Focus and Word Order Variations in Polish

Ewelina Mokrosz

Abstract


An empirical study aimed at investigating whether different focus types favour any specific sentential position has been conducted among native speakers of Polish. Two factors were taken into consideration: a syntactic category of a given focused phrase and its syntactic environment. Similar studies have been carried out in Romance languages (e.g., Jiménez-Fernández (2015, 2025) in Spanish, Cruschina and Mayol (2025) in Catalan, Italian and Spanish). It turns out that Polish speakers prefer a canonical word order with different focus types. At the same time many positional variations are admitted.


Keywords


focus; word order; acceptability-judgement test

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2026.50.3.62-80
Date of publication: 2026-10-30 11:37:54
Date of submission: 2026-05-04 01:24:25


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