, for instance,
conjunction agreement, impersonal passivization, quantification by prefixed
na- and po- verbs, unmarked word order, perfect/passive participle
premodification  and the genitive of negation test. The applicability of
those tests in Polish is assessed. 

	It is proposed that two diagnostics are particularly useful in
identifying unaccusative verbs in Polish. These are the availability of the
resultative -ly adjective and the ill-formedness of the -no/-to
construction with an unaccusative verb, as exemplified in (1-3).

(1)	byc 'to be'			upasc 'to fall down' 
	dojrzec 'to ripen' 		zgnic 'to become putrid'
	umrzec 'to die'			zsiwiec 'to grow grey'
(2) 	*Byto/*Dojrzano/ *Umarto/?*Upadnieto/ ?*Zgnito/ ?*Zsiwiano
	'(They) were/ ripened/ died/ felldown/became-putrid/grew-grey.'
(3)	byly 'former'			upadly 'fallen'
	dojrzaly 'ripe'			zgnily 'putrid, rotten'	
	umarly 'dead'			zsiwialy 'that has grown grey'

Then I investigate unaccusativity mismatches in Polish, i.e. instances when
two or more unaccusativity diagnostics give contrary predictions. It is
assumed, as in Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995, that certain tests for
unaccusativity are indicative of deep unaccusativity (e.g. the resultative
adjective test, the impersonal construction) while others diagnose surface
unaccusativity (e.g. quantification by na- and po- verbs). Furthermore, it
is pointed out that a failure of a diagnostic test for unaccusativity does
not necessarily signal the unergative status of a given Polish verb. The
failure of an unaccusativity diagnostic may result from the existence of
additional morphological or semantic restrictions on the construction in
question (see Zaenen 1993). For example, verbs whose single participant
denotes an inanimate participant are impossible in the -no/-to
construction. Resultative -ly adjectives, on the other hand, are derived
from telic and non-reflexive verbs.


References

Babyonyshev, M. 1996. Structural Connections in Syntax and Processing:
Studies in Russian and Japanese. PhD diss. MIT. 

Burzio, L. 1986. Italian Syntax. A Government-Binding Approach. Reidel,
Dordrecht. 

Hale, K. and S. J. Keyser. 1993 "On argument structure and the lexical
expressions of syntactic relations". In K. Hale and S.J. Keyser
(eds.) 	The View from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in 	Honor of
Sylvain Bromberger, 53-109. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. 

Hoekstra, T. 1984. Transitivity. Grammatical Relations in
GB-theory. 	Foris, Dordrecht. 

Levin, B. and M. Rappaport Hovav. 1995. Unaccusativity. At the
Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface. MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. 

Perlmutter, D. 1978 "Impersonal passives and the Unaccusative
Hypothesis". In: J. Jaeger et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the
fourth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, 	159-189,
University of California at Berkeley.  

Pesetsky, D. 1982. Paths and Categories. PhD diss., MIT.

Zaenen, A. 1993. "Unaccusativity in Dutch: integrating syntax and
lexical semantics". In J.Pustejovsky (ed.) Semantics and the
Lexicon,129-161. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.