236 Bożena Cetnarowska
(30) a. ciężarowy samochód
cargo.adj car
‘a truck’
b. szkolny kolega
school.adj mate
‘a schoolmate’
The data in (29) and (30) indicate that adjectives such as ciężarowy ‘cargo.adj’ and
szkolny ‘school.adj’ can occur either in pre-position or post-position in their classify-
ing usage (which requires a different composition mode with the head noun). Let us
look closely at what interpretive difference (if any) results from distinct composition
modes, for instance in (30a) and (29c).- The semantic interpretation of pre-nominal and post-nominal
classifying adjectives
Some subtle differences can be pointed out when one compares the roughly synony-
mous N+CA and CA+N strings in Polish, such as those in (16)–(18), or the ones in
(30) and (29c,d).^13 There is a stylistic distinction observable here.^14 Tight units, i.e.
noun phrases with the post-head CA, are characteristic of a formal register and they
are common in specialist texts. The pre-head CAs, on the other hand, are more typical
of informal spoken Polish (see CPT 2011a, Cetnarowska & Trugman 2012).^15
The sentences in (31) below, which contain CA+N sequences, represent an infor-
mal variety of Polish, as is indicated by their syntactic characteristics (e.g. the presence- Unless otherwise stated, examples given in the next two sections come from the National
Corpus of Polish (NKJP). The relevant searches were carried out between 15 July and 31 July
2013 with the use of the Pelcra search engine. The construction of the National Corpus of
Polish (http://nkjp.pl) is described in detail by Przepiórkowski et al. (2012). - Reviewer 2 suggests that the pre-head position of the classifying adjective may result
from the influence of English, as is argued in Otwinowska-Kasztelanic (2000) and exemplified
by the CA+N order in such Polish expressions as wirtualna rzeczywistość ‘virtual reality’ or
polityczny realizm ‘political realism’. However, most CA+N phrases discussed in this section
cannot be regarded as instances of direct word-for-word translations from English, e.g.
ciężarowe auto ‘a truck’ in (31b), or cukrowa wata ‘cotton floss’ in (31c). Consequently, a dif-
ferent explanation must be found for the pre-head occurrence of such CAs. - In the balanced subcorpus of the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP), which contains
300 million segments, the phrase ciężarowy samochód (A+N) has 20 attestations, while the
expression samochód ciężarowy (N+A) occurs 283 times (so is clearly the more common and
preferred option).