What kind of element is 'že' in Czech?

Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), 2018

This paper aims to describe different patterns of syntactic extensions of turns-at-talk in mundane conversations in Czech. Within interactional linguistics, same-speaker continuations of possibly complete syntactic structures have been described for typologically diverse languages, but have not yet been investigated for Slavic languages. Based on previously established descriptions of various types of extensions (Vorreiter 2003; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007), our initial description shall therefore contribute to the cross-linguistic exploration of this phenomenon. While all previously described forms for continuing a turn-constructional unit seem to exist in Czech, some grammatical features of this language (especially free word order and strong case morphology) may lead to problems in distinguishing specific types of syntactic extensions. Consequently, this type of language allows for critically evaluating the cross-linguistic validity of the different categories and underlines the nec...

Bohemica Olomucensia

Článek je založen na případové studii, jež byla provedena u skupiny studentů češtiny v bakalářském studijním programu, kteří dosud neabsolvovali kurz morfologie a syntaxe češtiny. Metodou analýzy krátkého textu a dotazníkového šetření je sledováno jejich vnímání struktury věty, konkrétně schopnost odvodit, které formální prostředky vyplývají přímo ze struktury věty, a které naopak představují odraz skutečnosti. Podstatou výzkumných otázek není testování znalostí morfologie či syntaxe, ale právě míra vnímání struktury věty, a tím i samotných slovních druhů.

Discours, 2015

Discours est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution-Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale-Pas de Modification 4.0 International.

Journal of uralic linguistics, 2023

This paper provides the first formal account of the meaning of the pragmatic marker ejsze in the Székely (Szekler) dialect of Hungarian. Using standard diagnostics of sentence types, we argue that it is compatible with declaratives and constituent interrogatives but not with polar interogatives. We suggest that it makes a contribution analogous to that of German wohl in declaratives, and argue that its use-conditional meaning can be described along the lines proposed for wohl by Eckardt (2020). Accordingly, ejsze is analyzed as an inferential evidential, marking that the prejacent is defeasibly entailed by the maximal body of knowledge of the speaker. The paper discusses contrasts between the distribution and felicity of ejsze vs. wohl, and ejsze vs. talán, an inferential particle that appears both in the standard and in the Székely dialect.

Approaches to Hungarian 18

This paper provides the first formal account of the meaning of the pragmatic marker ejsze in the Székely (Szekler) dialect of Hungarian. Using standard diagnostics of sentence types, we argue that it is compatible with declaratives and constituent interrogatives but not with polar interogatives. We suggest that it makes a contribution analogous to that of German wohl in declaratives, and argue that its use-conditional meaning can be described along the lines proposed for wohl by Eckardt (2020). Accordingly, ejsze is analyzed as an inferential evidential, marking that the prejacent is defeasibly entailed by the maximal body of knowledge of the speaker. The paper discusses contrasts between the distribution and felicity of ejsze vs. wohl, and ejsze vs. talán, an inferential particle that appears both in the standard and in the Székely dialect.

2005

Yet their theoretical account in some more prominent modern syntactic theories, including Principles and Parameters (P&P; Chomsky 1995 and references therein) and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG; Pollard and Sag 1987, 1994), seems to be problematic. Both theories assume a clear distinction between raising to subject (SR) and so-called Exceptional Case Marking (ECM; here called raising to object, or OR) constructions, as in (2), on the one hand, and subject control (SC) and object control (OC) constructions, as in (3) and (1) above, on the other hand.

Oslo Studies in Language, 2010

In this paper we investigate the semantic and syntactic properties of the prefix ZA-in Russian and Polish against the background of the Locative Alternation. We provide lists of alternating verbs for Russian and Polish and examine their occurrences with the prefix ZA-...

We provide novel empirical evidence that situations pronouns (henceforth SP; Percus 2000, von Fintel and Heim 2007/2011, Keshet 2008, 2010, Schwarz 2012, a.o.) are represented in the syn- tactic structure and their distribution is subject to Situation Economy (Keshet 2010). We follow Schwarz (2012) in that there is a difference between semantic situation arguments and syntacti- cally merged SPs. Even though all predicates have a semantic situation argument, a SP can be merged only in certain syntactic environments and at least in the cases we investigate it must refer to a contextually salient situation. The core argument comes from case marking of propositional and non-propositional NPs in copular clauses in Czech and their interaction with morphologically overt SPs. In order to execute the argument we first establish that Czech personal pronouns - unlike their English counterparts (Elbourne 2005, 2008) - are not ambiguous between individual (e) and individual concept (<s, e>) interpretation; instead to express the <s, e> meaning, an overt SP is used. In turn, this pronoun can be used to investigate case marking of copular clauses that has independently been argued to be sensitive to a contextually determined situation (Geist 2007). We show that if a situation is encoded by an overt SP, it cannot be simultaneously encoded by a special case marker. If the two morphological means co-occur, they must refer to distinct (sub)situations.

Research into causal conjunctions suggests that there are various degrees of causality and that causality is better situated on a cline between strong and weak. Some studies of English because/’cause/cos suggest a diachronic change in the spoken language, where the use of because is shifting from prototypical subordinator to discourse marker (Stenstro¨m, in: Jucker, Ziv (eds) Discourse markers, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1998; Burridge in Aust J Linguist 34(4):524–548, 2014). This study examines in detail the use of the most frequent Czech causal conjunction protože in both written and spoken language, thus making a further contribution to cross-linguistic research into causality and to research into the differences between spoken and written language more generally. There are two major language varieties of Czech: the common vernacular and the standard literary language (the codified norm). These two varieties differ in a number of respects—at the morphological, lexical and phonological levels. In comparing spoken and written Czech, very few studies include syntactic features and none are based on large-scale authentic spoken data. Based on the corpus data, the conjunction protože occurs strikingly more frequently in spoken Czech than in written language. This study looks at some differences in its distribution. The study is based on extensive corpus data of both written Czech (comprising fiction, newspapers and academic texts) and spoken Czech (corpora of spontaneous conversations and TV debates).

The paper deals with the limitations on omitting internal arguments of roz-prefixed verbs in Polish. Various linguistic factors influencing the distribution of overt internal arguments are considered, such as specific structures rearranging valency, selectional restrictions of the relevant verbs, semantic frame membership, contextual cosiderations (anaphor, existential INIs), and the presence of a specific morphological exponent, out of which the last two will be shown to bear on the occurrence of zero arguments with roz-verbs. Among the prefixed verbs these with the causative meaning are accountable for on the basis of their morpho-syntactic structure, but the remaining ones constitute a mystery. For these verbs explanations proposing additional predicational structures are analyzed and discarded. Then we consider a proposal concerning the maximization of the event information, following Filip (2013). The proposal assumes the existence of a maximizing semantic operator which, among others, underlies the notion of perfectivity in Slavic languages. The operator may find its place in the lexical representation of roz-and account for the proposition's reluctance to part with its internal argument.