Tendencje rozwojowe w polskiej derywacji czasownikowej

Evolutionary tendencies in Polish verbal derivation

The paper presents the findings concerning evolutionary tendencies in Polish verbal derivation. The authors point out the basic factors that have shaped the image of the prefixal word formation of verbs. The most important of these factors are the aspect category, the phenomenon of prefix and word-formative root polysemy and the lexicalization processes. Word formation is subject to influences from different levels of language, which is why it is so difficult to classify the phenomena that occur in it. A look at history from a contemporary viewpoint clearly shows that the abovementioned phenomena can model the internal structure of word formation. Also, the changes undergone by unmotivated lexemes break the coherence of word-formative rules. Nevertheless an analysis of materials allows the individuation of fairly distinct evolutionary lines, particularly visible when observing basic word-formative and cognitive categories. As it turns out, even though the way of conveying categorial information changes throughout history, the set of these categories remains fairly stable.