An Innovative Methodology for Learning Polish Inflection

This book introduces an innovative, practically oriented methodology for describing the inflectional patterns of Polish nouns, adjectives and adverbs. It then employs this methodology for describing the full inventory of inflectional paradigms for the selected parts of speech, and richly supplements each paradigm with illustrative examples. This book takes up where typical descriptive grammars leave off, supplementing their valid but often difficult to apply rules with a more direct, less abstract presentation of the material. Formally, the book is divided into two parts. Part I provides background about the morphology of Polish, as well as introducing and motivating the methodology of description. Part II instantiates that methodology, presenting the inflectional paradigms and lists of sample members in the general style of a reference manual. One aim of the work is to demystify the difficult, often idiosyncratic aspects of Polish inflection by stating plainly what factors affect the choice of inflectional endings for every class of word. Another aim is to provide students and teachers with sufficient practice material to drill each pattern to the point where producing correct word forms becomes automatic.