forward: Polish -no/-to construction

[Mary Bucholtz]

I'm forwarding this for a listmember. Please do not reply to me but to the
list or to Andrea personally.

Mary
---------------
>
>Dear Discourse members,
>
>while studying the passive voice in Slavic languages, I came across an
>article by Michael Smith ("Agreement and iconicity in Russian impersonal
>construction", Cognitive Linguistics 1994, not sure about the exact
>date!), in which it was argued that lack of agreement in the Russian
>impersonal construction is a signal that no trajector is projected onto
>the semantic representation of the event (please forgive me for the
>fuzziness of this description, I cannot remember the exact Cognitive
>Grammar terms Smith uses in his article). The article was about Russian
>sentences of the kind 'Lodku vybrosilo na skaly', that are not passives,
>and neither are they somehow related to the passive. In Polish, the
>construction with -no/-to displays the same neuter marking; moreover,
>this construction, though considered by linguists an active one, is at
>least formally related to the passive. I was wondering if lack of
>agreement in this case could be thought of as a device used to shift
>attention from the patient to the event itself (whereas the patient is
>normally brought to the foreground in the normal [+AGR] passives). What
>I mean is that in this kind of impersonal sentences, the patient (marked
>by ACC) shouldn't be considered as the topic of the sentence, or,
>better,
>that the sentence couldn't be considered to be ABOUT the patient, for it
>simply states the pure occurrence of the event. Some Polish native
>speakers pointed out that the difference in use between a [-agr] form
>and
>a [+agr] form is a matter of prominence of the patient. Some others
>agreed
>that the in general [-agr] forms are used in newspaper titles in order
>to
>highlight the pure occurrence of the event. I kindly ask you if this
>analysis is correct, and, in this case if you could provide me with some
>examples of the contrast between the [+agr] passive and the [-agr]
>(transitive) impersonal construction. Please forgive me for this long
>and
>boring message. Maybe I'm just overspeculating!
>
>Thanks in advance
>
>Andrea Sanso'
sanso at ling.unipi.it