This study aims to provide and analyze a representative list of Czech initial syllable onsets and final codas along with their frequencies of occurrence in running text (token frequencies) and in the vocabulary of unique word forms extracted from it (type frequencies). The frequency data are important because many experiments have demonstrated that phonotactics is not categorical, but rather gradient in nature. Importantly, the study analyzes and compares both spoken and written texts, using the Czech National Corpus, and the two modalities are hypothesized to yield different outcomes. All words in the sample were transcribed phonemically and analyzed. A general preference was found for phonotactic structures that are simple in the context of the attested inventory, and the two corpora differed most in the repertoire of complex onsets/codas (some sequences being unique to one modality) as well as in their respective frequencies. The results are discussed in relation to previous studies of Czech phonotactics, and evaluated with respect to implications for phonological theory, focusing on spoken/written and type/token comparisons.
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This article is concerned with texts by František Čermák devoted to issues of Czech language cultivation. Four major topics are analyzed: standard vs. common Czech, written vs. spoken Czech, prescriptivism and the native language of Czechs. Various problems in the analyzed texts result from an unclear methodological background. Many concepts are used without argumentation: Čermák fails to substantiate their suitability for his language description. We can find uncorroborated generalizations which can be interpreted as Čermák’s communicative strategy. Many statements are rather impressionistic and are not based on relevant language observations. With regard to these findings, the author of this paper argues that a deep-reaching dialogue should be held, which may help to clarify the indeterminate situation in Czech linguistics concerning issues of language cultivation.
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The paper deals with changes in the Czech aspectual system during the last twenty-five years. The author analyses data acquired from the Czech National Corpus or, more precisely, from subcorpora containing only journalistic texts (the national daily newspapers Hospodářské noviny, Lidové noviny, Mladá fronta DNES and Právo). The corpus-based analysis showed that the frequency of the verb (and its finite forms) has been increasing in journalistic texts and that the statistic relation between imperfective and perfective verbs, as well as the relation between grammatical tenses in Czech, has become more asymmetrical (especially, the frequency of imperfective verbs has been rising). The increase in aspectual asymmetry accentuates the “western” features of the Czech aspectual system in the sense of S. M. Dickey’s (2000) conception. Together with the increasing aspectual asymmetry in Czech, the frequency of bi-aspectual verbs has slightly decreased. The analysis also showed that the frequency of verbs with prefixes (both perfective and imperfective) has decreased in Czech. The author interprets these facts as results of the transmission of certain dynamic (and system-based) features from spoken language to the written language, and he also discusses the typological context of the changes (inferring aspectual meanings from grammatical context as a manifestation of strengthening analyticity in Czech).
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