Tematický infinitiv v češtině v rámci středoevropského jazykového prostoru
Topic infinitive construction in Czech within the Central European linguistic region

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents a corpus-based survey of the [Viinf Vif] construction in Czech in comparison with geographically close languages, namely Slovak, Polish, and Hungarian. Through a detailed qualitative analysis of Czech data, it points out lexical and morphosyntactic restrictions on the construction and links them to the strong tendency of the construction to be used in a specific discourse context where opposing assertions are contrasted. As an outcome, a prototypical representation of the construction in Czech is provided, drawing on theoretical concepts from Construction Grammar. Confronted with the evidence from the geographically close languages, the Czech construction is shown to impose more restrictions on the structural complexity as well as register, exhibiting e.g. frequent argument omission as well as severe restrictions on modification. In general, the paper argues in favour of geographically based cross-linguistic studies of linguistic phenomena, as such an approach can enable us to identify down both similarities and differences between similar patterns conventionalized across geographically close languages.

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