Gender agreement in Polish : a study based on elicitation and corpus data.

This thesis explores the role of gender and explains how gender agreement operates in Polish and presents the possible agreement that particular gender can provide when conjoined with a noun of different gender or with a hybrid noun. The linguistic representation of specific gender is connected not only with the morphological shape but also the inherent semantics of a given noun. In the Polish language a great deal of information about possible masculine-personal or masculine-non-personal agreement is provided by the value ‘person’ for a given noun, and recent research on gender agreement in Polish has shown that some of the proposed rules for gender resolution and agreement between subject and predicate do not describe all the agreement possibilities. Likewise, with regard to hybrid nouns in Polish little research has been done on their agreement. This thesis thus examines the interaction of nouns of different genders, their values and their verbal agreement. Drawing mostly on primary questionnaire work with native speakers of Polish, I argue that semantics has a predominant impact on gender agreement. I support my claim by presenting data from the Polish corpus. The thesis provides the most comprehensive description of Polish gender agreement in sentences with conjoined noun phrases and agreement with hybrid nouns to date, by investigating their morphological status, their semantic restrictions, and their use in discourse. Building on previous analyses of agreement possibilities in the Polish language, I argue for an additional rule in gender resolution. I provide a description of various types of hybrid nouns in Polish and check the impact of semantic agreement versus formal agreement on Polish hybrid nouns using Corbett’s Agreement Hierarchy