Is there an interaction between verbal aspect and nominal semantics in the Polish human impersonal no/to construction?
摘要
Human impersonals – pronouns like German man or French on, impersonal reflexive constructions, impersonal 3pl constructions, etc. – can refer to subjects ranging from ‘everyone in the world’ to a single specific person whom the speaker chooses not to name. Classifications of these subject semantics have been proposed by Cabredo Hofherr (2003) and Gast & van der Auwera (2013). One of these human impersonals is the so-called no/to construction in Polish (e.g. mówiono ‘they said’ or otwartodrzwi ‘the door was opened’), which can have a wide range of implicit subjects and combine with both verbal aspects. Given that aspect has been shown to correlate with definiteness (e.g. Birkenmaier 1979; Sadziński 1991; Leiss 2000) – although aspect certainly does not “express” definiteness or a common “function hidden behind these two categorial phenomena” (Leiss 2000: 236)! –, this paper investigates whether verbal aspect also interacts with the semantics of the implicit subject in the no/to construction. Based on the literature, I hypothesized that the perfective aspect combines most with existential definite subjects and least with universal ones, whereas the imperfective aspect combines most with universal and least with existential definite subjects. To test this hypothesis, a sample of corpus excerpts containing no/to forms was annotated to contain the necessary information about the semantics of the implicit subject. The results show that the perfective aspect behaves as predicted, whereas the imperfective aspect is almost equally distributed across all three semantic categories. A possible explanation for this is that the imperfective aspect is the unmarked member of the aspectual opposition, thus being compatible with all types of situations and therefore with all types of subjects.