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Jakub Arbes was a well-known Czech writer who died in 1914 and is known as the creator of a specific sort of short novel, called the romaneto. His work, however, is written in a language which is not completely understandable to the contemporary reader. Between the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century the Czech literary language changed rapidly and significantly in its morphology (e.g. the forms of noun cases), syntax (e.g. the structure of the passive), the lexicon (the meanings of many words and the styles ascribed to them), as well as word order rules. Supposedly, the classical literary Czech language changed much more substantially than did English, French or German during this period of time. But the reception of the classic Czech literature in the public and among literary historians has not followed this evolution of language as far as the classical Czech literary canon is concerned. Contrary to evident facts, most of the public and the literary historians have resisted the need to translate this outdated system of Czech into the new system of our time. The inevitable result will be the relegation of this literature to the status of museum piece. This article is a first step on the path to a new reception of this outdated Czech literary language.
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In this article, we introduce the Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Czech. The syntactic and semantic annotation of this corpus has led to the expansion of PDT-Vallex, a valency lexicon of Czech verbs, which has previously been linked only to the annotation of written texts. The expansion of the lexicon consisted of several steps: (i) new verbs were added to the lexicon; (ii) new meanings and new valency frames were added to verbs that had already been included in the lexicon; valency frames that had already been part of the lexicon were enriched with (iii) new participants (actants) and (iv) new formal realizations of participants (actants). All the above mentioned enrichments are (a) unmarked and based only on the addition of a new verb, a new meaning, a new participant (actant) or a new form, however, (b) some of them are influenced by the typical characteristics of spoken language. It would be almost impossible to find some of the verbs, some of the meanings, participants or forms in a written text. We believe that verbs in spoken language tend to exhibit different valency behavior than verbs in written texts. In this article we attempt to draw more general conclusions on the valency behavior of verbs in spoken language.
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This article treats German constructions with es in the function of formal object, their structures and equivalents in Czech. It tries to relate German structures with formal object to their Czech equivalents by using the referential properties of the formal object occurring in the German structure. The research is based on parallel language data extracted from the Czech-German Corpora InterCorp and ČNPK.
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In the stylization of spontaneous, non-prepared spoken expression in contemporary literary texts (including prose, drama, and even comics), one of the most striking syntactic elements to emerge is the one-syllable word (se, si, sem, sme, ste, mě, mi, tě, ti, bych, by…) at the beginning of an utterance or turn. Sgall and Hronek (1992) call these words enclitics or proclitics, though according to J. Toman (2002) or A. Svoboda (2002) they are not clitics. However, all of these authors consider them to be the result of word-order inversion (Se mu to nepovedlo = „Nepovedlo se mu to“) or of processes of ellipsis (Bych si taky myslel = „To bych si taky myslel“). Yet there are likely also other motivations, e.g. phonetic ones related to the specific techniques of spoken expression. This type is common in our research, for example, in the communication of young people engaging in internet chat, i.e. in written texts strongly influenced by spoken expression. With the help of corpora of spoken Czech and literary texts from the Czech National Corpus (SYN2000, SYN2005, SYN2010), the authors found that these one-syllable beginnings of utterances or turns are a striking and non-detachable sign of contemporary colloquial Czech, of authentic Czech dialogues – and thus not merely a myth heavily sustained by Czech authors of literary texts, who make efforts to stylize casual expression.
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Both historical and recent developments of quantitative research in linguistics brought out a great amount of data without a unifying method. The older data have been computed mainly by hand from limited samples of shorter texts, with limited possibilities of data combinations. Newer data based on large corpora offer a great number of quantitative characteristics even in the most different combinations, but they have been mainly extracted from heterogeneous text materials. Statistically, the older data can be considered as less exact. New data, with respect to enormous extent of corpora, can be considered as most exact. Therefore, problems arise not only because of the above mentioned methodological disparities of old and new approaches of computation, but also because of different details studied or because of limited possibilities of direct comparison. Deeper statistical and probabilistic questions arise too, and their discussion should not be ignored.
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The use of bohemisms in present-day Slovak is being increasingly discussed not only among Slovak linguists, but also by the lay public. Using the language data in the Slovak national corpus and comparing the contact (KV) and non-contact (NV) variants, the author seeks to prove the validity of the opinion that bohemisms are spreading in Slovak to a more than acceptable extent, i.e. above all at the expense of the original Slovak vocabulary.The examined sample contained 306 bohemisms (i.e. KV) and non-contact variants; another part of the analysis consisted of comparing the attributive extension of the pronouns nič and niečo by a postponed adjective in genitive (bohemism) and in accusative/nominative (NV, original variant) – tested with 150 adjectives.Using frequency distribution as basis, we determined the quantitative relation between the contact variant (bohemism) and its non-contact counterpart. According to the level of competition we defined 3 groups. Group I: the non-contact (original) variant prevails over a bohemism; group II: the bohemism and the non-contact variant exist next to each other in a balanced ratio; group III: the bohemism has a higher frequency than the non-contact variant.The established values have shown that a considerable amount of the bohemisms we followed on one hand covers a not neglectable space but – with a few exceptions – bohemisms do not push out the original variants into the margin of the language system.
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The paper deals with the identification of the dative/non-dative interpretation of a non-prepositional noun (the head noun in a prepositional group) in a rule-based automatic morphological disambiguation of Czech sentences. Based on the valency considerations including syntactic functions of the complements of verbs (these functions being an object or an adverbial) and resulting in the lists of verbs having / not having object dative valency, negative and positive non-heuristic (safe) as well as heuristic rules are presented. The negative rules assign a noun a non-dative interpretation using a list of verbs that cannot tolerate a dative noun in their close vicinity, whereas the positive ones specify a given noun as being in the dative case on the basis of the verbs having an object dative valency, an object being either the only object of the verb, or its second indirect object. The paper deals only with the non-prepositional nouns which are much more difficult to disambiguate than the prepositional ones.
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