Polish (review)

The grammatical structure of Polish is in some respects even more complex than that of other Slavic languages, and the authors of this book face a daunting task to provide an overview that is not only concise and accurate, but at the same time also accessible to nonlinguists. While these constraints prevent a comprehensive treatment of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the language, the authors nevertheless manage to provide a coherent picture of the most significant facts in a very brief introduction and nine succinct chapters. Chs. 8 and 9 were written by Franks, and the remainder is by Feldstein.

The introduction (1–2) gives some demographic data and a minimal amount of background information on the relationship of Polish to the other Slavic languages, the development of a written Polish language, and the history of Poland. Ch. 1 (3–21) describes the sounds of Polish and their representation in the standard orthography, which is used as much as possible throughout the book in preference to IPA symbols. Particular attention is given to the distinction between the alveolar and palatal fricatives and affricates and to the nasal vowels, and this chapter also covers word-final devoicing, voicing assimilation, and palatalization. Although Feldstein does state here that orthographic i and y represent allophones of a single underlying phoneme /i/, with i occurring after palatalized or palatal consonants and y after others, it would have been useful to provide a general statement summarizing the spelling of y vs. i in different positions: after c, dz, cz, dż, sz, ż/rz only y may occur; after k and g only i is possible; both i and y may occur after the voiceless velar fricative ch unless a morpheme boundary intervenes, in which case only y is possible (Feldstein mentions some but not all of these restrictions at different places). This would help the nonspecialist reader understand the spellings of various inflected forms in the following chapters, for example, masc. nom. sg. nowy ‘new’, dobry ‘good’, duży ‘big’ vs. wielki ‘big’; virile (masc. animate) nom. pl. nowi, duzi vs. dobrzy, wielcy.

Ch. 2, ‘Major types of morphophonemic alternations’ (22–36), summarizes the types of consonant and vowel alternations that occur regularly in inflected forms in Polish. The decision to treat these separately from the inflection is a good one, since it allows the reader to see the overall patterns more clearly. This chapter substitutes the term ‘alveopalatal’ for consonants that were labeled ‘alveolar’ in Ch. 1, and certain assumptions based on the history of the language (e.g. the glide ł [w] is classified with the dental consonants, and the zero ending of the imperative is referred to as an oral vowel) should have been explained in order to avoid confusion.

The next five chapters cover the inflection of the major parts of speech, with a generous number of example paradigms. Ch. 3 (37–52) describes the inflection of the noun, and Ch. 4 (53–56) deals with the declension of adjectives and the formation of comparative forms and adverbs. Ch. 5 (57–63) describes the inflection of numerals, which must be treated as a separate category because of their particular morphosyntactic behavior. Ch. 6 (64–72) covers the Polish pronouns, and Ch. 7 (73–103) contains a description of the conjugation of verbs based on the single-stem system originally developed by Roman Jakobson for Russian. This chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the category of verbal aspect; additional examples of aspectual usage are examined in more detail in Ch. 9.

Ch. 8 (104–18) provides a good nontechnical introduction to Polish sentence structure and the uses of the various cases. Ch. 9 (119–35) is more theoretically oriented than other sections of the book; it examines a number of interesting issues in Polish syntax, including wh-questions, impersonal sentences, clitics, and anaphora.

This volume could have benefited from more careful editing, but the errors are minor and in most cases do not interfere with...