The MUST (musieć) Serial Verb Construction in Polish

ABSTRACT

The present article is dedicated to a bi-verbal construction built around the verb musieć ‘must’ and another finite verb, e.g., musiał poszedł ‘he must have left.’ By testing this construction for the various properties associated with the cross-linguistic prototype of a serial verb construction, the author concludes the following: the construction with musieć ‘must’ complies with the serial-verb-construction prototype to a high extent, thus constituting its nearly canonical instantiation.

KEYWORDS:

• Serial verb constructions
• Polish
• typology
• prototype

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For the history of research on the various SVCs in Polish, consult Gębka-Wolak (2012) and Andrason (2018a).

2 Depending on context, the verb musieć corresponds to must, have to, need, and ought to in English. In glosses, I will only use ‘must.’

3 This example – which sparked my interest in the MUST construction – is extracted from the movie “Big Bang” (1986). It was used at the beginning of the film (11 min., 08–09 sec.) by Hela, one of the main characters. Hela employed it after observing that a UFO, which had landed in the village, was changing colors. In all examples, the MUST construction will be marked in bold.

4 Even if the marker of polarity is used only once in the construction, it operates over both verbs jointly.

5 All the features mentioned above yield and/or, inversely, are exponents of the mono-event, mono-clausal, and mono-predicative nature of an SVC prototype (Aikhenvald 2006; 2018; Bisang 2009; Andrason 2018a).

6 Similar to my earlier work on wziąć and motion-related SVCs in Polish, due to the association of all serialized constructions with colloquial registers and spoken non-normative language, I drew my corpus on on-line resources rather than the National Corpus of the Polish Language (Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego – NKJP; see Andrason 2018b, 25; 2019a, 169).

7 This status of the MUST construction as a grammatical phenomenon in its own right, rather than a language error, has been confirmed by Prof. Andrzej Moroz (p.c.) – one of the most relevant scholars studying SVCs in Polish.

8 This complies with a typical pattern exhibited by Polish SVCs, whereby the minor verb appears first while the major verb appears second (see Gębka-Wolak 2012; Gębka-Wolak and Moroz 2017; 2021; Andrason 2018a; 2018b; 2019; Andrason, Gębka-Wolak and Moroz 2022).

9 The TAM and PNG inflections will be dealt with in a more detailed manner in the further parts of this section in which I discuss the inflectional agreement of V₁ and V₂.

10 Accordingly, the MUST construction differs from the other SVCs in Polish. The minor verbs used in the remaining SVCs can be used as self-standing lexical main verbs outside their serializing uses (Andrason 2018a; 2018b; 2019a).

11 According to my database, it is difficult to find any significant semantic difference between the MUST construction analyzed in the present article and the construction in which the auxiliary musieć is used with the infinitive of a main verb – both construction types expressing the deontic and epistemic modal nuances. This seems to parallel, to a certain degree, the synonymous use of some motion verbs (especially when inflected in the imperative) in SVCs and constructions with infinitives, e.g., idź kup and idź kupić ‘go (and) buy.’

12 All the examples will be quoted in their original spelling and punctuation irrespective whether they follow the Polish norm or not. Example (2.a) comes from a blog that is dedicated to the Polish language and written by a philologue (www.okiem-filolozki.blogspot.com). The sentence containing the MUST construction itself forms part of the following book review: Genialna, trzymająca w napięciu intryga, ironiczne, pełne dobrego poczucia humoru dialogi, nowatorski wątek, utrzymana na wysokim poziomie akcja, a zakończenie? Całkowicie zwala z nóg. Z bijącym sercem rozgryzamy razem z prokuratorem Szackim przyczyny zabójstwa. Do samego końca wydaje nam się, że tkwimy w ślepej uliczce. Każdy jest podejrzany, a jednocześnie każdy ma alibi. Jednak ktoś musiał zabił. W tej sprawie musimy pamiętać, że „Nie ma złych, są tylko uwikłani”. All examples introduced in my article are linked to concrete digital addresses and form parts of such larger discourses or dialogues. Because of limitation in space, all this information could not have been included in the main text. It may, however, be obtained upon request.

13 Indeed, (4) is the only example of V₂ inflected in the regular perfective future (a perfective present from a morphological perspective) in my database.

14 This fact harmonizes with the situation observed in the other canonical SVCs in Polish (Andrason 2018a, 589–590; 2018b, 34; Nau et al. 2019, 284). However, it contrasts with less canonical SVCs, i.e., those that contain the linker i. For instance, although the use of a single negator is common in such less canonical serializing patterns, the use of two negators, one with V₁ and the other with V₂, is also attested (Andrason 2019a, 176; Nau et al. 2019, 282–283).

15 This exclusive construction-initial position of the negator in the MUST construction contrasts with its placement in the other SVCs. That is, in cases where one negator is used in SVCs in Polish, it regularly appears in front of V₂ – examples with the negator in front of V₁ being “questionable” (Andrason 2018a, 589) or erroneous (Nau et al. 2019, 285).

16 Similar to other SVCs in Polish (see Andrason 2018a; 2018b; 2019a), the subject of the MUST construction may be human, non-human animate, and non-animate.

17 In this regard, the MUST construction contrasts with the other SVCs, in which the lexical subject may sometimes occupy a construction-medial position (e.g., wziął się człowek zabił ‘a man killed himself’).

18 Compare with the similar properties exhibited by the other SVCs in Polish, which can be transitive, intransitive, reflexive, and passive (Andrason 2018a, 623; 2018b, 36; 2019a, 178–179).

19 This absence of comma (pronunciation) partially contrasts with the pronunciation of the other SVCs. Although SVCs in Polish often attest to unitary prosody (Andrason 2018a, 587–588; 2018b, 34; 2019a, 171), this prosodic compactness may be lesser. In fact, in some less canonical instances – still mono-event, mono-predicative, and mono-clausal – some type of pause (even a prolonged one) is grammatical (e.g., wziął … (i) się debil zabił ‘the idiot killed himself’ (own data).

20 Recall the ability of the imperfective verb musieć ‘must’ to be used in both imperfective and perfective contexts.

21 Regarding the exponents of an advancement in grammaticalization, such as higher token and type frequency and increased productivity, as well as semantic bleaching, de-morphologization, and phonological reduction, consult Hopper and Traugott (2003). Concerning the dynamics of SVCs see Aikhenvald (2018), Andrason and Aikhenvald (2022), and Andrason et al. (2022).

22 These uses of musi could have their formal parallel in Russian (now obsolete) dólžno. However, unlike its Polish counterpart, the Russian particle expresses deontic modality rather than epistemic modality. The particle-like uses of musi would also correspond to the word może ‘maybe’ which, in Polish, is the frozen 3^rd person singular of the modal verb móc ‘be able, can’ (see a similar relationship of the epistemic particle možet derived from the 3^rd person singular of the verb močʹ in Russian).