Event Construal in Some English Middle and Reflexive Constructions and Their Polish Counterparts Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk State University of Applied Sciences in Konin, Poland ABSTRACT: The paper focuses on some medio-passive and reflexive constructions in English and their Polish counterparts. It also discusses a syntactic-semantic extension of canonical verb scenarios into explicit reflexive constructions marked with reflexive-emphatic pronouns. The study elaborates on a discussion presented in Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2000), published in the volume to mark Professor Jacek Fisiak’s fortieth anniversary as an academic. KEYWORDS: agentivity, corpus data, English, middle constructions, Polish, reflexivization 1. Introduction In the year 2000 prof. Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk and prof. Stanisław Puppel invited me to contribute a paper to their volume to celebrate prof Fisiak’s fortieth anniversary in the academia. Professor Jacek Fisiak was the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation, and later an advisor to much of my scholarly work, so I was happy to comply (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2000). The study involved a proposal concerning e x p l o i t a t i o n and e l a b o r at i o n of the category of c a n o n i c a l e v e n t s , making reference to examples from English. The present volume is published in memory of Professor Jacek Fisiak. My paper in it is an extension of the Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2000) study, in which the category of canonical events is further elaborated on and exemplified with corpus materials of some English medio-passive and reflexive constructions and their Polish counterparts. A more specific aim is to analyze processes of agentivization and reflexivization in terms of relevant event construals and their reconceptualization1 in corresponding Polish constructions. 1 Cf. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2012) for details on reconceptualization in translation.
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