LingVaria (Apr 2015)
W sprawie durkheimowsko-saussurowskiego „faktu społecznego”
Abstract
A note on Durkheimian – Saussurian „social fact”. Two examples from Polish morphology The author presents an argument in favour of Durkheimian – Saussurian theory of „social fact” as applied to language. The argument consists in pointing out two examples of morphological facts of Polish that are not easily accessible to native speakers and have not been explicitly verbalized, but are nonetheless invariably and rigorously implemented by all of them in their linguistic practice. This shows that the regularities are superimposed on them in a strongly anti-individualistic way. The first fact can be illustrated with the sequence walka ze zorganizowaną przestępczością ‘struggle against organized criminality’, where the inflectional form ze of the preposition z is used in spite of its being followed by the adjacent segment beginning in z + V (rather than by a cluster of consonants beginning in a frontal fricative). Polish has created an analogon of the necessary separation of the prepositions z and w from their right-hand syllabic homophonic partner in the adjacent context. The nature of the analogon can be described in the following way: we have to do with strict functional proportional separability of the right-hand non-syllabic homophonic partner of the preposition, on the one hand, and the rest of the expression the partner belongs to. Here is an example of such a proportion: zorganizowany : organizowany :: zoperowany : operowany. The second fact can be illustrated with the present tense form dozbierywuje (vs. * dozbieruje) of the verb dozbierywać. This shape manifests a strict parallelism with regard to the imperfective forms in -liwać, -liwuje, vs. * -luje, cf. rozstrzelać – rozstrzeliwać – rozstrzeliwuje. Both main spirants, [l] and [r], go here hand in hand. However, there is an additional regularity in play. The point is that the shape -r-ywuje depends on the presence of the preceding sequence which contains a root vowel, cf. przeorać – przeorywać – przeorywuje (here, the vowel is [o]). If this condition is not met, the final -uje does not appear; instead, next to -r-yw- regular endings of the main conjugation of verbs in -ać are used; thus, we have -a in the 3rd person sg, -am in the 1st person sg, and so on, cf.: przegrać – przegrywać – przegrywa – przegrywam.
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