252 Artur Bartnik
Additionally, he claims that determiner-possessive combinations can indicate irony
and affection, as in (13):
(13) Ten twoj brat to zdolny facet.
that your brother is talented guy
‘that brother of yours is a talented guy’
(Swan 2002: 172)
Our corpus research confirms that determiner-possessive combinations are possible
in Polish and are amply illustrated in electronic texts. Some examples are given below:
(14) Jeżeli kiedy wydam ten
if one day publish.fut 1 sg this.sg.acc
mój dziennik, to nazwę go “Wojna i Spokój”.
my.sg.acc d i ar y.sg.acc then call.fut 1 sg it “War and Peace”
‘If I publish my diary one day, I will call it ‘War and Peace’
(PWN_3102000000008, Bobkowski Andrzej 1957: 87, ‘Szkice piórkiem:
Francja 1940–1944’)
(15) ale fajny chłopak z tego twojego synka.
but nice boy from this.sg.gen.m your.sg.gen.m son.sg.gen.m
‘but your son is such a nice boy’
(PELCRA_forumowisko.pl_414, 2005-05-11: 11,
〈www.forumowisko.pl〉)
(16) Tamten twój list był dla mnie szokiem.
that.sg.nom your.sg.nom letter.sg.nom was for me shock.inst
‘that letter of yours was a shock to me’
(IJPPAN_k70A0084, Paweł Pollak 2006: 6, ‘Kanalia’)
Just like in Old English, there seem to be no grammatical restrictions imposed on
these patterns. Both types of determiners can be combined with different forms of
possessives (cf. examples (14) and (16)). They appear in different types of texts (writ-
ten and spoken), they can modify common as well as proper nouns and can be used
with adjectives. It is difficult to compare these constructions numerically in both lan-
guages, as the corpora significantly vary: YCOE (Taylor et al. 2003) consists of 1.5
million words, while the portion of The National Corpus of Polish analysed for our
purposes comprises around 240 million words. It is, however, important to note that
determiner-possessive sequences are numerous in both languages. For example, the
search of the combination of forms ten twój ‘this your-sg’ alone yielded almost 400
tokens. If we add all the forms in the paradigms, the number will be significant.
To sum up this part of our paper, both Old English and Polish exhibit determiner-
possessive combinations, similar to other European languages. These constructions