Pasivum v češtině

• Authors: Petr Karlík

Title variants

EN

The passive voice in Czech

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

Analysis of Czech data within the theoretical framework of Modified Valency Theory (Karlík, 2000) shows that the syntactic derivation of passive voice proceeds in two phases. The first phase, which I call (A), can be referred to as deagentization. Given the passive morphology of a verb, A-1 (i.e. the subject or external argument of the verb) is blocked. When the verb is transitive, A-2 (i.e. the object or the internal argument of the verb) enters the caseless subject position “e” of a verb with passive morphology, i.e. the -n-/-t- participle in Czech. The resulting structures are sometimes called syntactically ergative, as shown by ‘PROA-1 chválit NPaccA-2 → e(i)A-2 chválen-Ø/-a/-o t(i)’, as opposed to lexically ergative, as illustrated in the example ‘PROA-2 blednout’. The second phase, which I call (B), can be referred to as raising. For transitive verbs, this is the movement of A-2 from the subject position “e” of a verb with passive morphology, where it fails to receive a case, into the subject position of the verb být, ‘to be’. The verb ‘to be’ does not assign a Θ-role, however, in this position, A-2 can obtain case and thus be lexically realized: Petr(i)A-2 je e(i) chválen t(i). In the description of the passive voice, it is necessary to distinguish expressions with deverbal adjectives because these are produced through a single phase. Deverbal adjectives are generated earlier in the lexicon.

Keywords

EN

language

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: 2004
• Volume: 65
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 83-112
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Petr Karlík

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