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.
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).
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.