Subject-operator inversion after sentence-initial only seen through its Czech equivalents

• Authors: Michaela Martinková
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper presents the results of a systematic analysis of English sentences with subjectoperator inversion after sentence-initial only through their Czech equivalents in a parallel translation corpus of English and Czech (InterCorp). Though the number of relevant tokens found in a parallel translation corpus is inevitably low and the Czech equivalents can hardly account for all tokens of the absence of S-O inversion after sentence-initial only focusing fronted adverbials, they nonetheless bring interesting evidence about the function of only in these sentences and about the scope of only as a restrictive focusing modifier. The contrastive analysis also sheds new light on two Czech temporal particles teprve [not until] and ještě [still] and opens areas for future research on monolingual corpora of both English and Czech.

Keywords

EN

parallel translation corpus InterCorp; contrastive analysis; English; Czech; sentence-initial only; subject-operator inversion

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Linguistica Pragensia
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 79-97
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Michaela Martinková

• Linguistica Pragensia, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic