Diversity of meaning of the construction with a contemporary adverbial participle: ambiguity, indeterminacy and the propositional content of the sentence

Abstract

Constructions with Polish adverbial participles can be used to express various meanings (temporal, causal, concessive, etc.). This article considers whether this type of meaning can be considered as belonging to the proposition, or whether the propositional content of the sentence with such construction should be defined only as the conjunction of fully or partially simultaneous events, with no specification of the semantic relationship between them.To consider this problem, reference was made to the classic distinction between ambiguity and indeterminacy (Zwicky, Sadock 1975). It was assumed that in case this type of meaning is semantic, it shall be possible to demonstrate that “ambiguous” sentences (allowing for different interpretations, i.e. temporal and causal at the same time), are indeed ambiguous and not indeterminate. For this purpose, diagnostic tests were carried out (cf. Zwicky, Sadock 1975; Kempson 1977; Gillon 1990). Further, if this type of meaning belongs to the semantic content of the sentence, it can be expected that constructions with a contemporary participle differing in regard to the meaning type will not combine freely with each other in a coordination test (cf. Chomsky 1957). This test was performed on a random sample of 250 sentences from the NKJP corpus. It has been shown that sentences with a participle structure are indeterminate and not ambiguous, but they do not combine freely in the coordination test. This indicates the pragmatic nature of these meanings.