The Acquisition of Polish*

Abstract

Within the Slavic branch, Polish represents one of the North Slavic languages, as different from South Slavic. Like other Slavic languages, Polish represents an inflecting, or fusional type of language, in which single grammatical morphemes combine several functions: case, gender, and number in noun forms; person and number in verb forms. Because Polish retains a rich inflectional system, morphology is the main device for expressing syntactic distinctions. Word order has grammatical functions only to a limited extent, and hence it can serve other purposes, namely, it performs pragmatic functions. This chapter provides a selective outline of Polish morphology and syntax. Morphological development should be conceived of as the acquisition of the ability to replace grammatical morphemes according to the rules of language, rather than the ability to add them to basic forms when required. Discussing morphology sketches the declensional and conjugational patterns of Polish.

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