Částice náhodou a snad ve zjišťovacích otázkách

• Authors: Michaela Chodounská , Adéla Koštejnová , Radek Šimík

Title variants

EN

The particles náhodou and snad in Czech polar questions

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The article focuses on the meaning and distribution of two Czech particles – náhodou ‘by any chance’ and snad (without a straightforward translation to English) – in direct and indirect polar questions. We argue that these particles are epistemic in the sense that they systematically appear in polar questions whose main goal is to acquire new information, rather than, say, make an offer or a request. The particles contribute mainly to the so-called question biases, i.e., they help indicate the speaker’s (in direct questions) or attitude holder’s (in indirect questions) attitude to one or both of the propositional alternatives in the denotation of the question. This attitude can either be based on prior beliefs (so-called epistemic bias) or currently relevant evidence (evidential bias). Relying on a corpus analysis (looking at both snad and náhodou) and a naturalness rating experiment (on náhodou), we draw inferences about the interpretive and distributional impact that the particles have on the polar question in which they appear. We find that náhodou is limited to negative questions and that it mostly contributes positive bias (both epistemic and evidential). The particle snad mostly conveys that the two biases (epistemic and evidential) are in conflict. We also observe a significant weakening of both particles’ meaning contribution in indirect questions.

Keywords

CS

čeština; zjišťovací otázky; otázkové inklinace; částice; epistemická modalita

EN

Czech; polar questions; question bias; particles; epistemic modality

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of the Czech Language, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovo a slovesnost: časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka (Slovo a slovesnost: A journal for the theory of language and language cultivation)
• Year: 2025
• Volume: 86
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 203-235
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Michaela Chodounská

• Slovo a slovesnost, redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic

author

Adéla Koštejnová

• Slovo a slovesnost, redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic

author

Radek Šimík

• Slovo a slovesnost, redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic