A GRAMMAR OF CONTEMPORARY POLISH OSCAR E. SWAN Bloomington, Indiana, 2002 Copyright © 2002 by the author. All rights reserved. Technical Editors: Jennifer J. Day, Andrea Rossing McDowell ISBN: 0-89357-296-9 Slavica Publishers [Tel.] 1-812-856-4186 Indiana University [Toll-free] 1-877-SLAVICA 2611 E. 10th St. [Fax] 1-812-856-4187 Bloomington, IN 47408-2603 [Email] [email protected] USA [www] http://www.slavica.com/ Contents Preface ........................................................................................................................ 3 Acknowledgments .................................................................................................... 4 Polish and Poland ..................................................................................................... 5 Abbreviations ............................................................................................................ 6 1. Sounds, Spelling, and Pronunciation .............................................................. 7 2. Morphophonemics (Sound Changes) ........................................................... 23 3. Feminine-Gender Noun Declension ............................................................. 43 4. Masculine-Gender Noun Declension ............................................................ 66 5. Neuter-Gender and Plural-Only Noun Declension .................................. 112 6. Adjectives and Adjectival Adverbs ............................................................. 126 7. Pronouns, Pronominal Adjectives, and Pro-Adverbs .............................. 153 8. Numerals ........................................................................................................ 189 9. Present Tense and Imperative ...................................................................... 215 10. Past Tense, Compound Future Tense, Conditional, Modals ................... 245 11. Verbal Aspect ................................................................................................. 269 12. Participles, Verbal Nouns, and Grammatical Voice ................................. 298 13. Uses of the Cases ............................................................................................ 327 14. Simple Sentence Syntax ................................................................................ 374 Glossary of Grammatical Terms ......................................................................... 424 Some Polish Grammatical Terms ........................................................................ 439 Index of Words Cited in a Grammatical Context ............................................. 441 Subject Index .......................................................................................................... 486 Preface This present work grew out of the first two editions of the author’s more modest and now out-of-print Concise Grammar of Polish. The overall length of this work in its new form ruled out the continuation of the original title.This reference grammar is primarily intended for English-speaking learners of Polish. It is a practical grammar, designed to facilitate the learning of forms and to explain their uses in a way that will be accessible to the non-specialist. At the same time, this book aims to be a fairly complete and reliable technical guide to the rules, regularities, and principles which underpin Polish grammar, taking into account important exceptions and irregularities. No attempt is made to simplify or gloss over matters which are in actuality complex, as many matters of Polish grammar are. The aim is to present complex things as simply as possible, and not to make simple things seem more complex than they are in actuality. A special attempt has been made to describe facts relating to the social implementation of grammatical forms, a point of view which is often inadequately represented in grammars of Polish written by Poles, for whom such matters may seem obvious. Working on the present version of this book has given me a renewed appreciation for how nothing of this nature can ever aim at being a complete description. Something as simple as the description of use of a single preposition like w in, to do it justice, could be continued for pages and pages. I have tried to be sensible as to the point of cut-off of various discussions, using my best judgment both as to where a potential user’s interest naturally wanes, and as to what can realistically be accomplished by a written description of living language phenomena. In my work on this book, I am indebted to nearly every Polish speaker with whom I have ever come into contact. I know of no country more linguistically friendly to foreigners than Poland, and no body of speakers more linguistically astute and willing to help one learn their language than the Poles. Oscar E. Swan Pittsburgh, 2002 Acknowledgments Special thanks, in chronological order, to Linda Ewbank, Wies∏aw Oleksy, Mark Lauersdorf, Gra˝yna Kabat, Robert Henshew, and an anonymous reader for reading major parts of the manuscript, for catching many errors, and for making many useful suggestions. Zygmunt Saloni of Warsaw was available by e-mail for resolving various knotty problems of grammatical correctness. The entire manuscript benefitted from the careful reading, insightful suggestions, and occasional creative solutions of Jolanta ¸apot, KoÊciuszko Foundation Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh during the years 1999–2002. Remaining mistakes and imprecisions are the author’s responsibility alone. Many years after their initial publication, I continue to find W. Doro- szewski and H. Kurkowska, S∏ownik poprawnej polszczyzny (Warszawa: PWN, 1973) and J. Stanis∏awski and W. Jassem, Wielki s∏ownik polsko-angielski (Warszawa, Wiedza Powszechna, 1969) invaluable sources of information on contemporary Polish. Toward the end of my work I was able to consult some of the many new works now appearing on Polish, including especially A. Markowski, ed., Nowy s∏ownik poprawnej polszczyzny (Warszawa: PWN, 1999) and B. Dunaj, S∏ownik wspó∏czesnego j´zyka polskiego (Warszawa: Wilga, 1996). Polish and Poland The Polish language is spoken by around 35-40 million speakers in the country of Poland (offical name: RZECZPOSPOLITA POLSKA Republic of Poland). The capital city is Warsaw, with a population of over 1.7 million and growing. Poland is bounded on the north by the Baltic Sea; on the west by Germany (where the natural boundary is the Oder (ODRA) River); on the south by the Czech Republic and Slovakia (where the natural boundary is formed by the Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains); on the east by Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania); and, in the northeast, by a fragment of Russia. In addition to Poland, Polish is spoken to one or another extent by several million people outside Poland in Western Europe; in South and especially North America; and in such countries as Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Polish ranks 17th among world languages as to number of speakers. Polish belongs to the Slavic group of Indo-European languages. Among the major Slavic languages Polish is most closely allied with Slovak and Czech, and also has many features in common with Ukrainian, an East Slavic language with which it has been in close contact for centuries. Christianity was brought to Poland by Czech missionaries and was adopted under the Polish ruler Mieszko I in 966. The earliest Polish writing goes back to the 14th- 15th centuries. The Polish language attained status as a means of accomplished literary expression by individual writers in the 16th century, and attained full maturity as a language of education, science, jurisprudence, public debate, and other broad social functions in the 17th–18th centuries. The boundaries of Poland have undergone many changes over its history, including a period in the 18th and 19th centuries when the country was entirely incorporated into the territories of its neighbors. Present-day Poland resembles in large part the shape of Polish lands in the Middle Ages. Contemporary Standard Polish, based in the main on the Warsaw variant of the language, is spoken or at least understood over the entire country. Due to mass education and communication, together with sizable movements in population from one part of the country to another, especially following the Second World War, the standard language has largely replaced strikingly different regional varieties. The most significant regional dialect is that of the Kraków-Silesia-Poznaƒ area, characterized by a subtly different way of voicing and devoicing consonants between words. The Silesia region itself has a noticeably different dialect, characterized among other things by its non- standard treatment of nasal and certain other vowels. The Góral dialect of the high south mountains is quite distinct both in vocabulary and, mainly, in its lack of differentiation between such consonants as cz and c, ˝ and z, sz and s. Abbreviations adj adjective oth(er) non-masculine personal det determinate verb part participle dim diminutive pass passive fem feminine pej pejorative imper imperative pers or p personal or person impf imperfective aspect pf perfective aspect indet indeterminate verb pl plural masc masculine refl reflexive mppl masculine personal plural sg singular neut neuter def defined N Nominative case I Instrumental case G Genitive case L Locative case D Dative case V Vocative case A Accusative case Incorrect forms may be prefixed with an asterisk (*); substandard or stylistically unusual forms may be indicated