Language Change in Polish: From Genitive to Accusative Marked Objects. A Synchronic Corpus Study

Abstract

Since the second half of the twentieth century, scholars have observed a growing tendency to use the accusative instead of the genitive as a case for the object of several Polish verbs. The study provides synchronic corpus data supporting the observation of an incremental shift in case government of certain Polish verbs (e.g. potrzebować: to need) and aims to illuminate the phenomenon based on the theoretical notion of transitivity. On the basis of empirical data gathered from a web corpus from 2019, the current state of the progression is outlined, indicating which semantic and morphological groups of verbs are affected, and, if so, to which extent. It is shown in this paper that, in the standard usage of Polish, the object is marked in the genitive when its affectedness is low (i.e. in events low in transitivity), whereas it appears in the accusative when its affectedness is high (i.e. in events exhibiting high transitivity). However, in colloquial Polish, there is a tendency to no longer indicate this distinction, and, in a process of analogical change, the use of the accusative as a structural case (i.e. mainly expressing the syntactic function of objecthood) becomes prevalent. The results of the corpus study suggest that only some groups of verbs governing the genitive case are affected, and that case government is also linked to the semantics of the object and the frequency of the collocation.