The Infinitive Clauses Governed by a Verb of Perception in the French-Polish Dictionaries

In French, there exists a kind of infinitive subordinate clause (ICP) introduced by a perception verb like voir, regarder, entendre, ecouter and sentir. These structures, composed of a noun phrase and an infinitive verb, do not exist in Polish. This anisomorphism implies difficulties of translation and bilingual dictionaries are one of the potential sources of knowledge about the ways of translating the ICP structures into Polish. We analysed the articles of the five French perception verbs from several contemporary French-Polish dictionaries in order to verify how their authors deal with the lexicographic treatment of the ICP. The general conclusion is that the investigated structure is usually not given in all five perception verb entries of the same dictionary, and the choice of these entries seems to be random. What is more, in most of them, we only found set expressions containing the ICP clause and not free phrases. Frequently, the latter simply appear among examples of the use of the verb headword. Concerning the Polish equivalents, their choice is random too and it happens that the most frequent of them, the jak P ("as P") structure, is not given. Thus, the microstructure of the analysed entries needs to be improved.