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Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) deny the possibility of coordination of unlike categories. They use three mechanisms to reanalyze such coordination as involving same categories: conjunction reduction, super-categories, and empty heads. We show that their proposal leaves many cases of unlike category coordination unaccounted for, and we point out various methodological, technical, and empirical problems that it faces. We conclude that the so-called Law of the Coordination of Likes is a myth. Instead, all conjuncts must satisfy any external restrictions on the syntactic position they occupy. Such restrictions may be rigid, resulting in categorial sameness, but when they are underspecified or disjunctive, category “mismatches” may arise.

This squib argues that adverbs can act as primary predicates. In Polish, a relatively large class of adverbs are frequently used in predicative constructions when the subject of predication is an InfP (infinitival phrase) or a CP referring to abstract objects: event kinds or facts. This requirement of a purely verbal rather than nominal subject of predication is the main difference between predicative adverbs and predicative adjectives, explaining contrasts between their syntactic behavior in extraction and coordination. Predicative adverbs usually express attitudes toward event kinds or facts and often combine with dative experiencers; in the case of InfP subjects, dative experiencers obligatorily control the subject.

Celem artykułu jest porównanie ze sobą dwóch konstrukcji predykatywnych w języku polskim, w których podmiotem jest fraza bezokolicznikowa: konstrukcji z przysłówkami predykatywnymi i konstrukcji z przymiotnikami predykatywnymi. Ta ostatnia konstrukcja, o postaci "przymiotnik predykatywny + łącznik + podmiot bezokolicznikowy", nie została wcześniej opisana w polskiej literaturze dotyczącej predykacji, łączników czy podmiotów bezokolicznikowych. Na podstawie danych korpusowych, przede wszystkim z Narodowego Korpusu Języka Polskiego, pokazujemy, że konstrukcja ta jest znacznie rzadsza niż analogiczna konstrukcja z przysłówkami predykatywnymi. Twierdzimy także, że w zasadzie te same predykaty mogą zostać zrealizowane albo jako przysłówki, albo jako przymiotniki, gdy podmiotem jest fraza bezokolicznikowa - obserwowane różnice nie mają charakteru systemowego, a wynikają jedynie z braków w leksykonie lub z tego, że nie zawsze przymiotniki i odpowiadające im przysłówki mają te same zestawy znaczeń. W szczególności pewne predykaty wyrażające modalność nieepistemiczną mogą być wyrażone tylko za pomocą przymiotników, gdyż odpowiadające im przysłówki nie wyrażają takiej modalności. Artykuł omawia także nowe dane korpusowe stanowiące dodatkowy argument za hipotezą, że przyczyną znacznie niższej frekwencji przymiotników predykatywnych niż przysłówków w omawianych konstrukcjach jest to, że - aby możliwe było połączenie przymiotnika predykatywnego z podmiotem bezokolicznikowym - podmiot ten musi ulec składniowej nominalizacji, podczas gdy przysłówki mogą łączyć się z podmiotami bezokolicznikowymi bezpośrednio; stąd preferencja dla składniowo prostszych konstrukcji z przysłówkami. The aim of this paper is to compare two Polish predicative constructions with infinitival subjects, namely those with predicative adverbs and those with predicative adjectives. The latter construction, of the form "predicative adjective + copula + infinitival subject" has hardly been noticed in Polish literature on predication, copulas, or infinitival subjects. On the basis of corpus data, mainly from the National Corpus of Polish, we demonstrate that this construction is much rarer than the analogous construction with predicative adverbs. We also show that roughly the same predicates may be expressed as either adverbs or as adjectives when the subject is an infinitival phrase - any observed differences are not systematic but rather stem from lexical gaps and differences in the meanings of particular adverbs and adjectives. In particular, certain modal predicates may only be expressed as adjectives because the corresponding adverbs do not express the same non-epistemic modal meanings. Finally, we provide new corpus evidence for an earlier claim that predicative adjectives are much rarer than adverbs when the subject is infinitival because they require this subject to undergo covert nominalisation; as adverbs combine with infinitival subjects directly, they are usually preferred.

