Breakdown of Prezydent oficjalnie wyznaczył go nowym dowódcą.
nowy
new
go
him / it
prezydent
the president
oficjalnie
officially
wyznaczyć
to designate
dowódca
commander
Questions & Answers about Prezydent oficjalnie wyznaczył go nowym dowódcą.
Why do we use the Instrumental case for nowym dowódcą?
The verb wyznaczyć (to designate, to appoint) is a transitive verb of appointing. In Polish, when you appoint, elect, or name someone as a certain title or role, that role takes the Instrumental case. Here, the president designated him (the Accusative direct object, go) as the new commander (the Instrumental role, nowym dowódcą).
Dowódca is a masculine noun. Why does its Instrumental form end in -ą like a feminine noun?
Masculine nouns that end in -a in their base Nominative form (like dowódca, kolega, or mężczyzna) follow the feminine declension pattern in the singular. That is why the Instrumental ending is -ą instead of the typical masculine -em. However, notice that the adjective modifying it still behaves like a normal masculine adjective, taking the standard -ym ending to become nowym.
Could we place the pronoun go at the very end of this sentence?
It would sound very unnatural. Go is a short, unstressed pronoun (a clitic). These short forms prefer to sit in the middle of a sentence and should generally never be placed at the very end or the very beginning. If you specifically needed to emphasize that it was HIM who was appointed at the end of the sentence, you would have to use the long, stressed form jego.
What is the imperfective equivalent of wyznaczył, and why is the perfective form used here?
The imperfective equivalent is wyznaczał. We use the perfective wyznaczył here because the act of officially appointing someone is being treated as a completed, successful, one-time event. Using the imperfective would imply that the president was in the middle of the process of appointing him, or was doing it repeatedly.
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