Polish participles: distribution and sentence length across functional styles. Quantitative analyses

Abstract

The distribution of four Polish participles across different functional styles has been discussed in many works, but never treated as an independent topic. This paper aims to examine the frequency of participles (both adjectival and adverbial) in 12 styles represented in the National Corpus of Polish Language (NKJP) and to provide some explanations for the varied distribution of these forms. It is done in the course of several quantitative analyses. The difference between adverbial participles and so-called quasi-participles is also taken into consideration.

The data presented shows the direct correlation between the frequencies of every participle type and the formality level of a particular style. The difference between adverbial participles and quasi-participles is demonstrated as significant. The article provides new arguments for the thesis that anterior adverbial participles tend to disappear in Polish.

Interestingly, there is also a very strong positive correlation between average sentence length across styles and the associated frequencies of adjectival participles, however it only concerns this particular group. The data for adverbial participles does not reflect this pattern. What is more, the probability that a word in a sentence is a participle is found to be growing along with sentence length for all four types of participles when the style division is not considered. It suggests that the origin of adverbial participles’ style distribution is more multifactorial than that of adjectival participles. It seems that all four participles are efficient grammar means to maximize the amount of information in a sentence by compacting additional verbal groups, but the adverbial participles also bear some other characteristics (i.e. relative tense marking, some vagueness of meaning) that could supposedly shape their functionality across styles.