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This paper is based on a study which was conducted within the research grant “Institutions in Life Stories. Multilevel Comparative Analysis of Biographical Narratives of Three Groups of Participants in Czech Society in 20th Century”. The aim of this research was both to describe one possible way of using a corpus to identify relevant differences between three types of text (in this case biographical narratives of three groups of speakers: communist officials, dissidents and so-called common people) and to serve as a basis for further analysis (be it a linguistic, sociological or historical analysis). We tried to point out typical features of the language of each group based on the most frequent expressions (nouns, adjectives etc.) and especially collocations. We also compared the corpus Příběhy (Stories) as a whole with the ORAL2008 corpus of synchronic spoken Czech, the SYN2005 corpus of synchronic written Czech and the Totalita corpus (a corpus of communist propaganda).
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The semantic aspectuality of the German present participle (participle I) is not mentioned in Grammars of German, and in specialized studies it is taken for granted that the aspect of this sort of verbal derivative (e. g. besuchende ‘visiting’) is only imperfective. In Štícha (2009) it is shown that the German attributive participle I can also be used and interpreted in the meaning of the Slavic perfective aspect. In this article, a special attention is paid to the aspectual meaning of the modal usage of the present participle with the free syntactic morpheme zu (zu besuchende ‘to be visited’). Examples of sentences containing this sort of modal attribute are selected from the corpus material (Corpus W - all free accessible corpora - of the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany) to show that the modal participle must be interpreted as perfective in most of its sentence usages. Some elementary statistics are added to strengthen the arguments.
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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.
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This contribution, which in a brief, succint and almost aphoristic way, critic-ally brings forward to the reader a number of problems of today’s corpus and computational lingu-istics as well as their unsatisfactory solutions, is trying, at the same time, to do away with a number of myths and simplified opinions in the field.
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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.
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The possibility to search electronically very large corpora of texts has opened up ways in which we can truly evaluate the rules through which grammarians have tried and continue to try to simulate natural languages. However, the possibility to handle incredibly large amounts of texts might lead to problems with the assessment of certain phenomena that are hardly ever represented in those corpora and yet, have always been regarded as grammatically correct elements of a given language. In German, typical phenomena of this kind are forms like betrögest or erwögest, i.e. second person singular of the so-called strong verbs in the subjunctive mood. Should we see them merely as grammarians’ inventions? Before doing so, we should reconsider the nature of these phenomena. They may appear to be isolated word forms but, in fact, are compact realizations of syntactic constructions, and it is the frequency of these constructions that should be evaluated, not the frequency of their specific realizations.
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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.
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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.
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