We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
The most influential achievement of corpus linguistics lies in the growing importance of context in the description of language. This is also reflected by context analysis which is introduced in this paper. Context analysis is an umbrella term for a bundle of methods sharing the same hypothesis: that all the features (form, meaning, function) of the lan-guage phenomena are mirrored by the context which they enter. It is important to em-phasise that by the term “context”, it is meant here not only one or two adjacent tokens in a particular text, but all the neighbouring units (e.g. words, lemmas, part of speech tags etc.) which co-occur with a given word in all of its instances in a corpus. The paper dis-cusses various types of context (range, type of contextual units etc.) and their effect on the analysis. By comparing contexts of distinct words or word groups we may find out what the similarities and differences are between language units, phenomena or even groups of lexemes. This type of research was conducted here to determine the relations between parts of speech.
More...
In this paper the author examines the aspectual usage of Czech verba dicendi říkat/říci when they introduce direct speech. According to the common opinion (Kopečný, 1962 – see also Forsyth, 1970 about Russian) there is a high degree o indifference in this type of situation. Data from the Czech National Corpus show on the contrary that aspectual choice is always somehow motivated in a broader context. It seems therefore that indi-fference is a mere illusion created by the observation of artificial or contextless examples.
More...
This contribution deals with the declension of Czech pluralia tantum oikonyms ending with -y in written Czech; the research was based on the SYN2005 corpus. The research focuses on two areas – firstly, feminine oikonyms with regular declension, and secondly, oikonyms with irregular declension. The corpus material contains 108 oikonyms end-ing with -y; there are 82 feminine oikonyms with regular declension and 26 irregular oikonyms. The oikonyms found in the corpus represent mostly the names of villages, towns and neighbourhoods. Irregular oikonyms can bear variant endings or doublet endings in Gpl., Dpl., Lpl. and Ipl. Tendencies and factors influencing the choice of endings in Lpl. can be objectively determined from the SYN2005 corpus material; there is a growing tendency to use the feminine variant ending with -ách instead of the doublet -ách/-ích. Dpl. and Ipl. forms are represented very rarely in the corpus, however, it can be said that written usage documents the peripheral occurrence of feminine endings (-ám, -ami) alongside the masculine endings (-ům, -ech, -ům/-ech; -y) which commonly occur in these two cases. Occurrence of the endings -ů, -Ø in Gpl. is not caused by intru-sion of feminine endings into the declension of masculine oikonyms, since both these endings are masculine. The majority of irregular oikonyms in the corpus has the original zero ending; only some names ending with -ky use the doublet ending -ů/-Ø.
More...Šárka Zikánová: Postavení slovesného přísudku ve starší češtině (1500-1620). Praha: Karolinum, 2009, 233s.
More...František Čermák, Václav Cvrček (eds.): Slovník Bohumila Hrabala. Praha: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2009, 605 s.
More...
The headword list of the Academic Dictionary of Contemporary Czech (ASSC) is mainly based on language corpora. We describe basic principles of the headwordlistmaking process: setting proportions of alphabetical sections, semiautomatical generation of a word list from a set of corpora, manual cleaning of the word list in order to detect lexicographically suitable and unsuitable items. Proportions and examples of the unsuitable items are given, e. g., foreign words, lemmatisation mistakes, abbreviations, word fragments, typing errors; alphabetical sections A–AM (mostly loanwords) and Č (mostly words of Čzech origin) are compared. We also briefly discuss the possibility of using the average reduced frequency instead of the raw frequency for the generation of the word list, and possible using of newer and larger language corpora, too.
More...
Complex sentence with chain dependence of subordinate clauses is a complex clause in which a main clause is modified by a dependent clause of the first degree of dependence, which functions as a governing clause of the second degree of dependence, etc.; chain dependence of subordinate clauses thus comes into existence. Such complex sentence is the highest grammatical unit, for which extension into depth is significant. The paper describes seven possibility of description of such complex sentences. (1) Subordinate clauses are usually distinguished by the sentence-element role and a hypotactic connective. (2) Complex sentence has different directions of extension of the chain dependence (clause order variants). (3) Contact pairs of hypotactic connectives belonging to different clauses. (4) Ellipsis of the middle subordinate clause in chain dependence. (5) Comparison between clauses of the first and second degree of dependence. (6) Transformation of complex sentences with chain dependence into a complex sentence with paratactic subordinate clauses. (7) Place of false subordinate clauses in chain dependence.
More...
