Polish grammar


The grammar of the Polish language is characterized by a high degree of inflection, and has relatively free word order, although the dominant arrangement is subject–verb–object. There are no articles, and there is frequent dropping of subject pronouns. Distinctive features include the different treatment of masculine personal nouns in the plural, and the complex grammar of numerals and quantifiers.

Regular morphological alternation

Certain regular or common alternations apply across the Polish inflectional system, affecting the morphology of nouns, adjectives, verbs, and other parts of speech. Some of these result from the restricted distribution of the vowels i and y, and from the voicing rules for consonants in clusters and at the end of words. Otherwise, the main changes are the following:

Polish retains the Old Slavic system of cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. There are seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative.

Number

Polish has two number classes: singular and plural.
It used to also have the dual number, but it vanished around the 15th century. It survived only in a few relicts:
There are three main genders : masculine, feminine and neuter. Masculine nouns are further divided into personal, animate, and inanimate categories. Personal and animate nouns are distinguished from inanimate nouns in the accusative singular; for the latter the accusative is identical to the nominative. In the plural, the masculine personal nouns are distinguished from all others, which collapse into one non-masculine personal gender.
The table below presents examples of how a determiner ten/ta/to agrees with nouns of different genders in the nominative and the accusative, both singular and plural. Adjectives inflect similarly to this determiner.
For verbs, the distinction is only important for past forms in the plural, as in the table below:
The numeral dwa, on the other hand, behaves differently, merging masculine non-personal with neuter, but not with feminine:
Gender usually can be inferred from the ending of a noun.
The distinction between personal, animate and inanimate nouns is largely semantic, although not always. Example of grammatically animate nouns are:
It's common for personal masculine nouns to change gender to inanimate to create semantic neologisms, for example edytor and edytor .
There are few nouns that change meaning by changing gender outside of the masculine. They are:
Typical declension patterns are as follows:
A common deviation from the above patterns is that many masculine nouns have genitive singular in -a rather than -u. This includes all personal and animate masculines. Also masculine animate nouns have accusative singular equal to the genitive singular. Masculine personal nouns also have accusative plural equal to genitive plural, and often have nominative plural in -i.

Adjectives

Adjectives agree with the noun they modify in terms of gender, number and case. They are declined according to the following pattern :
For a table showing the declension of Polish adjectival surnames, ending in -ski/-ska or -cki/-cka, see Declension of adjectival surnames.
Most short adjectives have a comparative form in -szy or -iejszy, and a superlative obtained by prefixing naj- to the comparative.
For adjectives that do not have these forms, the words bardziej and najbardziej are used before the adjective to make comparative and superlative phrases.
Adverbs are formed from adjectives with the ending ie, or in some cases -o. Comparatives of adverbs are formed with the ending -iej. Superlatives have the prefix naj- as for adjectives.

Pronouns

The personal pronouns of Polish are ja, ty, on, ona, ono, my, wy, oni, one.
The polite second-person pronouns are the same as the nouns pan, pani and their plurals panowie, panie. The mixed-sex plural is państwo. All second-person pronouns are often capitalized for politeness, in letters etc.
For the full declension of these pronouns, see Pronouns in the article on Polish morphology. Subject pronouns can be dropped if the meaning is clear and they are not emphasized. Sometimes there are alternative forms available for a given personal pronoun in a given case:
The reflexive pronoun for all persons and numbers is się.
The possessive adjectives derived from the personal pronouns are mój, twój, jego /jej ; nasz, wasz, ich. There is also a reflexive possessive swój. The polite second-person pronouns have possessives identical to the genitives of the corresponding nouns, although there is a possessive adjective pański corresponding to pan.
The demonstrative pronoun, also used as a demonstrative adjective, is ten. The prefix tam- can be added to emphasize a more distant referent.
Interrogative pronouns are kto and co ; these also provide the pronouns ktoś/coś, ktokolwiek/cokolwiek, nikt/nic.
The usual relative pronoun is który. However, when the antecedent is also a pronoun, the relative pronoun used is kto or co. The word który also means "which" as an interrogative pronoun and adjective.
The pronoun and adjective wszystek means "all". It is used most commonly in the plural, and in the neuter singular to mean "everything". The pronoun and adjective każdy means "each, every", while żaden means "no, none".
For full information on the declension of the above pronouns, see Pronouns in the article on Polish morphology.
When the referent of a pronoun is a person of unspecified sex, the masculine form of the pronoun is generally used. When the referent is a thing or idea that does not correspond to any specific noun, it is treated as neuter.

