The Czech active past participle in -(v)ší in contemporary journalistic texts Cover Image

Příčestí minulé činné na -(v)ší v dnešních českých publicistických textech
The Czech active past participle in -(v)ší in contemporary journalistic texts

Author(s): Markus Giger
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Applied Linguistics, Computational linguistics, Descriptive linguistics
Published by: AV ČR - Akademie věd České republiky - Ústav pro jazyk český
Keywords: Czech; verb; morphology; syntax; participle

Summary/Abstract: Among the results of Russian influence on Czech in the 19th century was the emergence of an active past participle in -(v)ší in Czech. Although not welcomed by all grammarians, this participle continued its existence in Czech until today, becoming mainly a device of archaic and bookish style. In the actual work, the occurence oft the active past participle in -(v)ší in the largest partial corpus of the Czech National Corpus containing journalistic texts is studied. A main result of the study is that apart from a large number of examples from different verbs which show the active past participle on -(v)ší in the studied corpus once or twice and where it is indeed a device of archaic and bookish style, sometimes even of irony and humor, there is a small group of (mainly intransitive) verbs, where this participle functions with considerable frequency in stylistically more neutral contexts of written Standard Czech as the only participle (sometimes as a – stylistically more marked – variant of a more numerous active past participle in -l). In theses cases, it remains overwhelmingly a syntactically unextended direct attribute of a noun. Such active past participle in -(v)ší is to be found most often in sports coverage where it is built from a set of verbs with terminological function.

  • Issue Year: 2010
  • Issue No: 2
  • Page Range: 3-23
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: Czech