Active verbs with inanimate, text-denoting subjects in Polish and English abstracts of research articles in linguistics

Abstract This article is concerned with “abstract rhetors”, i.e. inanimate nouns used as subjects of active verbs, in Polish and English academic texts. The few existing studies that deal with abstract rhetors in Polish indicate that their use is limited in comparison with English in both quantitative and qualitative terms. However, no suggestions have been offered so far as to the potential factors that may underlie these limitations, especially with regard to the qualitative differences. Focusing on a special type of abstract rhetors, namely active verbs used with text-denoting subjects, the article offers a comparable corpus-based analysis of Polish and English abstracts of research articles in linguistics with a view to determining their frequencies and shedding some light on the possible causes of the limited use of the structure in Polish. The results show that the use of active verbs with nouns referring to the abstracted article or its part is more than twice less frequent in Polish than in English, with considerable differences between the types of verbs employed in such contexts in the two languages. Three factors are proposed as potentially affecting the compatibility of the Polish verb with an inanimate, text-denoting noun: the type of agency, the supported metaphor/metonymy for the research article, and verb aspect/telicity.