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Grammaticalization – Theory and Data
Edited by Sylvie Hancil and Ekkehard König
[Studies in Language Companion Series 162] 2014
► pp. 109–128

Grammaticalization of Polish mental predicate prefixes

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This article presents insights into grammaticalization mechanisms in an attempt to elucidate the status of the aspectual prefixes in Polish as semantically ‘heavy’ or semantically ‘light’. The verb myśleć ‘to think’ and its ten prefixes constitute the subject of investigation. The study employs corpus linguistics as a method and applies a number of tests, also proposing a new one, for identifying the degree of grammaticalization of the individual prefixes. The new test consists in analyzing collocation patterns of the transitive verb in its imperfective form and its perfective counterparts. It shows that the sets of collocates differ between the imperfective and perfective forms with a varying degree of overlap. A higher overlap ratio is interpreted to indicate a higher degree of grammaticalization.

Published online: 24 September 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.162.07kok
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