General consensus in linguistics is that language context (or ''co-text'') plays crucial role in describing linguistic properties of language items. Isolated units are, as a corollary to this statement, inherently ambiguous (polysemous and/or polyfunctional). In this paper we describe the most influential forces leading to disambiguation of language units, specifically the role of n-gram length on its ambiguity.
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 language phenomena are mirrored by the context which they enter. It is important to emphasise 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 discusses 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.
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.
Among the results of Russian influence on Czech in the 19th century was the emergence of an active past participle in -(v)ší in Czech. Although not welcomed by all grammarians, this participle continued its existence in Czech until today, becoming mainly a device of archaic and bookish style. In the actual work, the occurence oft the active past participle in -(v)ší in the largest partial corpus of the Czech National Corpus containing journalistic texts is studied. A main result of the study is that apart from a large number of examples from different verbs which show the active past participle on -(v)ší in the studied corpus once or twice and where it is indeed a device of archaic and bookish style, sometimes even of irony and humor, there is a small group of (mainly intransitive) verbs, where this participle functions with considerable frequency in stylistically more neutral contexts of written Standard Czech as the only participle (sometimes as a - stylistically more marked - variant of a more numerous active past participle in -l). In theses cases, it remains overwhelmingly a syntactically unextended direct attribute of a noun. Such active past participle in -(v)ší is to be found most often in sports coverage where it is built from a set of verbs with terminological function.
The long-time process of paradigm levelling in the present-tense third-person plural of the IV-verb-class has been in progress since the 17th century at least. The aim of this paper is to describe how the concurrence between the standard (prosí, trpí, sázejí) and non -standard forms (in particular prosejí/trpějí and sází) manifested itself in the works by Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997). The inquiry into Hrabal‘s selected works (the sample contains 20 works written between 1938 and 1995) proves a context-bound prosejí/trpějí incidence as well as a rather less frequent incidence of the sází form.
The aim of the article is to present an analysis of variant endings -i and -é. The research was carried out on the base of Czech National Corpus SYN2005. The ending -i is a variant of ending -é in the standard language (it amounts to 4 %). According to the corpora examination, the ending -i can be mainly found in the names of followers and members of social and political movements and institutions. No occurence or sporadic occurrence of the ending -i can be found in names of followers of religious views, suppor-ters of religious movements and members of sects, the names of specialists and sportsmen. The occurence of the form -i depends on the various factors: linguistical layer, semantical group that the word belongs to, type and frequency of the word, context and a text.