This article presents a concise overview of the achievements of synchronic research in the field Slavic linguistics carried out in Poland. Due to an enormous range of research topics, the author had to narrow her attention to selected grammatical phenomena, namely morphology (excluding word formation) and syntax, as well as to limit the scope of the analysis to books and monographs, to the exclusion of publications of a different nature.
On the basis of selected subfields in linguistics, the author describes some general trends and tendencies concerning both the choice of a theoretical framework as well as the subject matter. She distinguishes among three periods for which she seeks to determine the dominant features.
The analysis shows that during the last 60 years, and especially since the 1970s, Slavic linguistics has seen a steady growth and a search for new solutions in the field of grammar research. The growth is accompanied by an ever-increasing potential for contact with the trends occurring in global linguistics. However, one should not underestimate the achievements of Polish theoretical linguists, slavicists and specialists in Polish Studies, whose research findings encompass a detailed description of a wide range of linguistic issues and cover considerable language data.
The review covers Ruselina Nicolova’s The Bulgarian Grammar. This is a revised version of Bǔlgarska gramatika. Morfologiia (Sofiia 2008) edited in English by Frank & Timme (Berlin 2017). This outstanding achievement is appraised highly by the review author. The review compares the new work with an earlier academic morphology of Bulgarian (Gramatika na sǔvremenniia bǔlgarski knižoven ezik, t. 2: Morfologiia, Sofiia 1983). It concludes that the Grammar of R. Nicolova makes important progress in semantically and functionally oriented type of Bulgarian linguistic description as well as that publication of this study translated to English is important because it provides a widened reception of the work.
The component of the cause for the emotional state of the person experiencing the emotion is built into the structure of the class of verba sentiendi. Most emotive verbs can be classed as P(x, q) predicates, where q is the position of the propositional argument in which the content qualifying the causal component is expressed. The syntactic characteristics of sentences (conjunctions, prepositions) often do not communicate unequivocally the causal function. This paper demonstrates the existence in languages of contextual syntactic conditions which foster the use of explicit exponents of causality (e.g., Pol. ponieważ / bo // z powodu; Bulg. защото / понеже // поради / заради / по повод), appearing in alteration with the exponents of cohesion typical of the given verb. Also brought to attention is the use in sentence structures of other lexical means serving a similar function, like Pol. wynikający / płynący; Bulg. причинен / предизвикан. In conclusion it is stated that the research which takes into account the semantic structure of the predicate allows for analyzing phenomena that are usually not included in descriptions of case government of verbs.