Polszczyzna wobec tendencji języków indoeuropejskich do szyku progresywnego (człon nadrzędny → człon podrzędny)

Abstrakt

Polish against the tendency of changing word-order in indo-European languages (left-branching shift to right-branching)

One of the evolutive tendencies in indo-European languages is the gradual shift toward right-branching constructions (the head precedes the modifier). The right-branching has begun to dominate in the Romance languages; but not in Latin and not in Polish. However, these languages show this tendency, too; Latin in a lesser degree than Polish. Despite the innovations, Latin still displayed a considerable number of left-branching constructions, which it inherited from the protolanguage. Its specificity is that the basic construction (OV) is archaic, but some others, such as NG, Vmod Inf, N, Rel, NA are innovations. The majority of archaic constructions used in Latin are also acceptable in Polish, but they are much more rare.

Contrary to the Romance languages, Polish 1) uses sometimes archaic constructions, and 2) its right-branching constructions are relatively rare.