Se vám to nelíbí? Jednoslabičné začátky českých výpovědí / dialo-gických replik: v běžně mluvené češtině a beletristické stylizaci
Se vám to nelíbí? One-syllable words at the beginning of utterances/turns in Czech: colloquial Czech and literary stylization

Summary/Abstract: In the stylization of spontaneous, non-prepared spoken expression in contemporary literary texts (including prose, drama, and even comics), one of the most striking syntactic elements to emerge is the one-syllable word (se, si, sem, sme, ste, mě, mi, tě, ti, bych, by…) at the beginning of an utterance or turn. Sgall and Hronek (1992) call these words enclitics or proclitics, though according to J. Toman (2002) or A. Svoboda (2002) they are not clitics. However, all of these authors consider them to be the result of word-order inversion (Se mu to nepovedlo = „Nepovedlo se mu to“) or of processes of ellipsis (Bych si taky myslel = „To bych si taky myslel“). Yet there are likely also other motivations, e.g. phonetic ones related to the specific techniques of spoken expression. This type is common in our research, for example, in the communication of young people engaging in internet chat, i.e. in written texts strongly influenced by spoken expression. With the help of corpora of spoken Czech and literary texts from the Czech National Corpus (SYN2000, SYN2005, SYN2010), the authors found that these one-syllable beginnings of utterances or turns are a striking and non-detachable sign of contemporary colloquial Czech, of authentic Czech dialogues – and thus not merely a myth heavily sustained by Czech authors of literary texts, who make efforts to stylize casual expression.

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