238 Bożena Cetnarowska
b. Samochód ciężarowy wymusił pierwszeństwo.
car cargo.adj forced priority
‘A/the truck failed to yield the right of way.’
c. Naczynie żaroodporne przed umyciem płynem
dish.acc heat_resistant before washing liquid.inst
należy wyczyścić gruboziarnistą solą.
should clean.perf.inf coarse-grained.inst salt.inst
‘One should clean a heat-resistant dish with coarse-grained salt before
using a washing-up liquid.’The stylistic difference between (31) and (32) correlates with a semantic distinc-
tion between the interpretation of adjectives in ‘tight units’ (N+CA) and in CA+N
sequences. When employing a tight unit, the speaker makes reference to an established
kind (or sub-kind).^17 As is proposed by Cetnarowska and Trugman (2012: 145), the
interpretation of such N+CA combinations “requires from the user the knowledge
of existing taxonomies, lack of which impedes their interpretation in a non-vacuous
manner”. These taxonomies may undergo changes when there are modifications intro-
duced in the principles of identifying representatives of each kind. For instance, before
November 2012, according to Polish tax regulations some passenger cars could be reg-
istered as trucks if they were equipped with cargo partitions. Thus, a Skoda Octavia or
a Ford Focus with the cargo partition, when approved as a goods vehicle, could be then
referred to as samochód ciężarowy (N+CA), but was unlikely to be called ciężarowy
samochód (CA+N). The latter (CA+N) nominal would rather imply a heavy-duty car
of a bigger size, often with an open cargo-carrying space.^18 A typical truck produces
considerable noise and is more difficult to manoeuvre. Such associations are implied
by the following sentences from the NKJP corpus, which contain the CA+N sequence
ciężarowy samochód.- In the formal variety of language the speaker is more likely to refer to established taxono-
mies than in the informal variety (hence the semantic difference between N+CA and CA+N
word orders in Polish implies a stylistic distinction). - The pre-nominal adjective ciężarowy ‘cargo.adj’ in ciężarowy samochód ‘truck’ brings
associations with a prototypical truck, thus being closer to qualifying (descriptive) adjec-
tives than the post-head CA. Nevertheless, it can be treated as a classifying attribute (and
not a qualifying one) since it denotes an inherent, and not an incidental, property of the
truck. Moreover, in contrast to qualifying adjectives, it is not gradable and does not form
the abstract nominalization by means of the suffix -ość (*ciężarowość ‘the property/state of
being a truck’).