Łącznik w początkowej fazie nauki języka polskiego jako obcego

This contribution aims at providing insights on the way adult initial learners process competing copular structures in Polish as a foreign language. Within the VILLA project, 14 Italian L1 learners took a 14-hour Polish course whose input was recorded and transcribed, so as to thoroughly correlate item frequency with learner output. The study discusses the result of a question-answer task. Learners were asked to describe a referent using the appropriate copular construction and referential means (to jest + NOM, “this is” vs. on/ona jest + INSTR “he/she is”) according to the structure employed in the stimulus and to the gender of the target referent. Results show that learners seem to prefer the structure on/ona jest + INSTR, in spite of its much lower frequency in the input and greater morpho-syntactic complexity. Results are interpreted in terms of naturalness: both the pronouns on and ona and the INSTR endings are univocal with regard to gender, so that the resulting construction is maximally explicit in this respect.