Polnisch-dänische Äquivalenzbeziehungen im Bereich der Vergangenheitstempora

The paper attempts to present an account of the interrelations between aspect and tense in Polish and Danish sentences expressing past time meaning. The starting-point of the comparative analysis is the view that different languages do not use the same morphosyntactic means for representing a category. A grammatical category is always a mapping between particular formal means and particular meanings (or functions). With reference to Czarnecki (1998) the author distinguishes between the functional-semantic category aspectuality and the formal category aspect. According to this view there are different formal means of expressing the aspectuality: morphological, syntactic and lexical. The Polish aspect is to be defined in grammatical terms, whereas its Danish counterpart rather in lexical-semantic ones. Correspondingly, tense and aspect are very closely connected with each other in Polish.