English-sourced ordinal superlatives in contemporary Polish: An argument for the usefulness of syntactic loans

Abstract

This article raises the question whether syntactic loans can be useful in the recipient language, i.e. whether they can exhibit advantages over their native counterparts. Polish ordinal superlatives (OSs), such as drugi najwyższy budynek (w mieście) ‘the second tallest (building in town)’, serve as the main source of examples, but two other syntactic loans are also briefly discussed in order to strengthen our position. It is not our aim to trace the history of OSs in Polish nor to provide their comprehensive description, but since they have been much underresearched, we have made preliminary queries in corpora and digital libraries to examine their structure, meaning, and origin. These queries suggest that Polish OSs were borrowed from German in the second half of the 19th century, yet their current abundance in Polish is due to the influence of English. We have put our research in the context of language contact studies and analysed the pros and cons of Polish OSs compared with their native counterparts. We have found contact-induced Polish OSs to show some advantage over their native equivalents, but to occasionally interfere with formally identical native contructions, and make the message potentially ambiguous. A further conclusion is that syntactic loans can be useful in the recipient language.