Ke slovu vězenkyně
On the Czech word vězenkyneě ‘female prisoner’

Summary/Abstract: The paper begins by documenting the surprisingly frequent occurrence of the Czech non-codified form vězenkyně (a variant of the codified form vězenkyně), showing that the ratio of these two forms in 4,225- billion-word corpus SYN v7 is about 3:1 (ARF = 2.6:1) in favor of the codified form vězenkyně (Section 1). Given this background, it further addresses the question of why the non-codified form vězenkyně actually occurs and why it is spreading (Section 2), then undertakes the question of (how to determine) its normativity or correctness (Section 3.1) and finally comments on the procedure of its possible codification (Section 3.2). The paper concludes with a sketch of an answer to the question of the correctness of form vězenkyně for language counselling purposes and argues that this currently non-codified form should not be treated as incorrect (Section 4).

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