A few remarks on archaic syntactic elements in Cyprian Norwid’s texts (transl. by Tadeusz Karłowicz)

Abstract

The article discusses the main types of obsolete syntactic structures that are present in Cyprian Norwid's writings: a lack of identity of the agent of a participle elliptical sentence and of a super-ordinate clause (in this case the archaic character is only one of hypotheses explaining Norwid's practice of building sentences); non-agent constructions with verbs containing się (reflexive verbs) fulfilling the function of predicate connected with the nominative case by the relation of concord; harmonizing relations of quantity ad sensum; gender discordances in a sentence's main relation; a nominal predicative word in the nominative case; the presence of the accusativus cum infinitive construction; numerous peculiarities of the rection (especially the predilection for synthetic constructions) and the use of old functions of grammatical cases; obsolete conjunctions, personal forms of the predicate in clauses of purpose and other subordinate utterances starting with the conjunctions by, aby, żeby, ażeby, iżby, byle.

The feature that connects Norwid's language with the old Polish language is also the multitude of component utterances in a compound sentence that is accompanied by a relatively loose connection between syntactic elements.

Some of Norwid's uses of obsolete constructions result from an intentional stylization that is first of all supposed to lead to obtaining a certain hieratical character of the text; however, most old forms show the peculiar character of the idiolect typical of the author of Vade-mecum himself; he used archaic structures probably under the influence of his readings, of foreign languages and regional variants of Polish, because of the rhythm of the text, and sometimes also because of his own carelessness, or even his lack of proper abilities to build sentences.