Numbers and quantifiers

Polish has a complex system of numerals and related quantifiers, with special rules for their inflection, for the case of the governed noun, and for verb agreement with the resulting noun phrase.
The basic numerals are 0 zero, 1 jeden, 2 dwa, 3 trzy, 4 cztery, 5 pięć, 6 sześć, 7 siedem, 8 osiem, 9 dziewięć, 10 dziesięć, 11 jedenaście, 12 dwanaście, 13 trzynaście, 14 czternaście, 15 piętnaście, 16 szesnaście, 17 siedemnaście, 18 osiemnaście, 19 dziewiętnaście, 20 dwadzieścia, 30 trzydzieści, 40 czterdzieści, 50 pięćdziesiąt, 60 sześćdziesiąt, 70 siedemdziesiąt, 80 osiemdziesiąt, 90 dziewięćdziesiąt, 100 sto, 200 dwieście, 300 trzysta, 400 czterysta, 500 pięćset, 600 sześćset, 700 siedemset, 800 osiemset, 900 dziewięćset.
These numerals are inflected for case, and also to some extent for gender. For details of their inflection, see Numbers and quantifiers in the article on Polish morphology.
Thousand is tysiąc, treated as a noun. Million is milion, billion is miliard, a million million is bilion, a thousand million million is biliard, and so on.
Compound numbers are constructed similarly as in English.
When a numeral modifies a noun, the numeral takes the expected case, but the noun may not; also the gender and number of the resulting noun phrase may not correspond to that of the noun. The following rules apply:
Polish also has a series of numerals called collective numerals, namely dwoje, troje, czworo, pięcioro, and so on. These are used with the following types of nouns:
For the declension of collective numerals by case, see the morphology article section. They all follow the rule that when the numeral is nominative or accusative, the noun becomes genitive plural, and the resulting noun phrase is neuter singular. In this case the genitive noun is also used after the instrumental of the numeral.
Certain quantifiers behave similarly to numerals. These include kilka, parę and wiele, which behave like numbers above 5 in terms of the noun cases and verb forms taken. There are also indefinite numerals kilkanaście, kilkadziesiąt, kilkaset, meaning "several-teen", several tens and several hundred.
Quantifiers that always take the genitive of nouns include dużo, mało, więcej, mniej , trochę, pełno.
The words oba and obydwa, and their derived forms behave like dwa. However the collective forms oboje, obydwoje, when referring to a married couple or similar, take the nominative form of the noun rather than the genitive, and form a masculine plural noun phrase.
For the declension of all the above quantifiers, see the morphology article section.

[|Verbs]

Polish verbs have the grammatical category of aspect. Each verb is either imperfective, meaning that it denotes continuous or habitual events, or perfective, meaning that it denotes single completed events. Verbs often occur in imperfective and perfective pairs – for example, jeść and zjeść both mean "to eat", but the first has imperfective aspect, the second perfective.
Imperfective verbs have three tenses: present, past and future, the last being a compound tense. Perfective verbs have a past tense and a simple future tense, the latter formed on the same pattern as the present tense of imperfective verbs. Both types also have imperative and conditional forms. The dictionary form of a verb is the infinitive, which usually ends with -ć. The present-day past tense derives from the old Slavic "perfect" tense; several other old tenses have been dropped.
The present tense of imperfective verbs has six forms, for the three persons and two numbers. For example, the present tense of jeść is jem, jesz, je; jemy, jecie, jedzą, while the future tense of the corresponding perfective verb zjeść is zjem, zjesz etc.
The verb być has the irregular present tense jestem, jesteś, jest, jesteśmy, jesteście, są. It also has a simple future tense.
The past tense agrees with the subject in gender as well as person and number. The basic past stem is in -ł; to this are added endings for gender and number, and then personal endings are further added for the first and second person forms. Thus, on the example of być, the past tense forms are byłem/byłam, byłeś/byłaś, był/była/było; byliśmy/byłyśmy, byliście/byłyście, byli/były.
The conditional is formed from the past tense plus by, the personal endings coming after the by. For example: byłbym/byłabym, byłbyś/byłabyś, byłby/byłaby/byłoby; bylibyśmy/byłybyśmy, bylibyście/byłybyście, byliby/byłyby.
The personal past tense suffixes, which are reduced forms of the present tense of być, are clitics and can be detached from the verb to attach to another accented word earlier in the sentence, such as a question word, or an emphatic particle że. The same applies to the conditional endings.
If by introduces the clause, either alone or forming one of the conjunctions żeby, iżby, ażeby, aby, coby, it forms the subjunctive mood
and is not to be confused with the conditional clitic by. For example, "He wants me to sing" might be chce, aby śpiewał, chce, żeby śpiewał or chce, by śpiewał. Such clauses may express "in order that", or be used with verbs meaning "want", "expect", etc.
The future tense of być follows the pattern of a typical present tense: będę, będziesz, będzie, będziemy, będziecie, będą.
The future tense of other imperfective verbs is formed using the future of być together with the infinitive, or the past form, of the verb in question. For example, the future of robić has such forms as będę robić/robił/robiła, będziecie robić/robili/robiły. The choice between infinitive and past form is usually a free one, but with modals governing another infinitive, the past form is used: będzie musiał odejść "he will have to leave".
The second personal singular imperative is formed from the present tense by dropping the ending, sometimes adding -ij or -aj. Add -my and -cie for the 1P and 2P forms. To make third-person imperative sentences the particle niech is used at the start of the sentence, with the verb in the future tense or present tense. There is a tendency to prefer imperfective verbs in imperative sentences for politeness; negative imperatives quite rarely use perfectives.
Other forms of the verb are:
Polish uses prepositions, which form phrases by preceding a noun or noun phrase. Different prepositions take different cases ; some prepositions can take different cases depending on meaning.
The prepositions z and w are pronounced together with the following word, obeying the usual rules for consonant cluster voicing. Before some consonant clusters, particularly clusters beginning with a sibilant or with f/w, the prepositions take the form ze and we. These forms are also used before the first-person singular pronouns in mn-; several other prepositions also have longer forms before these pronouns, and these phrases are pronounced as single words, with the stress on the penultimate syllable.
Common prepositions include:
Common Polish conjunctions include i meaning "and", lub and albo meaning "or", ale meaning "but", lecz meaning "but" chiefly in phrases of the type "not x but y", że meaning "that", jeśli meaning "if", czy meaning "whether", kiedy or gdy meaning "when", więc, dlatego and zatem meaning "so, therefore", ponieważ meaning "because", choć/chociaż meaning "although", and aby/żeby meaning "in order to/that".
In written Polish, subordinate clauses are normally set off with commas. Commas are not normally used before conjunctions meaning "and" or "or".

