https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0925-1805
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ABSTRACT
Based on empirical material derived from the National Corpus of Polish and supplemental web-based sources, this paper provides an account of a recent change affecting the Polish intensifying prefix prze-, namely the emergence of its autonomous uses. It is argued that the development at issue exemplifies a rare linguistic process known as degrammaticalization, which incorporates phenomena running counter to a prototypical grammaticalization scenario. Firstly, the investigated Polish element seems to have undergone phonetic strengthening, as suggested by its relatively common separate spelling and occasional capitalization in non-edited, spontaneous written data. Secondly, the emancipated form has increased its morphosyntactic flexibility, as reflected by its appearance in reduplicative constructions, co-occurrence with verb phrases, independent occurrence in predicative settings, and the possibility of extraposition. And thirdly, it has been affected by semantic enrichment, i.e., it has additionally acquired an evaluative (positive) sense. The analyzed change is further claimed to be fueled by paradigmatic analogy to the frequent, well-established neoclassical elements super(-) and mega(-), which function as prefixal intensifiers as well as free intensifying and evaluative items, coupled with the general tendency for language change to involve renewal, whereby older expressive forms become superseded by novel, more vigorous expressions with the same meaning contents.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2 While a quantitative analysis is carried out on corpus data, attestations detected on the Internet primarily serve the purposes of exemplification.
3 The prefix prze- also combines with verbs, in which case it either serves as a mere perfectivizer (cf. przeczytać ‘to have read’ < czytać ‘to read’) or introduces an additional semantic component to the verbal meaning, such as that of excess (cf. przesolić ‘to have oversalted’ < solić ‘to salt’). Nevertheless, given that such uses bear no direct relevance to the purposes of this study, they will be disregarded in the remainder of the present paper.
4 Prze- can likewise be seen to play an emphatic role in the lexicalized formation przenajświętszy ‘the very holiest,’ peculiar to the religious register, and derived from the superlative form of the adjective święty ‘holy,’ namely najświętszy ‘the holiest.’ For simplicity, however, the formative under examination will here be mainly referred to just as an intensifying prefix or a prefixal intensifier.
5 In the history of Polish, prze- can in fact be observed to have attached to nouns, yet without conveying the notion of intensification or emphasis, and to a very limited extent, namely in the same function as the prefix pra- has today (cf., e.g., Old Polish przewnuk vs. Modern Polish prawnuk ‘great-grandson’).
6 However, neither the prefix’s distributional extension to nominal bases nor the emergence of its free uses has attracted scholarly attention before.
7 All the authentic examples provided in this text are cited in their original forms.
8 In Hopper and Traugott (Citation2003, 145), changes involved in secondary grammaticalization are referred to as morphologization, defined as “the creation of a bound morpheme (i.e., an affix) out of an independent word by way of cliticization.”
9 As mentioned before, this kind of attrition is nonetheless compensated for by the grammaticalizing unit’s extended distribution (cf. Himmelmann Citation2004).
10 Even so, it is possible to encounter relics of the no longer existing inflectional forms, now constituting part of the stem. By way of illustration, the English adverb seldom etymologically derives from the adjective seld ‘strange, rare’ and the plural dative suffix -um (Hopper and Traugott Citation2003, 173).
11 The same applies to conversions such as ifs and buts or ups and downs, which likewise cannot be treated as cases of degrammaticalization as construed here.
12 In fact, I first examined all the 6,927 attestations of the form prze in the entire NKJP corpus, but having noted that only the web-based data represented unambiguous instances of the change under scrutiny, I resolved to limit the search accordingly.
13 The manual analysis was necessary on account of fairly frequent errors in corpus tagging. For instance, the element prze in sentences in which it clearly performs the function of an intensifier or evaluator is wrongly tagged as a verbal form.
14 The relatively small size of the dataset can be accounted for in terms of two facts. First, the change analyzed here is still nascent, as suggested by the lack of a separate entry for the independent variant of the prefix prze- in the online MSSiMP dictionary. And second, only about 7% of the textual material in the NKJP corpus is made up of web-based data.
15 In contrast to prototypical adjectives, however, the form prze may be said to exhibit a defective paradigm in that it does not inflect for case, number, or gender.
16 Note that in Polish, some predicative environments standardly require the employment of a formally adverbial item instead of an adjectival one, which applies specifically to so-called predicative adverbs as well as the complements of copular verbs like wyglądać ‘look, seem,’ as already suggested by ślicznie ‘lit.: cutely’ in (10).
17 Even though the NKJP corpus is not diachronic in character, i.e., specific periods are not equally represented textually, it is possible to rely on normalized frequencies of particular expressions over years. The data on the basis of which I constructed the graph were derived with the aid of the Poliqarp search engine. First, I checked the total number of tokens in each year using commands like [] meta published=1990|created=1990, and then I placed the investigated forms in the square brackets to determine the number of their occurrences, e.g., [base=”super”] meta published=1990|created=1990, [base=”mega”] meta published=1990|created=1990, etc. Finally, I calculated the items’ respective frequencies per one million tokens for each year. Notably, since both super and mega are well-established in Polish, the searches were carried out on the entire corpus, not just on the web-based section, as was the case with prze.