Polish Syntax: Structure, Literature, and National Identity

Introduction to Polish Syntax

The syntactic differences between spontaneous spoken language and written language have direct consequences for various areas of linguistics — typology, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics — not to mention certain assumptions lying behind generative grammar. There is a range of syntactic constructions typical of spontaneous spoken English, with parallel constructions in the spontaneous speech produced by speakers of other languages. Conversely, there is a range of syntactic constructions typical of written English. The constructions typical of spontaneous speech do not occur in written texts except in the representation of conversation. The constructions typical of written English are very rare in spontaneous speech and are usually found only in the speech of people who have passed through both secondary and higher education.

Like other Slavic languages, Polish represents an inflecting, or fusional, type of language in which single grammatical morphemes combine several functions: case, gender, and number in noun forms; person and number in verb forms. However, Polish is less close to the ideal model of an inflecting language than Czech or Slovak. Examples of replacing synthetic means of expression with analytical ones can be found in contemporary Polish. In general, the Polish grammatical system closely parallels that of Russian.

Because Polish retains a rich inflectional system, morphology is the main device for expressing syntactic distinctions. Word order has grammatical functions only to a limited extent, and hence it can serve other purposes — namely, it performs pragmatic functions. Deviations from the standard (unmarked) SVO order serve the purposes of topicalization; combined with focal stress, word order expresses special emphasis on certain elements in a way independent of discourse structure. Furthermore, the rich inflectional system makes it possible to apply ellipsis to a much larger extent than in English. Passive participles are used in passive voice constructions; in spoken language, however, these have a limited range of use, as word order flexibility is sufficient for expressing focus, and a number of subjectless active constructions can be used for subject downgrading. Those occurring in spoken language typically involve perfective participles, used to refer to a resulting end state of some action performed by an unspecified agent that is either unknown, evident, or simply irrelevant. These cannot be called truncated passives, as full passives are practically never used. They are rather a subclass of attributive sentences making statements about objects.

Syntax in Polish Literature

The oldest monuments of Polish prose, dating from the thirteenth century (though the first copy is from the fourteenth), are the Kazania Świętokrzyskie (The Holy Cross Sermons), so called because the Latin manuscript in which the sermons were found once belonged to a monastery in the Holy Cross Mountains (Góry Świętokrzyskie). In 1890 the distinguished Polish philologist Aleksander Brückner found them in the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, part of the parchment on which the sermons were written had been cut into strips and sewn into the binding of the manuscript. From the surviving strips it was possible to reconstruct only a few pages of a larger original collection. On these pages are three sermons that are probably complete (for the feasts of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and the Three Magi), and three more of which only the beginning or the end was preserved. It is possible to deduce that these sermons were composed according to a traditional medieval pattern: first the text from the Bible, which gave the subject; then an introduction in which the priest told his congregation in Polish from which part of the Bible the fragment was taken and briefly explained it; then the sermon itself, which paraphrased the subject, explained its significance, and drew a general moral lesson.

In the Holy Cross Sermons we find very old linguistic forms that are almost unknown in other Old Polish texts, such as the old imperfect and aorist tenses. The work also contains much useful material for the historical study of phonetics, etymology, inflection, and syntax. The texts discussed above are not the first in which Polish words are inscribed. Even in the Latin diplomas of the early twelfth century we find isolated Polish words. In 1136 a bull of Pope Innocent II to the archbishopric of Gniezno contained over four hundred Polish names, mostly those of persons and places. The same is true of the Book of Henryków, which contains documents issued by various popes and princes stating the privileges of bishops and monasteries, besides many juridical documents. Although they are less significant than the longer texts, they also provide valuable material for the history of the language, especially in phonology and etymology.

While Rey's poetic language is often clumsy and generally rather prosaic, his prose is colorful and pliable, with a vitality capable of expressing both commonplace and exalted feelings and thoughts. Unchecked by the requirements of rhythm and rhyme, it flows freely and smoothly, though the syntax is frequently chaotic — it is apparent that the literary language of Poland was still in the process of creation. Rey's prose is of great value today, for it gives us a vivid and authentic picture of the speech of sixteenth-century Poles — their everyday language rather than their official, oratorical, parliamentary, or literary language. Rey's prose contains even more household words, expressions, phrases, and comparisons drawn from country life than does his poetry. Another trait of Rey's style is his vigor of expression, which is frequently gaudy; this was probably a feature of the colloquial language at that time, and Rey wished to make himself understood by the gentry — who were not very literate — in a way that would make his ideas and moral teaching thoroughly intelligible to all.

