Sulla declinazione dei cognomi italiani in polacco
On the Declension of Italian Surnames in Polish

Summary/Abstract: Polish inflexional morphology, with its rich inventory of rules relating to noun declension, also involves surnames of foreign origin. Generally, these surnames should be inflected just as Polish common names or adjectives are, depending on the inflexional paradigm to which they belong. However, the declension of foreign nouns involves various complications of phonetic, orthographic, and, most of all, inflexional natures, not only because of a relatively high number of rules governing the Polish morphological system, but also because some of these rules have not yet been determined in a definitive manner and the declension itself, in some cases, is optional. For this reason, speakers of Polish, to avoid inflecting a given surname, often prefer to adopt various editorial strategies, so to speak; in their texts, however, we can still find numerous incorrect inflexional forms and inconsistent or outright wrong inflexional strategies. With this article, then, I intend to expose the detailed rules relating to the declension of Italian surnames in Polish and analyse the occurrences of these surnames in Polish texts that have appeared in Italica Wratislaviensia.

• Details
• Contents