Towards a construction grammar account of the distributive PO in Polish

Abstract

Towards a construction grammar account of the distributive PO in Polish Polish distributive constructions involving the form po are well known for their syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasy. The aim of this paper is to show that, contrary to the received wisdom, two different lexemes po take part in such constructions: a preposition and an adnumeral operator. This explains some of the idiosyncratic behaviour, namely, the apparent ability of po to combine with different grammatical cases. A preliminary Construction Grammar analysis is proposed which eschews the potential problem of missed generalisations that such a dual account of po might engender.

Keywords

• Distributive po
• adnumeral operator
• Sign-Based Construction Grammar
• Polish