240 Bożena Cetnarowska
require encyclopedic knowledge for their interpretation. Thus, a speaker can easily
find a contrast set with the nominal bawełniana sukienka ‘cotton.adj dress’. It can be
compared, for instance, with wełniana sukienka ‘woollen dress’, kretonowa sukienka
‘cretonne.adj dress’, koronkowa sukienka ‘lace.adj dress’, lniana sukienka ‘linen.adj
dress’, or jedwabna sukienka ‘silk.adj dress’.^19 The same situation obtains in the case
of the nominal szkolny kolega ‘school.adj mate’. It can be juxtaposed with, among oth-
ers, kolega z pracy (lit. friend from work) ‘workmate’, kolega z drużyny ‘teammate’, or
kolega z wojska ‘army mate’, since it is not difficult to find various life domains in which
people can form close relationships.
The next section will demonstrate another factor determining the pre-head or
post-head position of adjectives in Polish, namely their discourse status.^20- Information structure and the placement of classifying adjectives
I will argue below that in Polish the pre-head placement of a classifying adjective
can be dictated by the requirements of information structure,^21 i.e. the identification- Adjectives denoting material a given object is made of, for instance bawełniany ‘cotton.
adj’, wełniany ‘woollen.adj’ or lniany ‘linen.adj’, are treated as qualifying modifiers, among
others, by Szymańska (2000) and Tabakowska (2007). However, they are recognized here as
classifying modifiers. Similarly to the adjective ciężarowy ‘cargo.adj’, mentioned in the pre-
vious note, they denote inherent properties of objects denoted by head nouns. They are not
gradable and do not derive abstract nominalizations by means of the suffix -ość. They appear
to be closer to qualifying modifiers than other classifying adjectives (such as jądrowy ‘nuclear’
in fizyka jądrowa (lit. physics nuclear) ‘nuclear physics’) since they are intersective and can be
used predicatively, due to the availability of contrast sets (see Cetnarowska & Trugman 2012). - Bouchard (2002: 114) shows that the choice between pre-nominal and post-nominal
position of French adjectives can be determined by information structure requirements, e.g. it
can result from their anaphoric usage. The influence of Theme-Rheme structure on the order
of constituents in Polish noun phrases is discussed briefly in Topolińska (1984: 384–386). - For the combinations of nouns and adjectives discussed in this section, the A+N order is
less common than the N+A order. The numbers in the brackets indicate the occurrences of a
given A+N/N+A sequence in the full NKJP corpus: naturalny nawóz (40) – nawóz naturalny
(66) ‘natural fertilizer’, sztuczny nawóz (5) – nawóz sztuczny (32) ‘artificial fertilizer’, drogowe
wypadki (5) – wypadki drogowe (975) ‘road accidents’, policyjne patrole (440) – patrole poli-
cyjne (493) ‘police patrols’, kreskowym kodem (3) – kodem kreskowym (172) ‘(with) a bar code’,
wielkanocne śniadanie (140) – śniadanie wielkanocne (211) ‘Easter breakfast’.