🚀 go-pugleaf

Hesitantly, I'd like to offer some closely-related examples to the
(testily) debated Russian constructions from Polish.

In summary: the "lots-of" construction takes a genetive complement in
the Polish also: this suggests the "genetive subject" is merely a result
of the "lots-of" construct.  The other (obligation-modal) construction
can't have the modal "verb" elided away in the Polish.  I have
one-and-a-half Polish analogues to the textbook examples where there's a
DATIVE+infinitive construction.

Details follow, long and rambling despite trimming, preceded by these
disclaimers:
 - Polish is my first language ("mother tongue"): I spoke no other until
   I was about 5 years old, continued to speak it regularly at home to
   age 18, and continue to speak, read, and (only occasionally) write
   the language;
 - I am much more fluent in English, having been born and educated in
   England (of Polish parents);
 - I have only a poor grasp of the linguistic "point" of the
   constructions being flogged to death in this string --- looks like
   attempts to show usages in which the "subject" is firmly not in the
   nominative case;
 - My grammatical nomenclature is limited, and my ability to analyse
   fragments of Polish is further limited by never having been exposed
   to any cogent formal accounts of its grammar;
 - I know no Russian.

For the two people still reading :-), let's get to the beef.

There is a direct, close counterpart to the Russian
    v Kieve ix bylo polno
which is
    w Kiowie bylo ich pelno
[the exact same word order as in the Russian can also be used, but the
one I quote sounds more natural to me.  Word order's pretty flexible
in Polish, since the cases are pretty readily morphologically
distinguishable.]  The cases, as far as I can make them out, are
    w  Kiowie bylo ich pelno
                  *ambiguous

"ich" is lexically(? should that be morphologically?) ambiguous, being
the 3rd-person-plural form for both the accusative, such as /kopnalem
ich mocno/, "I kicked them hard"  or /wzialem ich do kina/, "I took them
to the cinema"; AND for the genetive, as in /zobaczylem ich telefon/,
"I saw their phone" or /wzialem ich rzeczy/, "I took their things."  It
seems from the strings that Russian shares the same identity of form for
these two 3rd-person-plural cases, otherwise we wouldn't have DAJ
identifying /ich/ as them-GEN and MZ identifying it as them-ACC.

The same manouver used in the string to nail down the case also works in
the Slavic language I know: let's try both /zloto/, "gold", and
/jablko/, "apple"...

    w Kiowie bylo pelno jablek
    w Kiowie bylo pelno zlota

Both these look firmly -GENative to me --- in the case of /jablko/, the
ACC-plural would be /jablka/ (identical to the nominative), in the case
of /zloto/ it would be unchanged as /zloto/; while the two forms used
above have that "possessive" feeling about them which my amateurish,
untrained ear associates with the genetive case.

However, this doesn't seem to be particularly significant in relation to
the claimed "genetive subject" construction which started off the issue
--- as David Birnbaum noted by reference to a dictionary, "pelno" is a
mass qualifier meaning "a whole load of" (which is closer to capturing
its colloquial feel than "a lot of" or "many"), ant it simply and
happily takes a genetive complement... as would other "naturally
occuring" mass qualifiers in the same position, such as
    w Kiowie bylo ich duzo
    w Kiowie bylo duzo jablek
    w Kiowie bylo duzo zlota
    "There was/were a lot of [them/apples/gold] in Kiev"
  or, more topically,
    w Kiowie bylo duzo rozruchow
    "There were a lot of riots/disturbances in Kiev"
Ditto for "malo" (few), "pare" ((just) a couple), ...

Stumbling blindly on, I cannot with any confidence find an analogue of
the more interesting constructions
    nam bylo pomoch' emu        /we should've helped him/
    nam bylo poexat' tuda       /we should've gone there/

The Polish here would force the use of an auxilliary(?) verb "trzeba":
    Trzeba nam bylo mu pomoc
which breaks down as
    Trzeba          /obligation-modal/
    nam             /1st-plur-DAT/
    bylo            /3rd-sing-neuter-past of To Be/
    (je)mu          /3rd-sing-masc-DAT/
    pomoc           /help, infinitive/
and analagously
    Trzeba nam bylo tam pojechac

The elisions whose Russian analogues are in dispute, are definitely
*not* permitted in the Polish:
    *nam bylo mu pomoc
    *nam bylo tam pojechac

The sense here would as commonly be rendered by "Powinnismybyli mu pomoc".

