"Your task is to find the exit."
Translation:Twoim zadaniem jest znaleźć wyjście.
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"Waszym zadaniem jest znaleźć wyjście" - is OK, but "Twoim zadaniem jest znaleźć TO wyjście." is more like "Your task is to find THIS exit" not 'THE exit'
Native here: It does not work, it's broken. The best transcription into English I can come up with is "Your task is find the exit." In this particular sentence structure I cannot come up with any single verb that would be grammaticaly correct. You have to use a noun in the secondary clause.
EDIT: After a break I remembered about a class of verbs that do work. It is when the task or duty given are perpetual (imperfective?) actions. But when I think of those in terms of grammar, I believe they are also treated as nouns, with the same spelling as their counterparty verbs. "ochrona" "budowa" "nauka" and so on.
For this construction, there are only several results in the corpus (http://www.nkjp.pl/poliqarp/nkjp300/query/ - search for zadanie to [pos=inf]), but I think they show it's valid, although rare and probably not something I'd advice to use.
By 'several' I mean 4-5, because some of 10 results shown use the word 'to' in a different meaning.
Why is "your task" in the instrumental case here? Is it along the lines of "jestem inżynierem"?
Because when "x jest y", either x or y has to be instrumental unless you use "to" as part of the verb. Sorry, that's not very technical, but I hope it's helpful.
I think it's because this is a special variation of the "X is Y" construction. Yes, like "jestem inżynierem" (where "inżynierem" is the Y).
For this sentence, Y is "znaleźć" which is an infinitive verb, "to find." It's not a noun and it doesn't have an instrumental form. That causes the cases to flip from what we normally see. The main noun is "task," so "task" is forced to take the instrumental case.
If you think of it as "To find the exit is your task" it becomes a little more familiar and the instrumental makes more sense to us learners. But that construction is perhaps not proper Polish.
Surely 'task' is the subject here. You have translated 'Finding the entrance is your task' In other words Znalezc wyscie should be in the instrumental or what everand zadana should be nominative.
Znaleźć is a verb, so it can't take any case. It can replace the verbal noun znalezienie.
The rule is:
If you use jest/są instead of to: [Nominative noun] is a subset of [instrumental noun].
That is why:
Twoim zadaniem jest znalezienie wyjścia.
In this sentence, finding the exit is a subcategory of task and not the other way round; this is why you can't switch the cases.
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/26552000?comment_id=36056373
If I understand things right, "twoim zadaniem" is the object of the sentence but in the place where we would think subject. And yes, it is because of the "jest."
Can every verb in infinitive form be used as subject? Are they interchangeable with gerund?