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SLE, Date: 2017/09/10 - 2017/09/13, Location: Zurich

Publication date: 2017-09-10

Author:

Kisiel, Anna

Abstract:

In a Polish conjunction system one unit – a ‘and, but’ – stands out when it comes to its frequency, variation of usages and readiness to co-occur with connectives (see Tab.1.; Żabowska 2009). With 1 095 755 usages in National Corpus of Polish it is the second, after i ‘and’, most frequent Polish conjunction. It is also the one covering most types of usages. In literature there are 6 types of usages assigned to a: 1) connecting, 2) resultative, 3) opposition, 4) consent, 5) condition, 6) addition (Wajszczuk 1984, 1997). There is also another feature specific for a that will be the point of interest in this paper. A is, by far, the conjunction most eagerly co-occuring with connectives, a group of meta-units with a very similar function to that of conjunctions. Connectors require (like conjunctions) a pretext, ie. a preceding verbal context, but are not stabilized (unlike conjunctions) in the central position between the pretext and a second conjunct. Co-occurrence of units similar in meaning and function is always noteworthy (Fraser 2015). It has to be investigated whether or not one of the co-occuring units modifies its meaning (or loses it becoming nothing more than a handy support for the second unit). Co-occurrence of a and connectives will be discussed in more details with a special attention to: A. in what types of a’s usages co-occurence with connectives is allowed and why are some connectives never approved in the conjunct after a, B. if any of the co-occuring units modifies (or drops) its meaning, C. what the differences in the matter are between Polish a and a in other Slavic languages, such as Russian and Bulgarian. The language material for analysis will be extracted from national corpora for all three Slavic languages, Polish-Russian-Bulgarian Parallel Corpus (Koseska-Toszewa&Roszko 2015) and supported by Polish-Russian Parallel Corpus. Translations will be examined in order to extract the rules for using a in translation of other meta-units as in the case of Pol. zaś ‘while’, for which one third of usages in PRPC gets Rus. a as a translational partner 1) Pol. W sercu moim drzemie orzeł, w głowie zaś promieniuje gwiazda harmonii. Rus. В сердце моем дышит орел, а в голове сияет звезда гармонии. [PRPC] An eagle naps in my heart, while in my head radiates a star of harmony. The contrastive aspect of the analysis will help to establish whether co-occurrence of a and connectors is language specific or shared between a language family. References: Żabowska, Magdalena. 2009. Hierarchia wyrażeń metatekstowych. Linguistica Copernicana 2:2. 179-189. Fraser, Bruce. 2015. The combining of Discourse Markers – A beginning. Journal of Pragmatics 86. 48-53. Koseska-Toszewa, Violetta & Roszko, Roman. 2015. On Semantic Annotation in Clarin-PL Parallel Corpora. Cognitive Studies 15. 211-236. Wajszczuk, Jadwiga. 1984. Metatekstowe "szwy" tekstu. Casus polski spójnik a. In L. Lönngren (ed.) Polish Text Linguistics. Uppsala. 53-75. Wajszczuk, Jadwiga. 1997. System znaczeń w obszarze spójników polskich. Warszawa: Katedra Lingwistyki Formalnej. corpora: BNC: Bulgarian National Corpus http://search.dcl.bas.bg/ NCP: National Corpus of Polish (balanced version) http://www.nkjp.pl/ PRPC: Polish-Russian Parallel Corpus http://pol-ros.polon.uw.edu.pl/ RNC: Russian National Corpus http://www.ruscorpora.ru/