Polskie dwumiany i wielomiany

Abstrakt

POLISH BINOMIALS AND MULTINOMIALS

The article analyzes Polish binomials (e.g., cały i zdrowy ‘safe and sound’, krótko i węzłowato ‘short and sweet’) and multinomials (mydło, szydło i powidło ‘lock, stock and barrel’), i.e., pairs or tercets of coordinate words, connected by a conjunction or without a conjunction (<na> mur beton ‘for sure’), belonging to the same word class and/or occupying the same syntactic position. The author aims to establish order in the field under study, with an eye toward determining the status of the different types of expressions discussed. As a result of research, four classes of bi- and multinomials have been isolated and described under analysis: collocations (mężczyzna i kobieta ‘man and woman’), winged words (być albo nie być ‘to be or not to be’), idiomatic language units (wóz albo przewóz ‘make-or-break’), and operational units that haven’t been noticed in the relevant literature. The binomials <coraz> lepiej i lepiej ‘better and better’, wyżej i wyżej ‘higher and higher’, później i później ‘later and later’ are products of such an operation. The realizations of another one are coordinated words: wcześniej lub później ‘sooner or later’, krócej lub dłużej ‘shorter or longer’, cieniej lub grubiej ‘thinner or thicker’, etc. Operational units represent the grammatical rather than the lexical level of language. In the article, attention was also paid to the interrelations between these four distinguished classes of expressions.