There has been no systematic research into word-formation of Czech names of animals of all main taxonomic categories published so far. The word-formation analysis presented in this paper is based on about 600 names of animals drawn from the index of Czech names in the encyclopedia ZVÍŘE (ANIMAL). Some support in explaining the derivational motivation has also been found in the characteristics and photographs in internet sources. In names derived with a word-formation suffix I found 69 different suffixes, which is about one third of all suffixes of this sort that can be identified in contemporary Czech words.Different models of compounds are also described. As to prefixation, only the prefixes pa- and vele- have been found in the analyzed material. This paper also shows in details that, in many cases, the Czech name of the animal genus formally looks like a derivative from a possible base word, but in fact, it has no apparent semantic relation to that base word.
More...Petr Nejedlý a kol.: Slovotvorný vývoj deverbálních substantiv ve staré a střední češtině Praha: Academia, 2019, 416 s.
More...
The article presents the results of the research project aimed at identifying different parts of speech functions of the Czech expression což in contemporary Czech written texts. The function of a relative pronoun proved to be significantly dominant: Přišel sám, což mě překvapilo (He came alone, which surprised me). Other functions, like a particle or an interjection, are much less common (only about 2 % of occurences display them). The word což appears as a particle only in a few stable collocations: Což takhle dát si čaj? (What about having tea?); Což o to, já jim věřím, ale… (Oh, I believe them, but…). The author deals mainly with the status of the pronoun což within the Czech relative pronoun system, the frequency of its case forms and various reference types. The main language material source of the research was the representative corpus of contemporary written Czech SYN 2015.
More...(The Case of Temporal Meanings)
The system of adverbials with temporal meaning is analyzed here with specific emphasis on their surface expressions. The traditional classification for the meanings applied as responses for the question When?, Since when?, Till when?, How long?, How often? requires a more precise subcategorization with regard to systemic behavior of the adverbials. For the primary temporal expressions answering the questions When? and How long?, a system of subfunctors is proposed, while for the secondary meanings Since when?, Till when?, the corresponding functors are not splitted into subfunctors. The meanings connected with the repetition and the frequency are not discussed here as they belong to the description of the boundary between lexicon and grammar.
More...
Within the Czech declension, the pronoun týž/tentýž is a true singularity. Its codified forms are constructed in three different ways and the distribution of these forms is highly irregular. In addition, there is a fourth (uncodified) way of constructing its forms. In this paper, we aim to answer the question how the forms of the pronoun týž/tentýž are applied in present-day newspaper texts. The impetus for this paper is the article by N. Svozilová published 50 years ago (in 1970). In addition, the paper describes the competition between the pronoun týž/tentýž and its stylistically less formal equivalent ten samý.
More...Případová studie o dvou dveřích
The paper presents a corpus-based case study concerning quantification of the Czech plurale tantum dveře ‘door’ (but also of other plularia tantum). The study is a contribution to the research on language dynamism, i. e. dynamic changes in properties/behaviour of language units. According to both the authors’ intuition and the corpus data available, the plurale tantum dveře ‘door’ usually does not combine with the basic numeral dvě ‘two’ (hence dvoje dveře ‘two door’ is the only option) but quite commonly combines with basic numerals of higher numbers (tři ‘three’, čtyři ‘four’, etc.) which hereby comprise an alternative to set numerals (troje ‘three (sets)’, čtvery ‘four (sets)’, etc.). Therefore, dvě dveře ‘two doors’ is not common while tři dveře ‘three doors’, čtyři dveře ‘four doors’, etc., is common to some extent. As for other cases besides nominative and accusative, on the other hand, basic numerals of all numbers are common (dvou dveří ‘of two doors’, tří dveří ‘of three doors’, etc.). The following rationale is provided: the phrase dvě dveře ‘two doors’ is not acceptable because the numeral marks gender while the noun does not (as a result, the two forms are not compatible); the phrases dvou dveří ‘of two doors’, tři dveře ‘three doors’, tří dveří ‘of three doors’, etc., are also acceptable because neither the numerals nor the nouns mark gender. Other factors having an impact on the competition between basic and set numerals are also pointed out, especially: a) the nature of the denotate of the noun, b) the morphological type of the noun. The impact of various factors is examined via analysis of corpus data. It turns out that the (desired) ceteris paribus condition cannot be fully met as the respective factors interact with one another.
More...
Distributive verbs are a semantically significant but infrequent category in contemporary Czech. The centre of this category are several dozens of verbs with the prefix po- and with the obligatory plural object (or subject). Within the SYNv8 corpus, the author found fifty-eight of these verbs occuring in journalistic and prosaic texts. The number of tokens related to these fifty-eight lemmas has been growing slightly in recent decades (1990–2014), as well as the number of verbs with two or more prefixes among these tokens. Compared to verbs as a whole, distributive verbs are characterized by certain specifics in grammatical behavior – they more often appear in the 3rd person, in plural and in passive voice.
More...
