Limitations on Involuntary-State Constructions in Polish: Between Structure and Semantics

Abstract

Involuntary State Constructions in Polish, formed with the clitic form się, are complex structures at the interface of the lexicon, morphology and syntax. Recently they have been analyzed in a most interesting way, where their properties are explained away with the use of the applicative structure, proposed a few years ago. In this paper we try to show that the uniformly structural analysis does not allow us to explain away all the limitations on the production of Involuntary State Constructions. We discuss the limitations concerning the one-argument predicates used in Involuntary State Constructions in the context of the control of such states by the human element. The irregular behavior of such verbs is explained with the use of re-analysis rules, which are lexical operations, not the syntactic ones, perhaps to be derivative from more general tendencies operating in the lexicon and connected with assigning thematic roles to arguments. Other limitations concern psychological predicates, whose behavior is also explained with the use of the same rules. We also consider the possibility of the existence of a split among psychological predicates, similar to a split proposed for Spanish. This split, together with the proposed syntactic structure, may explain why only the predicates that refer to continuing state may derive the Involuntary State Constructions.