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

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Title: 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 manyworks, 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 severalquantitative analyses. The difference between adverbial participles and so-called quasi-participles isalso taken into consideration.The data presented shows the direct correlation between the frequencies of every participle type and theformality level of a particular style. The difference between adverbial participles and quasi-participles isdemonstrated as significant. The article provides new arguments for the thesis that anterior adverbial participlestend to disappear in Polish.Interestingly, there is also a very strong positive correlation between average sentence length across stylesand the associated frequencies of adjectival participles, however it only concerns this particular group. Thedata for adverbial participles does not reflect this pattern. What is more, the probability that a word in a sentenceis a participle is found to be growing along with sentence length for all four types of participles whenthe style division is not considered. It suggests that the origin of adverbial participles’ style distribution ismore multifactorial than that of adjectival participles. It seems that all four participles are efficient grammarmeans to maximize the amount of information in a sentence by compacting additional verbal groups, butthe adverbial participles also bear some other characteristics (i.e. relative tense marking, some vaguenessof meaning) that could supposedly shape their functionality across styles.