Accusative-instrumental alternation in Polish

Abstract

Summary The present study provides a corpus account of the factors governing the choice between the accusative and the instrumental case for object marking in Polish. The two cases are near-interchangeable with a set of Polish verbs primarily expressing physical manipulation. Following profile-based approaches, a sample of representative usage data has been extracted and manually annotated for subsequent multivariate modeling. The results indicate the importance of construction-specific characteristics for the choice between the two forms and the complex nature of the influence of coarse-grained transitivity-related features. Specifically, two semantic features emerged as particularly associated with the choice of the instrumental: (i) holistic conceptualisation of the manipulated object and (ii) prominence of its physical contiguity to the acting force.