THE ETYMOLOGY, DEVELOPMENT AND OLDER FUNCTIONS OF THE POLISH ŻE IN THE HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

The article aims to describe the etymology and development of the Polish word że that can play various functions in the contemporary Polish language. It is used as a particle added to the forms of imperative, questioner, as a complementizer, and lastly as a part of such items like conjunctions, discourse markers, metapredicative operators, etc. It is assumed that the primary and inherited function of the item in question is to stress, strengthen and even confirm the element of communication to which it is syntactically and functionally linked. Reflexes items derived from że or compound with że were formed in the process of various transformations. One of these processes is univerbation of an anaphor and the particle. Most etymologists derive the complementizer że from the Proto-Slavic compound (or univerbation) *jьže, however, it is assumed in the article that the base of the complementizer is the neuter anaphor *je. The path of grammaticalization is reconstructed as follow: amplifying/emphatic particle (*že) > compound of a anaphoric pronoun and particle with the semantic value of ‘this one’ > relative connector with the semantic value of ‘which one/that is’ > expression of a dependent predication that announces the speech act ‘this one that’ > complementizer ‘that.’ The chain explains the mechanisms of forming the Polish complementizer as well as its polyfunctionality in the Old Polish language.