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Vortrag: Polish clitics on their way to freedom or fixation?

Tracking word-order-patterns in Polish over 400 years

In this event, I will (hopefully) share some results from the large-scale corpus research on Polish clitics that is supposed to form the main part of my MA thesis. I am interested in how the placement rules of these funny little words change over a long span of time, as they potentially develop into free words or affixes (these processes are still ongoing in Polish). For more information why I find this very interesting and entertaining, see below. Key words: Polish, clitics, word order, morphology, morphosyntax, language change, corpus linguistics, Wackernagel‘s Law.

What exactly clitics are is hard to define, but for many Indo-European languages, you always know where to find them: in the so-called Wackernagel position, that is, the second position in a clause. Putting it simply, Clitics are small (you might say cute) and unaccented/phonologically dependent morphemes that usually follow some placement rule in the clause; but they are not affixes, so they are not fixed to other word forms. Over time, they can evolve into full words or into affixes. Potentially, something like this is going on in Polish right now. Polish used to have a strict Wackernagel Law, but the Law stopped being strict at some time in the 18th century, with no obvious new rule to replace it. Some clitics seem to tend towards the position close to the verb nowadays, but not all of them and not in all cases. Needless to say, there has been a lot of discussion on Polish clitics and what they are up to.

In my master thesis I am trying to find out what has happened to clitics and their placement rules in Polish over the last 400 years. If I am successful, this will be the first large-scale diachronic corpus-based analysis of clitic placement in Polish. I am building on a multi-factored methodology used for Czech to try to find out how the Wackernagel Law and verb placement interact. I will also try to account for different clitics in different text genres and geographical regions. So, I will be very busy collecting and analysing a lot of data until November, and hopefully I will then be able to present some information on how these funny little words changed their position/movement/mobility over time.

Note: this is my first corpus study of this scale, so I will be thankful for any feedback by corpus experts. Also, it would be great to talk to some people with a background in generative syntax, because some generativists seem to find clitics very interesting, and I honestly do not understand what they are talking about.
See you in Stuttgart!

Info

Tag: 14.11.2025
Anfangszeit: 14:00
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: M17.74
Track: Historische Linguistik
Sprache: en

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