74 Anna Bondaruk
The sentences in (20) and (21) clearly indicate that neither the singular nor the plural
1st or 2nd person pronoun is allowed in predicational copular clauses with to. In this
way, the 1st and 2nd person pronouns clearly contrast with 3rd person ones, as can be
seen in (22) and (23) below:
(22) On to dyrektor.
he.nom cop manager.nom
‘He is a manager.’
(23) Oni to dyrektorzy.
t h e y.nom cop managers.nom
‘They are managers.’
The person restriction present in Polish to-predicational clauses has only been
noted in the literature by Wiśniewski (1990: 113) and Hentschel (2001). However,
it is worth noting that the ban on 1st and 2nd person subjects in to-predicational
clauses in Polish is not absolute. For some native speakers, the grammaticality con-
trast between (20) and (21) on the one hand and (22) and (23) on the other hand is
rather weak, and for some, sentences such as (20) and (21) are fully acceptable on a
par with (22) and (23). Consequently, it seems that the person restriction mentioned
above is subject to speaker variation in Polish. The question is why there should be
speaker variation in this respect. A tentative hypothesis we would like to entertain
here is that those native speakers who accept (20) and (21) interpret these sentences
as equative, which is possible on account of the fact that Polish lacks articles to signal
definiteness or indefiniteness. Therefore, (20) and (21) can be interpreted in Polish
as either ‘I am a manager/You are a manager’ or as ‘I am the manager/You are the
manager’. It is the latter interpretation which overrides the person restriction in sen-
tences (20) and (21), as equatives are not sensitive to the person restriction at all (cf.
(25) and (26) below).
The person restriction operative in to-predicational clauses is taken by Bondaruk
(2012, 2013b) to be an embodiment of the Person-Case Constraint, which is a univer-
sal condition regulating the distribution of marked person features in certain contexts
(cf. Bonet 1991, 1994) in particular in the double object construction.^14 To account
for the data such as (20) and (21) above, Bondaruk (2012, 2013b) follows Richards’
(2005: 383) approach to the PCC, for whom it is “a requirement that certain types- The exact formulation of the PCC, provided by Bonet, is reproduced in (i) below:
(i) Person-Case Constraint (PCC)
If dat then acc-3rd. (Bonet 1994: 36)