In the existential sentences of Slavonic languages we can find some interesting deviations from the basic type of Indo-European sentences, ie. "Nominative + concordant Verb", for instance Genitive of negation; in some, especially South Slavonic languages there are examples of the main nominal part of positive existential sentence (ie. name of the existing entity) in Genitive or even (as in Slovenian povsod jo je) in Accusative. These deviations can be of interest for the study of the development of Indo-European syntax, as Miklosich and Potebnya already in the 19th century observed. Relevant in this aspect also is the opposition between autosemantic (existential or possessive) esse and (zero or non zero) copula. This phenomena are here studied from the standpoint of the general opposition between polymorphic and monomorphic structures of the syntactical system.
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 presents and discusses the results of an experiment testing the validity of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (Grodzinsky 1989, 2000) in Czech. The Trace Deletion Hypothesis (= TDH) was proposed to account for a receptive syntactic deficit in Broca’s aphasics that involves structures containing transformational operations such as the passive. According to the assumptions of the TDH, in passive constructions Broca’s aphasics fail to assign a semantic θ-role to the derived subject syntactically, so they assign it the Agent θ-role by linear consideration (Default Principle), which results in a structure with two potential Agents. This strategy is supposed to lead to the chance performance of Broca’s aphasics in these structures, as they are forced to guess the distribution of the Agent and the Patient θ-roles. The results of our experiment, however, do not support the TDH-proposal: out of the six tested subjects, only one performed at chance. The error rate for reversible passive structures in Czech was 33.34%, which corresponds to an above-chance performance. Given these results, the validity of the TDH is called into question, also with respect to the development of the generative theory itself., In diesem Artikel werden Ergebnisse eines Experiments präsentiert und diskutiert, in dem die Validität der sogenannten Spurentilgungshypothese (Trace Deletion Hypothesis – Grodzinsky, 1989, 2000) für das Tschechische überprüft wurde. Die Spurentilgungshypothese (= STH) wurde vorgeschlagen, um rezeptive syntaktische Defizite von Strukturen mit Transformationsoperationen (z. B. das Passiv) zu erklären, die bei Patienten mit Broca-Aphasie auftauchen. Beim Verständnis von Passivkonstruktionen misslingt den Broca-Aphasikern laut der STH die Zuordnung der semantischen θ-Rolle zum syntaktisch derivierten Subjekt. Stattdessen stützen sich die Broca-Aphasiker bei der Zuweisung der Agens θ-Rolle auf die lineare Abfolge der Satzglieder (Default Prinzip), was dazu führt, dass die Struktur aus Sicht der Aphasiker zwei potentielle Agens hat. Diese Strategie führt zu einer zufälligen Wahl, da Broca-Aphasiker die Verteilung zwischen den Agens und Patiens θ-Rollen raten müssen. Die Ergebnisse des hier vorgestellten Experiments unterstützen die Gültigkeit der STH-Hypothese nicht: Von sechs getesteten Probanden wies nur ein Proband eine zufällige Verteilung der semantischen Rollen auf. Die Fehlerrate für reversible Passivkonstruktionen im Tschechischen lag bei 33,34 % – dies entspricht einer überzufälligen Leistung der Probanden bezüglich der Zuordnung der semantischen θ-Rollen. Angesichts dieser Resultate muss die Validität der STH-Hypothese in Frage gestellt werden, und zwar auch im Hinblick auf die allgemeine Entwicklung der generativen Theorie., Andrea Hudousková, Eva Flanderková, Barbara Mertins, Kristýna Tomšů., and Obsahuje seznam literatury
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.
Large synchronic textual corpora of the Czech National Corpus are built as representative: they contain a balanced quantity of texts of various styles, divided into three genre subcorpora: fiction, technical/scientific literature and journalism. Comparisons of these genres have been performed on phonological and morphological level; in this paper, I deal with differences between genres on the surface-syntactic level. I use an automatic syntactic annotation of the SYN2005 corpus in the formalism of the analytical layer of the Prague Dependency Treebank. I compare the frequencies of syntactic functions of nouns in the three genres represented by the corresponding subcorpora of SYN2005. I also present a more detailed analysis of four syntactic phenomena: subtypes of the function of attribute in non-prepositional genitive; frequencies of groups of the type pan Novák (Mr. Novák); frequencies of the function of agent in passive constructions expressed by nouns in non-prepositional instrumental and the ratio of the expression of the nominal part of a verbal-nominal predicate by nominative and instrumental. Significant differences found between genres in all the syntactic phenomena analyzed show that in comparing corpora one should carefully monitor their genre composition.