Based on the corpus data of SYN2015, the paper explores the formal variety of processual adjectives derived from the verbs of the type “sází”. Considering the existence of the doublet -ejí/-í (3rd person, plural, indicative, present, active) – codified in stages during the 20th century in Standard Czech – it aims to verify whether this formal variety can be attested also in the case of adjectives (-ející/-ící). The results indicate major differences between the verbs with doublets codified in 1902, 1941 and 1958 on one hand and the rest of the type, where the doublets were codified uniformly in 1993, on the other.
More...
The corpus statistics show that: (a) since 1990, the conditional mood with theconjunction aniž has been on the rise; (b) the conditional mood is more frequent in journalisticand technical texts than in fiction; (c) in fiction, the share of the conditional mood variesbetween different authors; this indicates that the semantics of the conditional mood in sentenceswith the conjunction aniž loses its validity with the progress of time; (d) the conditionalmood in the clause with aniž is almost a norm in sentences containing the conditionalmood in the head clause. The indicative mood in clauses with the conjunction aniž is used orprevails in contexts which suppress the hypothetical content of the clause due to its facticity.
More...
The paper deals with the question whether contradictory oppositions occurnot only between state verbs (mít ‘have’ – chybět ‘lack’), process verbs (spát ‘sleep’ – bdít ‘beawake’, mluvit ‘speak’ – mlčet ‘be silent’) and event verbs (opustit ‘leave’ – zůstat ‘stay, remain’,vzít ‘take’ – nechat ‘leave’) but also in such cases where one verb denotes a state/processand the other verb denotes an event which terminates the respective state/process. Therecould potentially be many such pairs. The paper sheds light on three pairs of verbs of thiskind: zazlívat ‘blame’ – odpustit ‘forgive’, pamatovat si/se ‘remember’ – zapomenout ‘forget’,žít ‘live’ – zemřít ‘die’. Of them only the pair žít ‘live’ – zemřít ‘die’ can be considered contradictoryin the systemic sense. However, the categorial discrepancy between both verbs isalleviated by the fact that the respective state is conceptualized as an event. In the case of theother two pairs of verbs, the state/process verbs are conceived of as event verbs only inparticular contexts, therefore there is no contradiction in the systemic sense. The authorconsiders it probable that in Czech there are not many verbal pairs similar to the pair žít‘live’ – zemřít ‘die’.
More...
The paper represent This paper discusses the results of the pilot study on intonational patterns of questions and statements in Lithuanian. Special attention is devoted to the tone changes at the end of the intonational phrase, i.e. to the boundary tone and the pitch accent of the last word. In order to identify the main patterns, a corpus of 96 tokens (statements, questions with wh-word ‘kada’ and yes/no questions with and without interrogative word ‘ar’ read by four speakers) has been examined. F0 measurements were extracted using Praat. The audio files were annotated based on the main principles of the autosegmental-metrical phonology: high tone is marked with H, low tone – L, pitch accent – ‘*’ and boundary tone – ‘%.’ In the perception experiment, the participants were asked to identify the statements and questions (the interrogative words were removed). 21 native speakers participated in the experiment. The results have shown that the end of the statements in Standard Lithuanian is described by low tones (L* L%), whereas questions can have tones as follows: high-low (HL* L%), low (L* L%) and low-high (LH* H%). The tone patterns at the end of the questions depend on the presence or absence of the interrogation word: wh- questions are characterized by low tones at the end of phrase (L *L%), yes/no questions with an interrogative word ‘ar’ may have low (L* L%) or rising tones (LH* H%), and yes/no questions without an interrogative word end in rising (LH* H%) or falling (HL* L%) tones. The patterns with low or falling tones are common for the questions with an interrogative word and (or) focus word in a non-final position of the phrase. The results of the perception experiment allow us to draw preliminary conclusions that the high boundary tone, the interrogative word and the pitch accent of the focused word are equivalent markers of a question in Lithuanian.s a distinctive attempt to trace the development of the preposition and the adverb ‘on’ as the initial and transposed categories. The study focuses on their evolution throughout 16 historical time spans – since 850 and up to the present time. The research is based on 7 954 Old English, 2 368 Middle English, 4 251 Early Modern English examples, which have been obtained from the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and analyzed without applying any corpus software; 174 581 examples of Late Modern English from the Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, which have been processed by means of the Lancsbox software tool; and the statistical data on 7 118 454 examples of Present-Day English retrieved from the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus. The paper attests that ‘on’ is formed at the first stage (before 850) of the Old English period as the preposition and at the next stage (850–950) is transposed into the category of the adverb, which is characterized by a further slight increase in the statistics and stabilization of its correlation with the preposition ‘on’. Correlation between the categories had remained stable up to the Early Modern English period, when the category of the adverb has started its sustainable growth, which is currently being observed in the English language. The paper proves that in Early Modern English the process of functional transposition is superseded by an utterly new stage of lexicalization which leads to formation of phrasal verbs.
More...