The Necessity to Distinguish Perfectivity from Resultativity in Order to Understand the Usage of Italian and Polish Tenses

In this article, following a critical examination of some Italian academic grammars, a new systematisation of the verbal systems of Italian and Polish is proposed.
In Italian, resultativity is a principal aspectual meaning, which can be seen in Italian verbal morphology. Compound tenses have grammaticalised the resultative meaning, whereas simple tenses have grammaticalised the lack of it, that is, they denote situations without any outcome. The author of the article proposes to separate this strongly grammaticalised opposition from the opposition of perfectivity vs imperfectivity, for which Italian does not have special grams. In this case, Italian uses two past tenses: the passato remoto with perfective meaning and the imperfetto with imperfective meaning. In Italian, it is not possible to express these opposite meanings in the future. This conception of the Italian verbal system is complicated by the coexistence of two past tenses used in narrating, i.e., the passato remoto and the passato prossimo. In fact, they are not duplicates because they belong to two complementary systems.
Unlike Italian, Polish has grammaticalised the opposition between perfectivity and imperfectivity, which means that it uses specialised grams conveying one of these two aspect meanings. This opposition is morphologically marked in future and past tenses and in non-finite forms of verbs. Besides, imperfective Polish verbs are used to indicate a past or future situation without giving information about its end or its continuation, a usage that is impossible with the Italian imperfetto tense. Polish, unlike Italian, does not have any grams conveying the result meaning; instead, it uses past-tense forms, as only this tense can indicate how the past action implies the lasting present state.

The evolution of grammatical terminology in course books of the Italian language for Poles (17th–19th centuries)

The subject of research is that of changes in grammatical terminology that can be observed on the basis of four course books of Italian language for Poles published between 1675 and 1869. The first of them is marked by the Latin terminology that manifests in the adaptation of Latin terms as well as in the direct translation of their basic meaning into Polish. Moreover, the instability of terminology results in the co-occurrence of various forms of the Polish term or in the co-occurrence of Polish and Latin terms. The other two course books by anonymous authors, which seem to be adaptations of French course books, do not include Latin terminology, whereas names for word classes are, with a few exceptions, consistent with the Polish nomenclature devised by the Commission of National Education in the Enlightenment. In comparison to the previous course books, the last one involved in this research is more modern with regards to solutions that are typical for articles and other categories that are characteristic of Romance languages.

Teaching the Italian trapassato prossimo tense to Polish native speakers

The Italian pluperfect (trapassato prossimo) differs from other past tenses due to the fact that it implies a point of reference situated in the past. Although it is frequently used in both written and spoken language, little space is devoted to this tense in textbooks of Italian for foreigners. This can be explained by taking into consideration the following two factors: on the one hand, the Italian pluperfect usually can be substituted by other tenses (like the present perfect, passato prossimo, and preterite, passato remoto); on the other hand, the choice of the speaker to use this tense is often difficult to explain. In other words, the abovementioned point of reference is sometimes difficult to locate. A full comprehension of the Italian pluperfect can be problematic for a Polish speaker, as contemporary Polish does not have tenses with similar functions. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the teaching of the Italian pluperfect to Polish students, highlighting some linguistic issues that should be considered by the teacher.

The nominal systems of Italian and Polish in comparison: some remarks on gender and case as grammatical categories

The present study features a description and comparison of the Italian and Polish nominal systems. Our tertium comparationis are two grammatical categories: gender and case. Gender is morpho-syntactically coded in both languages; case, is morphologically coded only in Polish, while in Italian it is predominantly expressed by the use of prepositions. Focusing on the noun class, we contrastively examine the ways and means used to express the two grammatical meanings. In particular, we compare grammatical meanings expressed by morphological and syntactic cues. As a multifaceted category, grammatical gender classifies Italian and Polish nouns and co-regulates the morpho-syntactic agreement between sentence constituents (controller-target relation), contributing to the decoding of an internal text structure. The morphological case variation of Polish nouns (inflection) is often reinforced by syntactical markers; thus, case coding in Polish occurs both in synthetic and analytic ways. In contrast, Italian uses only analytic means to mark the grammatical meaning of case. The two linguistic systems under examination exhibit a similar formal organisation and expressive cues but apply them in different proportions.

Polish translations of the Italian verbal construction stare per + infinitive

The Italian verbal construction stare per + infinitive expresses the prospective aspect. This aspectual meaning can be defined in terms of Reichenbach’s theory (1947), which makes use of three points: E (the point of the event), S (the point of speech), and R (the point of reference). The prospective meaning appears when R precedes E and when the position of S is not important. The author of the article examines the possible ways of translating the Italian construction stare per + infinitive into Polish. Unlike Italian, this Slavic language does not have special grams that convey the prospective meaning. Amongst the possible Polish translations, the construction <mieć (‘have’) + infinitive> seems to express best the prospective meaning of the Italian stare per + infinitive. Still, this Polish construction has two other readings: a modal one and an evidential one.

Italian Literature in Polish Schools: Pinocchio forever?

This article presents aspects of the way Pinocchio is known and understood in Poland, based on the availability and use of Italian literature in primary and secondary schools in that country since the Second World War. It focuses on the paratexts and contexts of the last two translations of Collodi’s masterpiece, particularly the translation by Jarosław Mikołajewski with illustrations by Roberto Innocenti, published in 2011.