Spanish to Polish: adding no can require a different object form in Polish
La pizza stays unchanged in the Spanish negative
Spanish Me gusta la pizza and No me gusta la pizza keep the noun phrase la pizza unchanged. Negation adds no and reverses the statement of liking; it does not put pizza into a new morphological case. Polish can require a different form of the object when the corresponding liking verb is negated.
Mateusz Gaze’s discussion of language teaching contrasts Polish lubi pizzę with nie lubi pizzy. The positive object is accusative; the negated construction uses genitive. The change from pizzę to pizzy does not mean that the subject suddenly dislikes several pizzas. It is a grammatical case change within the illustrated negative pattern.
Spanish and Polish organise the liking statement differently
In the ordinary Spanish gustar construction, la pizza is the grammatical subject and me identifies the experiencer. In the Polish lubić construction, the liked thing is the object. This difference helps explain why the Polish negative can affect a noun that Spanish leaves unchanged in these examples. The target is not merely adding a separate translation of no to an otherwise identical clause.
For a restaurant conversation, a Spanish customer can affirm a liking and then correct it with No me gusta la pizza. The Polish correction needs its appropriate object form. Keeping the positive Polish form solely because the Spanish noun has not changed would imitate the source’s morphology while missing the target construction.
Nor should a reader take the different Polish ending as evidence that the translator changed the food. The lexical item still concerns pizza. The disagreement is about liking it, not about replacing one dish with another. Spanish makes that reversal conspicuous through no; Polish can show it both through negation and through the object’s case.
Not every word after a negative becomes genitive
Gaze explicitly identifies the overgeneralisation “always use genitive after nie” as an inadequate explanation. The relevant relationship is between negation and a direct object otherwise appearing in the accusative. A negative sentence can contain many other phrases whose form is not determined by that same rule.
Compare the Spanish meanings “I do not like pizza” and “I do not work in the pizzeria.” Both contain negation and related food vocabulary, but the second places the pizzeria inside a location phrase. It would be unjustified to apply the object rule just because a noun follows the negative somewhere in the target sentence.
For the liking example, the concrete comparison is therefore between positive and negative Polish object constructions, not between the positions of words after Spanish no. Preserve the person’s preference, the food referred to, and the negative scope. A changed Polish noun ending can be precisely what keeps the Spanish meaning intact, while a mechanical copy of the positive form can make the target object form inappropriate.
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