Expressing i think that in Polish

Abstract

The paper investigates how four Polish mental predicates, signalling the subject’s of conception thinking process and representing the i think that conceptualisation, differ in usage and what motivates the difference. The verbs’ first person singular present tense forms, in an objective way, signal the speaker’s, i.e. the subject’s of conception, thoughts about the (ir)reality stored in their mind, whereas the content of clause complementation subjectively reveals the object of conception, namely the realm of one’s thoughts. A quantitative corpus-driven analysis implemented in the study presents how formal, semantic and extra-linguistic ‘usage features’ of the complementation interact with the verbs. The findings suggest that the i think that conceptualisation shows linguistic variation in Polish dependent on the temporal realm of the situation described in the complementation, the topic of discourse, and the evaluation of the event described.