The issue of the syntactic category of unlike-category coordination has been elusive for decades, with a plethora of proposals, all deficient in one way or another. This chapter proposes to broaden the perspective and consider disjunctive constraints which are not limited to syntactic categories, but which also take into consideration morphosyntactic and lexical properties. Przepiórkowski and Patejuk present an account in which syntactic categories are encoded in functional-structures and all constraints on syntactic positions uniformly refer to functional-structures only. On this solution, the issue of syntactic categories of coordinate structures is void: same category coordinations have—via the definition of distributive properties—the same category as that of all the conjuncts, while unlike-category coordinations do not need—and, on this proposal, do not have—syntactic categories on top of the different categories of their conjuncts.

The paper describes the conversion of an LFG treebank of Polish into enhanced Universal Dependencies, and—more generally—identifies the kinds of information lost in translation from LFG to UD. The paper also presents the resulting UD treebank of Polish and compares it to the previous UD treebank of Polish.

The aim of this paper is to reexamine the rich repertoire of grammatical functions assumed in LFG and provide novel arguments for the claim, voiced earlier for example in Alsina et al. 2005, that most of them are redundant. We also demonstrate that a textbook LFG test for the sameness of grammatical functions of different predicates fails on closer scrutiny. Constructively, we propose a more constrained approach to grammatical functions, which, however, has the advantage of formalising the grammatical function hierarchy, assumed in LFG analyses of diverse phenomena but apparently not previously formalised.

This paper shows how Walenty, a valency dictionary of Polish, was automatically converted in order to be used with an XLE/LFG grammar of Polish, discussing issues such as the grammatical function assignment under unlike category coordination and imposing constraints for lexicalised dependents.

Chemical methods of determining composition of blends with respect to blends of different fibres have been standardised in many countries. In Poland we also have numerous standards covering most blend types present in the produced textiles. However, these methods cannot be used for studies of quantitative composition of blends containing cotton and bast fibres. There are also methods, less popular and not standardised so far, of determining composition of blends on the basis of changes of the physical properties of the blend in relation to changes of the physical properties of its component fibres. Such methods are usually applied in research work. It seems, however, that they are worth popularising in quality control of half-products and final textiles, as well as in interoperational control. Blending of fibres is one of the most important operations in yarn production processes. Irregularity of fibre blending has an adverse influence on the quality of yarns. Therefore, it is very important to s...

The aim of this paper is to propose a far-reaching extension of the phraseological component of a valence dictionary for Polish. The dictionary is the basis of two dierent parsers of Polish; its format has been designed so as to maximise the readability of the information it contains and its re-applicability. We believe that the extension proposed here follows this approach and, hence, may be an inspiration in the design of valence dictionaries for other languages.

International audience; In this paper, we use machine learning techniques for part-of-speech tagging and parsing to explore the specificities of a highly heterogeneous corpus. The corpus used is a treebank of Old French made of texts which differ with respect to several types of metadata: production date, form (verse/prose), domain , and dialect. We conduct experiments in order to determine which of these metadata are the most discriminative and to induce a general methodology .

International audience; This paper addresses the classic problem of the triggers of the passage from a relatively free word order to a strict SVO in the history of French ([26], [9], [8], [28], [12], [7]). We present a corpus-based modelling of two, likewise classic, lines of analysis. First, we explore the link between the loss of word order freedom and the disappearance of morphological case marking ([22], [23], [6], [20], [14]). Second, we evaluate the syncretisation of verbal agreement and massive appearance of overt preverbal subject pronouns ([1], [19], [21]) as a potential analogical trigger of a generalized SVO (e.g. [3] for an analogy-based explanation of the change in nominal syntax in Old English). Although the analytical intuitions themselves have a long history, only recently has it become possible to perform their quantitative evaluations due to the availability of large (for historical data) annotated treebanks of Medieval French ([15], [16], and [24]).