This article is concerned with “abstract rhetors”, i.e. inanimate nouns used as subjects of active verbs, in Polish and English academic texts. The few existing studies that deal with abstract rhetors in Polish indicate that their use is limited in comparison with English in both quantitative and qualitative terms. However, no suggestions have been offered so far as to the potential factors that may underlie these limitations, especially with regard to the qualitative differences. Focusing on a special type of abstract rhetors, namely active verbs used with text-denoting subjects, the article offers a comparable corpus-based analysis of Polish and English abstracts of research articles in linguistics with a view to determining their frequencies and shedding some light on the possible causes of the limited use of the structure in Polish. The results show that the use of active verbs with nouns referring to the abstracted article or its part is more than twice less frequent in Polish than in English, with considerable differences between the types of verbs employed in such contexts in the two languages. Three factors are proposed as potentially affecting the compatibility of the Polish verb with an inanimate, text-denoting noun: the type of agency, the supported metaphor/metonymy for the research article, and verb aspect/telicity.

中文翻译：

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波兰语和英语语言学研究文章摘要中带有无生命、文本表示主语的主动动词

这篇文章关注的是“抽象修辞”，即波兰语和英语学术文本中用作主动动词主语的无生命名词。现有的少数关于波兰语抽象修辞的研究表明，与英语相比，它们在数量和质量方面的使用都是有限的。然而，到目前为止，还没有就可能构成这些限制的潜在因素提出任何建议，尤其是在质量差异方面。本文着重于一种特殊类型的抽象修辞，即与文本表示主语一起使用的主动动词，对语言学研究文章的波兰语和英语摘要进行了基于语料库的可比较分析，以确定它们的频率并阐明一些限制使用波兰语结构的可能原因。结果表明，波兰语中使用主动动词和名词指代抽象冠词或其部分的频率比英语低两倍以上，两种语言在此类语境中使用的动词类型之间存在相当大的差异。提出了三个可能影响波兰语动词与无生命的、文本表示名词的兼容性的因素：代理的类型、研究文章支持的隐喻/转喻，以及动词方面/telicity。