„Kobieta z ptakiem w autobusie”. „Mężczyzna stracił przytomność”: Redundant Endophora or Necessary Supplement?

Abstract

Endophora, the phenomenon of syntax and rhetoric-related nature, enables the users of a language to connect shorter syntactic units (schematically: sentences) into the longer strings of utterances, without the necessity of constant referring in the same way to thus endophorized elements, with a possibility to exchange them for different endophoric variants. The endophoric relations (anaphora and cataphora) constitute also a range of topical issues to solve within the machine-related communication and the communication with a machine, including machine translation and automatic generation of texts. Still, it is not obvious that human users of natural languages do not experience problems related to endophora, or that there occur no changes in its techniques, perhaps to render deeper metamorphoses in the structure of language and reasoning. Available traditional sources of general character referred to in the paper do not provide ready solutions for these. This hypothesis is verified by the authors on Polish examples revealing a rather dubious character when it comes to implementation of endophora. The main emphasis is put on illustration of apparently growing trend of undesirable redundancy of certain information already present in the predicate, mostly containing clear and obligatory data on person and gender of a referent. The above mentioned feature of Polish predicates makes it possible even to omit the subject of a sentence, due to the possibility of its easy reconstruction as a conjectural subject. In recent utterances in Polish it is often the elements unambiguously referring to the gender of a referent that appear in endophoric function (as kobieta ‘a woman’ or mężczyzna ‘a man’). They have for long been present in various registers of Polish, while usually being related to the referents unknown with regard to their features other than sex or gender (i.e. in criminology). The research objective of this paper is to find out motivations supporting such choices.