A proposito di quantificatori indefiniti di massa in polacco

The present paper examines substandard Polish constructions in which the quantifiers kupa ‘a lot’, masa ‘mass’ and połowa ‘a half’ in Subject function occur in the Accusative case (followed by the referential noun in the Genitive) and take neuter singular verb agreement: Kupę ludzi zebrało się na placu, ‘a lot of people gathered in the square’. These constructions are generally considered proof of the defective declension of numerals, namely their lacking the Nominative case. Diachronically, they can be considered instances of an ancient «Accusative of quantity», witnessed in different Slavic (and non Slavic) languages till the 16th century. In this paper, relying on a large amount of occurrences taken from the Polish corpus Poliqarp and from the Pl TenTen (see the corpus software SketchEngine), a qualitative analysis of the contruction is carried out. A classification of the referential nouns following the quantifier shows that they are mostly animate and collective nouns and refer to groups of indefinite individuals, a class of nouns that, together with the quantifier, defines subjects as characterized by weak agentivity. The verb also shows a large range of characterics: both transitives and intransitives occur, mainly unaccusative; from the lexical-actional point of view, they show a large diversity as well, which thing does not allow a univocal explanation of the construction. The indefinite quantifier, the most relevant element in the construction, is not only characterized by weak agentivity, but is also placed in the low part of the animacy hierarchy: all these factors conflict with the prototypical subject’s profile (+animacy +agentivity) and predispose it to the thematic role of Patient, encoded in case-sensitive languages by accusative case marking, so that our construction can be considered an instance of phrases in which the atypical subject is encoded as the typical object.