Valency Rearrangement Phenomena and Their Limitations with Polish ‘Clear’ Verbs

Anna Malicka-Kleparska

Anna Malicka-Kleparska The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Faculty of Humanities

Keywords: morpho-syntax; verbal valency; lexicon; event structure; Polish; English; Greek; Hebrew

Abstract

The paper is concerned with very basic questions concerning the nature of lexical representation of verbs which take part in valency rearrangement alternations and the contribution of grammar to the morpho-syntactic phenomena involved in this rearrangement.

We analyze a group of such valency rearrangement verbs which are referred to as ‘clear’ verbs in Polish and compare their behaviour and properties with the corresponding material from English, Greek and Hebrew. In particular we try to establish which properties enable some verbs to undergo the alternation, while some others accept only one of the alternants. We propose lexical representations for alternating and non-alternating verbs and establish a connection between these representations and the alternating propensity of prefixed verbs in Polish.

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