However, I *can* find an analogue to some of the examples in the Pulkina
/ Zakhava-Nekrasova text quoted by David Pesetsky.  The text gives

    Nam skoro exat'
for "We are to go soon".  One possible Polish rendering is:

    Czas nam jechac!
    Time we went!
    Time-NOM we-DAT go-INFIN

I can also coerce the example
    Emu ne ponjat' etogo
    Him-DAT NEG understand-INFIN this-GEN
    He can't understand this
    [can]
into something analagous
    To mu sie nie da zrozumiec
    [This-NOM him-DAT reflexive-particle NEG give-future-3rd-sing
                                                        understand-INFIN]
    "To understand it will not be given to him"

What I (in my under-informed way) find interesting about this example is
that in the Polish, and indeed in the English rendering, there's an
explicit auxilliary verb "give" which "naturally" takes a *DATIVE*
"indirect object".  Maybe this auxilliary is elided away in the Russian,
"leaving its indirect object still suitably declined"?  (Apologies to
linguistic theory here!).  My translation uses "will", as the
original Polish uses a perfective (zrozumiec); you *could* say /To mu
sie nie daje rozumiec/, using a present-tense of the auxilliary.  This
is even less natural-sounding, though still acceptable, than the
slightly tortured /To mu sie nie da zrozumiec/.  Where you're thinking
about a specific individual, you'd be MUCH more likely to use a
non-passive voice:
    On tego nie zrozumie          He won't understand this
    On tego nie rozumie           He doesn't understand this
If you're not thinking of an individual, but asserting something about
the comprehensibility of something, then the natural construction *is*
to use the passive
    To sie nie da zrozumiec       This is not to be understood
Introducing a (dative) "subject" (ha! is it not, instead, an indirect
object?) into this gets us back to the starting-point
    To mu sie nie da zrozumiec    This is not to be understood by him


I can also find something vaguely analogous to the example
    Zavtra, rovno v vosem' chasov, vsem byt' zdes'.
    Tomorrow at eight sharp everyone must be here  (everyone-DAT be-INFIN)

This would be
    Jutro nalezy sie wszystkim wstac o osmej.
    Tomorrow everyone should be up at eight.
Here, "wszystkim" is everyone-DAT.  The piece-by-piece analysis is
    Jutro           Tomorrow
    nalezy sie      passive-obligation-modal-with-reflexive-particle
    wszystkim       everyone-DAT
    wstac           get up-INFIN
    o osmej.        at eight o'clock.
[I hope "reflexive particle" is the right name for "sie"; its function
is similar to that of the French "se" ...]

Note that the infinitive "nalezyc" declined above means "belong", whilst
"nalezyc sie" means "be entitled to", as in
    Mi sie nalezy sto dollarow      I'm entitled to $100
    i-DAT reflexive-particle be-entitled-to-PRES-3rd-Sing $100


A couple of other constructions off the top of my head in which the
apparent subject isn't in the nominative case:

    Mi nie robi roznicy             It makes no difference to me
    Mi              nie        robi     roznicy
    1st-sing-DAT    negation   makes    (a) difference - Sing-GEN
    ("Nie robi mi roznicy" is a more natural sentence order here, but you'd
    use the one I give above for emphasis, as in "It doesn't matter to *ME*".

    Mi jest zimno                   I'm [experiencing] cold

    Mi sie snil snieg               I dreamt of snow
               ("Snow dreamt itself to me")
    Mi            sie                 snil                  snieg
    1st-sing-DAT  reflexive-particle  dream-past-3rd-sing   snow-NOM
This example is firmly one where the sentence-order flexibility
is on show: you could (with little if any semantic effect) equally
acceptably assert
    Snieg mi sie snil
    Snil mi sie snieg
and a few other orders also work, though sounding a little poetic or
affected:
    Snieg sie mi snil
    Snil sie mi snieg
Most of the other 4!=24 combinations are beyond acceptability, to
varying degrees...


BTW, real native speakers of Polish, many of whom have a good though
non-native grasp of Russian too, lurk (and shout) over in
soc.culture.polish...

Adding irrelevant psuedo-data.... Stefek

---------------
Email:         sjmz@hplb.hpl.hp.com
In-real-life:  Stefek Malkowski Zaba
Organisation:  Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol
Address:       Filton Road, Stoke Gifford, Bristol, England, BS12 6QZ
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        All and any statements, assertions, and opinions above void
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