The authors present their respective views on the development of the Czech post-war syntactic studies. Their approach is influenced by the fact that they were educated by the different syntactic schools: thus the paper is a combination of Prague’s and Brno´s views. V. Šmilauer´s Novočeská skladba (Syntax of Modern Czech, 1947) is understood as a source of the contemporary research of the Czech syntax. The paper describes the results reached by individual investigators as well as the results of the research teams. According to the authors´ opinion, Two-Level Valency Syntax (represented by F. Daneš and his close collaborators and reflected in the Czech Academic Grammar) and Functional Generative Grammar (developed by P. Sgall and his colleagues) form the main paradigms of the Czech syntax since 1960. Both theories incorporate the results of the classical Praguian functional approach as well as results of the generative paradigm. The authors conclude that the Prague‘s and Brno´s views on the development of Czech syntactic studies are not incompatible but rather complementary and that the methods of formal and corpus linguistics are attractive and useful for the young researchers.
The necessity to distinguish between ontological (cognitive, extralinguistic) content and linguistic (''literal'') meaning has its sources in European structural linguistics. The idea that the task of linguistics itself is to study language in its ''form'' rather than in its ''substance'' is further elaborated in the Prague Linguistic Circle. However, analyzing concrete language data we often face many open questions: It is not always clear how to divide the knowledge of language from the knowledge of the world, which general criteria could be used for the separation of (language) ambiguity and vagueness etc. The present contribution cannot be aimed at the solution of these non-trivial distinctions; we only present some Czech examples as a challenge for consideration, which we believe to be useful for the determination of this boundary. The examples belonging to the different phenomena of language structure are analyzed from the point of view of the asymmetry between the layer of content and the layer of meaning. The examples with different aspectual and tense forms are used as an exemplification of the asymmetry ''same content - different meanings''. The reflexive forms, dative case dependent on the verb, coreference with infinitival and other constructions serve as examples of the situation where instances of different content are not articulated as oppositions in linguistic meaning but rather display structural ambiguity. Despite of these problems, we are convinced that without keeping the distinction between linguistic meaning and cognitive content during the analysis of language data the description of the language system is impossible.
In the present paper two pairs of terms and notions are discussed as for their benefit to syntactic studies. The notions of coordination and subordination with their counterparts the parataxis and hypotaxis are studied in relation to the domain of the linguistic meaning and to the domain of language form, respectively. The asymmetry between them is studied on selected data of Czech. Czech constructions classified in Czech syntactic handbooks as hypotactical forms of coordination are analyzed. In the syntactic structure of Otec s matkou odjeli do lázní [Father with mother went to the spa] the possible plural agreement of the predicate demonstrates a hypotactical patterning of the coordination between father and mother. The “false” subordinated clauses are presented as the other example of the hypotactic coordination. On the other side, the nominal constructions introduced by the expressions místo [instead of], and the ambiguous expression kromě [beside/with exception] are excluded from the domain of asymmetry and the proposal to classify them as specific types of adverbials (a substitution, an addition, and an exception) is formulated.
In the Prague Dependency Treebank, a part of the texts from the Czech National Corpus is being annotated on several layers, including the underlying (tectogrammatical) representations. The usefulness of such a treebank is briefly characterized and a large set of topics is discussed for which further monographical research appears to be necessary. The future discussion and elaboration of these topics can be carried out much more effectively with the use of the annotated corpus, and the results thus gained may then serve to an enrichment of the descriptive framework and of the annotation procedure.
Individual values of syntactic and morphological attributes used in the syntactic annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank are discussed, as well as certain more general issues concerning the relationships between the underlying and the morphemic levels (word order, deletion and others).