The Person Case Constraint, Person Ordering Constraint and Pronominal Clusters in Polish

Abstract

This contribution deals with preverbal clusters of deficient pronouns in Polish and combines an empirical study with a theoretical description inspired by Stegovec (2020). Polish pronouns are ill disciplined in comparison with their Slavic equivalents: they do not have a fixed position, they need not cluster together or with person-number auxiliaries and their cluster-internal ordering does not seem fixed (Franks and King 2000). These properties lead many authors to propose that their deficiency is limited mainly to phonology and morphology, while their syntactic distribution is typical for Slavic DPs. We examine preverbal pronominal clusters in a controlled setting and conclude that they show strong regularities in internal orders compatible with Person Case Constraint (PCC). We conclude that Polish shows effects of this constraint in a limited set of cases; deficient pronouns form a heterogenous group, with 1st and 2nd person SG displaying typical properties of deficient pronouns, and 3rd person masculine showing mixed properties of deficient and strong pronouns. This divide contributes to the idiosyncrasy of the pronominal system in Polish and shows that the three-way classification of pronouns in Cardinaletti and Starke (1994) is too coarse.

Keywords

• pronominal cluster
• weak pronouns
• person case constraint
• person ordering constraint