Syntactic and Semantic Differences between Polish Falsehood Verbs

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to indicate the most general types of Polish falsehood verbs. The presented typology is based on their syntactic and semantic features. Depending on what kind of an argument a verb takes, the propositional or the nominal one, and if it co-occurs with the phrase w milczeniu or milcząc (≈ keeping silence) or not, we obtain four types of falsehood verbs. We can distinguish VFL+sent. verbs, which take a proposition as an argument and refer to the activity which cannot be performed in agent’s silence, like bajać, że, bajdurzyć, że, bredzić, że, bujać, że, chrzanić, że, kręcić, że. Some of them assert the speaker’s knowledge of what is said, while others implicate the speaker’s ignorance of the propositional content. There is also a group of VFS+sent. verbs, which take a proposition as an argument and can be left without an actual utterance, like blefować, że, fantazjować, że, nabrać kogoś, że, symulować, że, upozorować, że. They include verbs which tell us about bad intentions of the agent. Verbs of the next type, i.e. VFL–sent., do not take a propositional argument and do not allow silent performance, these include: koloryzować coś, minąć się z prawdą, ołgać kogoś, pleść trzy po trzy, przeinaczyć coś, wyssać z palca. They differ depending on what kind of object the agent is dealing with. In the last type, we classify VFS–sent. verbs, which do not take a propositional argument and the activities they denote can be done without an actual utterance, for example: kantować kogoś, manipulować kimś, podrobić coś, przywłaszczyć sobie, sfabrykować coś, sfałszować coś. Some of them presuppose negative evaluation of the agent while others do not.