The present paper focuses on the form of the first person present conditional as a component of explicit performative formulae (EPF), which are considered to be a means directly expressing the communicative function of an utterance. We try to demonstrate that the performative usage of verbs is not limited to indicative forms of imperfective verbs in Czech, as usually stated, but that also the form of the first person present conditional of imperfective as well as perfective verbs is used as an ordinary component of EPF. In Section 2, basic characteristics of EPF are briefly described. Two groups of verbs (verbs of assertion and verbs of appeal) are examined on the basis of language data from two corpora: from the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0 and SYN2005 corpus (Sect. 3). In Section 4, the performative function of the conditional forms of these verbs is attested by means of Austin’s test and by some other criteria described in theoretical works. We further examine how the propositional content is expressed in analyzed utterances as well as what the difference between the examined EPF with the conditional verb form and the EPF with the indicative form is.
The present study deals with Czech deadjectival derivates with the suffix -ost. In Czech linguistics, the suffix is described as a monofunctional suffix that derives names of qualities (e.g. sladkost ''sweetness''; qualitative meaning). However, as the corpus data demonstrate that the suffix is commonly used for deriving names of bearers of quality (sladkost ''sweet thing''; non-qualitative meaning) in contemporary Czech as well, we propose to consider both the names of qualities and the names of their bearers as direct deadjectival derivates with the suffix -ost. The proposal is supported by an analysis of large data from the SYN2010 corpus. The material documents that, first of all, there is a relation between the frequency of a noun with the suffix -ost and its usage in the non- -qualitative meaning and, secondly, that the existence of plural forms can be interpreted as a signal that the particular noun (except for the most frequent nouns) has a non- -qualitative meaning.