Three Distributive Elements in Polish (without Missing Lexical Generalisations)

Przepiórkowski 2010 argues that there are in fact two different functional lexemes po in Polish: a preposition, exemplified by (1), and an adnumeral operator (in the sense of the classification of functional parts of speech in Polish by Grochowski 1997), exemplified by (2). The main difference between them is that the distributive preposition po assigns the locative case, which is a strictly prepositional case in Polish, and the adnumeral operator po is transparent to any case assignment mechanisms, i.e., the accusative case in (2) is assigned to the direct object of dałem ‘gave’. The main reason for distinguishing such an adnumeral operator po is that it may occur with numeral phrases in cases other than the previously noticed accusative, as shown by the marginal but attested dative example (3) below: