Tense and Aspect in Polish

Dorota Klimek

Wrocław University

This will be a study of the interplay of neo-Reichenbachian temporal semantics and aspectual perfective/imperfective markers in Polish simple and complex sentences. Building on Stieber (1973), Rittel (1975), Kowalska (1976), Andersen (1987), Schenker (1993), Migdalski (2002) among others, I will demonstrate that Polish lacks morphological means to grammaticalise tense as it was also postulated by Paunovič (2000) in her discussion of aspectual-temporal relations in Serbo-Croatian verbal morphology. With this assumption in mind, I will put forward a hypothesis that aspectual morpology in Polish serves to express temporal relations of the kind proposed by Hornstein (1990). Hornstein treats tenses as an independent linguistic level with its own syntactic rules of combination, and its own rules of interpretation. He claims that Basic Tense Systems are composed of an S (utterance time), E (event time) relation determined in English by the tense morpheme and an R (reference time), relation fixed by the presence or absence of auxiliary have. The total number of tenses in the inventory of tenses is eleven, as illustrated in (1).

I will modify this set of temporal relations with respect to Polish, bearing in mind that its content is fully determined by aspectual characteristics of verbs. Most Polish verbs have two tense forms: imperfective and perfective. Thus for instance she sang can be translated in Polish into either śpiewała (imperfective) or zaśpiewała (perfective). Rozwadowska (2001) demonstrates additionally that Polish perfective verbs can have final boundary (zbudować 'build') or initial boundary (zainteresować się 'get interested in'). It is my contention that Polish has three different kinds of past tense representations illustrated in (2):

Interestingly, resultative verbs such as for instance pożółkł 'yellowed', zardzewiał 'rusted', urósł 'grew', zgnił 'rotted', stał się 'became', zmienił się 'changed' which are conventionally treated as expressing past events, correspond to the representation of English Perfect tense in Hornstein’s system, as illustrated in (3):

(3) (S,R)((E_R)=E_S,R

(R,S)((E_R)=E_R,S

Hornstein (1990) notes that in English the information that an R point is present in the simple present, past and future is not explicitly carried by any morpheme and that in these tenses, the R point is not semantically visible. The child simply assumes that every tense must have an R point which is a part of its universal grammar. I suggest that in the case of Polish perfective verbs, the presence of R point is expressed by a perfective prefix denoting either inception or culmination. This can be supported by the temporal analysis of complex sentences and by the acquisition facts. It has been demonstrated by Błaszczyk-Szabat (2003) for Polish that learners of L2 primarily associate telic verbs with past tense inflections which can signal that the R point is easier to identify when clearly anchored to the most prominent temporal point in an eventuality.

Selected References:

Andersen, H. (1987) "From Auxiliary to Desinence". In: Harris, Martin, and Paolo Ramat (eds.), Historical Development of Auxiliaries. Berlin/New York/Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.

Błaszczyk-Szabat (2003) The Relation between inherent aspect and past tense in the acquisition of Polish learned as L2, Poznań Linguistic Meeting.

Hornstein, N. (1990) As Time Goes By: Tense and Universal Grammar. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Kowalska, A. (1976) Ewolucja analitycznych form czasownikowych z imiesłowem na -ł w języku polskim. Katowice: Uniwersytet Śląski.

Migdalski,K. (2003) Predicate Inversion and the Diachrony of Complex Tenses in Slavic. Paper presented at Castle Kick-off Conference at the University of Tromso

Paunovič, Ž. (2000) Aspectual-Temporal Relations in Serbo-Croatian Verbal Morphology. Presented at the 9th Postgraduate Linguistics Conference at the University of Manchester

Rittel, T. (1975) Szyk członów w obrębie form czasu przeszłego i trybu przypuszczającego. Wrocław/Warszawa/Kraków: Ossolineum.

Rozwadowska (2001) Initial Boundary and Telicity in the Semantics of Perfectivity. Princeton University

Schenker, A. M. (1993) "Proto-Slavonic." In Comrie, B. And G. G. Corbett, G. G., (eds.), The Slavonic Languages. London: Routledge, 60-121.

Stieber, Zbigniew. (1973) Zarys gramatyki porównawczej języków słowiańskich. Część II: Fleksja werbalna. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

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