A Morphological Analysis of Polish Complex Nie-Nouns: A Case of a Morphosyntactic Hybrid

The aim of this paper is to explore the thus far unstudied territory of a class of Polish hybrid complex nouns with the initial negative morpheme nie. The study seeks to determine the morphological structure of what seems to be a case of “syntax-inside-morphology” in the domain of Polish word-formation. Among a rich array of morphological structures in which the negative morpheme in question can be found, there is one word-formation type whose derivational base is, as will be argued below, a syntactic phrase. I wish to demonstrate conclusively that what appears to be sheer concatenation of morphological building blocks is, in fact, a complex noun built on a phrasal unit. This atypical combination of seemingly incompatible categories in separate grammatical domains can be referred to as a morphosyntactic hybrid. I believe that the study may have far-reaching consequences for the descriptive adequacy of the Polish word-formation system and point to new directions in the discussion on the morphology-syntax interface.