Il sistema nominale italiano e polacco a confronto: riflessioni sulle categorie grammaticali di genere e caso
The Nominal Systems of Italian and Polish in Comparison: Some Remarks on Gender and Case as Grammatical Categories

Summary/Abstract: The present study features a description and comparison of the Italian and Polish nominal systems. Our tertium comparationis are two grammatical categories: gender and case. Gender is morpho-syntactically coded in both languages; case, however, is morphologically coded only in Polish, while in Italian it is predominantly expressed by the use of prepositions. Focusing on the noun class, we contrastively examine the ways and means used to express the two grammatical meanings. In particular, we compare grammatical meanings expressed by morphological and syntactic cues. As a multifaceted category, grammatical gender classifies Italian and Polish nouns and co-regulates the morpho-syntactic agreement between sentences’ constituents (controller-target relation), contributing to the decoding of an internal text structure. The morphological case variation of Polish nouns (inflection) is often reinforced by syntactical markers; thus, case-coding in Polish occurs both in synthetic and analytic ways. In contrast, Italian uses only analytic means to mark the grammatical meaning of case. The two linguistic systems under examination exhibit a similar formal organisation and expressive cues but apply them in different proportions.

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