La motivation du verbe tchèque
The motivation of the Czech verb

Summary/Abstract: Although the principle of arbitrariness of the sign has dominated linguistics since the publication of Saussure's General Linguistics Course, research on iconicity has nevertheless never been abandoned, and has recently given rise to a large number of monographs and of articles, which show that there is a motivational relation between the signifier and the signified, and more broadly between the form and the meaning, in a large number of cases. In this article, we focus on the motivation of the Czech verb system, which, to our knowledge, has never been studied in detail. In this perspective, we study the categories of the aspect (imperfective, perfective and frequentative - the latter being more lexical than grammatical) and of the verbal person, which are the most important with regard to the Czech verb, and we show that they are based on two types of motivation: a phonosymbolic motivation, and a motivation of quantity. Our study thus represents a contribution to both Czech linguistics and general linguistics.

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