Studia Językoznawcze

The aim of this article is the reconnaissance of the literature of the subject, preliminary reference of the general knowledge to the apocryphic material, and indicating further line of research into the ways of functioning of the passive participles in the texts of the Old Polish Apocrypha of the New Testament. The construction of the passive participles was described, and particular attention was paid to disappearance of the opposition between the passive participles of the present and past tense, to nearly complete disappearance of the word formations with -m-, as well as to the change of the value of the category of voice (passive meaning of the active participles and active meaning of the passive ones) and grammatical aspect (perfective meaning of the participles build on the stems of the imperfective verbs, and vice versa). The preliminary reconnaissance of the syntactic functions of the passive participles in the apocryphic material demonstrated that in the simple (noun) inflection they perform primarily the function of centres of predication – autonomously or as predicatives in substantive predicates, while in the complex inflection primarily perform a function of an attribute, and secondarily that of a subject or complement. The issue was also raised of probable origin of the impersonal verb forms (or impersonals) as continuants of the nominative singular neuter passive participles in the simple inflection. Detailed quantitative and qualitative study was announced, also with the use of a statistical method, after subsequent stage of the grant – grammatical annotation – is realized.