Syntax

Word order

Basic word order in Polish is SVO; however, as it is a synthetic language, it is possible to move words around in the sentence. For example, Alicja ma kota is the standard order, but it is also possible to use other orders to give a different emphasis ; general word order controls theme and rheme information structure with theme coming first.
Certain words, however, behave as clitics: they rarely or never begin a clause, but are used after another stressed word, and tend to appear early in the clause. Examples of these are the weak pronouns mi, go etc., the reflexive pronoun się, and the personal past tense endings and conditional endings described under Verbs above.

Polish is a pro-drop language; subject pronouns are frequently dropped. For example: ma kota may mean "he/she/it has a cat". It is also possible to drop the object or even sometimes verb, if they are obvious from context. For example, ma or nie ma may be used as an affirmative or negative answer to a question "does... have...?".
Note the interrogative particle czy, which is used to start a yes/no question, much like the French "est-ce que". The particle is not obligatory, and sometimes rising intonation is the only signal of the interrogative character of the sentence.
Negation is achieved by placing nie directly before the verb, or other word or phrase being negated. If a sentence contains a negative element such as nigdy, nikt, etc., the verb is negated with nie as well.
The equivalent of the English "there is" etc. is the appropriate part of the verb być, e.g. jest..., są..., był..., etc., with a noun phrase in the nominative. The negative form is always singular, takes the noun phrase in the genitive, and uses ma rather than jest in the present tense: nie ma kota, nie było kota etc..
Where two concepts are equated, the particle to is often used instead of a part of być, with the nouns expressing the concepts in the nominative case. There are also sentences where to appears to be the subject of być, but the complement is in the nominative and the verb agrees with the complement: to jest..., to są..., to był..., etc.

Subjectless sentences

There are various types of sentence in Polish that do not have subjects:
The use of the cases of nouns is as follows:
  1. The nominative is used for sentence subject and for certain complements.
  2. The genitive is used for possessor and similar, for the direct object of negated verbs, as the object of some verbs and prepositions, as an object with partitive meaning and in some fixed expressions, and for nouns governed by certain numbers and expressions of quantity.
  3. The dative is used for indirect objects, to denote the party for whom something is done or the "party concerned" in certain expressions, and as the object of some verbs and prepositions.
  4. The accusative is used for the direct object of verbs that are not negated, as the object of some prepositions, and in some time expressions.
  5. The instrumental is used for the means by which something is done, for example pociągiem means "by train". It is also used for a noun complement of być, and for the complements and objects of some other verbs and some prepositions.
  6. The locative is used only as the object of certain prepositions.
  7. The vocative is used to indicate who or what is being addressed. However, with personal names, in colloquial speech, the nominative is usually used instead.
Like most Slavic languages, with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, Polish uses no definite or indefinite articles. A noun such as kot may mean either "the cat" or "a cat".
Polish does not regularly place nouns together to form compound noun expressions. Equivalents to such expressions are formed using noun-derived adjectives, or using prepositional phrases or a noun in the genitive or other case.
A group of nouns connected by a word for "and" is treated as plural. It is masculine personal plural if it contains any male person.

Adjective syntax

Adjectives generally precede the noun they modify, although in some fixed expressions and official names and phrases they can follow the noun.
Attributive adjectives agree in gender, number and case with the noun they modify. Predicate adjectives agree with the relevant noun in gender and number, and are in the nominative case, unless the subject is unspecified, in which case the adjective takes the instrumental form. The instrumental is also used for adjectival complements of some other verbs, as in czynić go mądrym.
With pronouns such as coś , if the pronoun is nominative or accusative, the adjective takes the genitive form.
Adjectives are sometimes used as nouns; for example, zielony may mean "the/a green one" etc.
Compound adjectives can be formed by replacing the ending of the first adjective with -o, as in formalno-prawny.