The bishop of Smolensk, Adam Naruszewicz (1733–96), was also an industrious poet. He wrote odes, eclogues, satires, and reflective and circumstantial poems as well as fables. His poetry tends to be heavy; his odes are often panegyrical, pompous in style, filled with conventional literary devices, rhetorical, and didactic. The eclogues are modeled on second-rate French works and on the German poet Salomon Gessner of the eighteenth century, and they repeat the dull, sentimental style of their models. A characteristic trait of Naruszewicz's style is his elaborate, often strange combination of adjectives; he puts neologisms side by side with archaisms, makes innovations in syntax, and in his eclogues is much given to sentimental diminutives. His eight satires are more interesting, although half of them are adaptations of Boileau. The themes, character studies, and moral and social problems of these works are the familiar stock-in-trade of both foreign and Polish satirical literature. Nevertheless, Naruszewicz's satires show a great deal of originality in their adaptation of foreign motifs to Polish circumstances, as well as in their amplifications and changes. The language is generally simpler than in Naruszewicz's other works and often more forceful than in Boileau; it stresses the elements of raillery and jeering, and gives strong expression to his sense of mordant irony, indignation, and even grief. Unfortunately, Naruszewicz's customary weaknesses — his conventionalism, didacticism, and bombastic rhetoric — sometimes intrude.

The characteristic differences between the poetry of Mickiewicz and that of Słowacki are best seen in their language and verse. Mickiewicz was a master of simplicity, precision, and clarity of style. Taken separately, his words are simple, common, current, and understandable to all. Only the proximity of other words — their distribution, succession, rhythm, and rhyme combinations — lends them poetic expression, making them unusual, giving them a new sparkle, and revealing them in a startling new form. Słowacki is different. His vocabulary is in itself unusual, poetical by birth, as it were, and often difficult and "artificial"; it abounds in neologisms created with brilliant linguistic intuition, and in changes in structure, declension, and syntax. The later his production, the more distinct and intense this trait becomes; it reached its summit in the period of Słowacki's mysticism, when his works required a special language all the more. In those works his linguistic inventiveness and creativeness surpassed everything that had ever been done in Polish poetry. All the known means of poetic expression — the poetic image, description, symbol, metaphor, and simile, to mention only the principal ones — assume a new shape. The metaphor joins very distant clauses, symbolism penetrates every description and image, colors operate in the most unusual combinations, and the world of sound intensifies the voices of nature, making them unusual.

The poet's exclamation in Beniowski — "And mine will be victory beyond the grave!" — was fulfilled in the third generation of Polish poets. "Young Poland," at the end of the nineteenth century, acknowledged him as its master, placing him at the very pinnacle of Polish poetry. His influence was strongest in that epoch, but even the generation that followed was not independent of the fertile force of his poetry. It had entered the blood of creative Poland, and lives on; it will continue to live as long as poets are born on Polish soil.

Hyperbaton in Polish Speech and Prose

In colloquial Polish speech, hyperbaton is associated with strong focus, optimally with symmetrical contrast. However, in literary prose hyperbaton can also occur with weak focus and with unfocused non-lexicals. When presented with examples of the exclusively literary type of hyperbaton out of their literary context, native speakers of Polish either rejected them — saying that they did not understand why the modifiers were in hyperbaton — or corrected them into colloquially acceptable hyperbata by stressing the modifier so as to induce a strong narrow focus.

Consider the following Polish examples (Giejgo, 1981):

Słynnego przywitaliśmy językoznawcę — "famous we-greeted linguist"
Językoznawcę przywitaliśmy słynnego — "linguist we-greeted famous"
"We greeted a famous linguist."

Szynkę kupił i chleb — "ham bought and bread"
"We bought ham and bread."

The first example is a modifier hyperbaton in the initial position (Y1), the second a modifier hyperbaton in the final position (Y2). In the third, the verb is straddled not by a noun and its modifier but by a pair of conjuncts. This is called conjunct hyperbaton.

Works Cited

Flashner, V. "The Grammatical Marking of Theme in Oral Polish Narrative." Coherence and Grounding in Discourse, edited by R. Tomlin, John Benjamins, 1987, pp. 131–56.

Foley, W. D., and R. D. Van Valin Jr. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Friedrich, P. Proto-Indo-European Syntax. Butte, 1977.

Giejgo, J. A. Movement Rules in Polish Syntax. Ph.D. diss., University College London, 1981.

Lotko, E. "Język polski z typologicznego punktu widzenia [The Polish Language from a Typological Point of View]." Polonica, vol. 5, 1979, pp. 9–23.