A COGNITIVE GRAMMAR ANALYSIS OF SELECTED POLISH REFLEXIVE CONSTRUCTIONS

• Authors: Berlinska Monika
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The authoress main aim in this paper is a semantic analysis of Polish reflexive constructions conducted within the framework of Langacker's (1987, 1991) cognitive grammar with a view to showing that the great diversity of such constructions is only apparent as, at a more abstract level of conceptualization, they all function as contextual realizations of certain basic schematic notions. The analysis focuses on four of Wilczewska's (1966) twelve classes of Polish reflexive verbs: directly reflexive verbs, passive-resultative-spontaneous verbs, passive verbs, and reciprocal verbs. In the analysis she shows that whenever Polish speakers make use of a reflexive construction, they convey one of the following three types of information: an entity acts on itself, two (or more) entities act analogously on each other (one another), and an event seemingly happens on its own. Furthermore, she claims that it is the relational reflexive marker 'sie', which, by dint of its several profiling options, brings different elements of a transitive-construction action chain into focus and makes the above-enumerated information types possible to be communicated. Consequently, the authoress postulates three broad senses of Polish reflexive constructions: those expressing (1) reflexive relationships, (2) reciprocal relationships, and (3) seemingly spontaneous events-each constituting a separate, though closely related, grammatical category. In turn, these three senses/grammatical categories are said to form a crucial part of the schematic network model of Polish reflexive constructions.

Keywords

EN

COGNITIVE GRAMMAR; REFLEXIVE CONSTRUCTIONS; SEMANTICS

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk
• Journal: Linguistica Silesiana
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 29
• Pages: 119-139
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Berlinska Monika

• Monika Berlinska, Wyzsza Szkola Filologiczna we Wroclawiu, ul. Sienkiewicza 32, 50-335 Wroclaw, Poland

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

09PLAAAA064511