Although “literary language”, i.e. standard language or spisovná čestina, was the central notion of the Prague Linguistic Circle’s Theory of the Cultivation of Language, it has never been defined. This article deals with the problem of definition of “literariness”, a concept which forms the base for the codification criterion of “correspondence with the literary norm”. Several attempts to define it or to provide criteria for “literariness” were made, but, as I explain, none of them were successful in reproducing the codified set of language means. These attempts can be divided into two groups: nominalistic and realistic. The former suggests that literariness (i.e. being a part of literary/standard language) is “a mere label”, a characteristic that is acquired by being codified, the latter supposes that language means are standard or nonstandard (or something in between) depending on their usage. The nominalistic approach appears to be inadequate, as it provides no opportunity for language development. Realistic criteria, however, are either methodologically dubious or highly controversial among Czech linguists.
Since the publication of the Concept of Minimal Intervention (Cvrček 2008a, Cvrček 2008b), three critical reactions have been published (Adam 2009, Beneš & Prošek 2011, Homoláč & Mrázková 2011) defending the current language policy (based on the Theory of Language Cultivation). This paper discusses the most important points of their criticism: axiology in the concepts of language regulation, prescriptivism in the Czech language situation and the means of measuring it, the role and nature of current and future codifications, speakers’ attitudes toward language and the validity of their elicitation in linguistic research, the notion of the “literariness” of language, etc. This paper also enriches the original Concept of Minimal Intervention with observations and conclusions based on the experience of making the first non-interventional description of Czech, the Grammar of Contemporary Czech (Cvrček et al. 2010). The paper emphasizes three crucial differences between the Concept of Minimal Intervention and interventional approaches (esp. the Theory of Language Cultivation): preoccupation with literary language in the language regulation in current language policy, the priority of the noetic potential of the discipline over the public demand for language regulation, and the perception of linguists’ activity as an artificial part of the language situation.
The Concept of Minimal Intervention (CMI) is a “methodological bill” concerning linguists and their approach toward the language and its speakers. CMI represents one possible approach to language, implying programmatic character. CMI prerequisites are: 1) There is no reason why linguistics should infringe upon language development through its interventions and thus disqualify speakers for their (natural) linguistic behavior. 2) The language has been evolving into a sensible instrument of communication, needing no assistance from linguists. 3) The arbitrary nature of linguistic means draws on their usage, and involves the ways of using constituents; it is thus not beneficial when linguistics violates, through its interventions, the very fact of this choice taken by the majority. CMI is delimited by the endeavor to minimize linguists’ interventional pressure on language and its speakers; CMI’s goal is to bring the language situation as close to the condition marked by the existence of a spontaneously constituted order of norms which is “only” passively recorded by linguists. Since zero intervention is irreconcilable with the existence of linguistics, it is necessary to deliberately weaken potential linguistic interventions through a pluralism of descriptions which should expressly declare the goals they pursue and which (communicative) functions they favor.
The aim of this paper is to initiate the discussion on current trends in sharing research data (and other materials related to the research process) in the Czech linguistic community. First, we present a brief explanation of what the primary incentives are for data sharing. Second, we discuss nine main reasons for sharing data and other research materials. These are verifiability of the results, prophylactic effects, replicability, synergy and cooperation between the researchers, use of data in teaching, social and ethical responsibility, easy accessibility and interpretability of the results, data as an outcome, and the possibility to conduct a meta-analysis. Third, we focus on several examples of good practice, i.e. the Czech National Corpus, the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ infrastructure, TROLLing, and the Open Science Framework. As a conclusion of the paper, we present three appeals for Czech linguistics: (a) Academic journals should require data sharing as a standard aspect of the publication process, (b) academic institutions should require sharing of data and other research materials by the academic staff, (c) universities should adopt clear rules for sharing of data and other research materials for students.
This study summarizes a corpus-based analysis of tendencies in register variation of Czech-written fiction texts in the period from 1992 to 2018. The analysis is based on projection of the results from a large sample of Czech prose texts (1070 texts, 12.7 mil. words) on a general register model (established by previous research using multidimensional analysis). The major tendencies found in the material are a decrease of cohesion level, addressee coding and retrospective narration, and increased polythematicity/lexical richness. These findings are supplemented by additional analyses of the role of translation, the position of a text excerpt in the original text (beginning, middle and end) and type of text in the results
This paper addresses two most common comments on corpus linguistics: 1) a corpus is merely a card file index in electronic form and 2) corpus linguistics covers only corpora construction and linguistic marking. We argue that a corpus consists of much more complex material and it can be exploited in unprecedented ways. In response to the second question, we point out that corpus linguistics is an independent linguistic discipline with substantial contributions to linguistic theory and language description.
After briefly discussing the heterogeneities inherent to language production and how they influence corpus evidence, we describe a scale for the classification of individual morphological variants by their relative frequencies that has recently been independently proposed in Mluvnice současné češtiny (2010) (A Grammar of Contemporary Czech, hereafter GCCz), of which we are co-authors, and in Bermel & Knittl (2012). Those variants with relative frequency (roughly) within 1% and 10% are classified by the respective authors as “sparse” and “marked”, and those occurring in (roughly) less than 1% cases as “unexpected” and “isolated”. Another feature of the scale is the “equipollence” of variants of a doublet having relative frequencies within (roughly) 1/3 and 2/3 (for this criterion see also Štícha 2009). The scale in GCCz is heuristically based on Shannon entropy and valid for synchronic functionally equivalent variants. Recently, R. Čech (2012) has claimed to have revealed “a serious statistical deficiency” in GCCz. We show that this is a misunderstanding stemming from his not distinguishing between the null-hypothesis statistical significance testing and the effect size evaluation. We end with a brief note on the structure of the resources employed in GCCz.
The paper describes the new corpus SYN2015, the most recent 100 million word corpus of contemporary written Czech. General notions of corpus representativeness and balance are discussed in this context with a focus on the new design of representativeness adopted for SYN2015. Unlike the previous synchronic corpora SYN2000, SYN2005 and SYN2010, which were balanced according to text reception (based on sociological surveys), the composition of SYN2015 is based on the “texts-as-products” principle with arbitrary proportions of the individual categories within a revised text classification scheme. The paper argues in favour of this solution by highlighting three major advantages: (1) this type of composition can be upheld constant in the future, ensuring corpus comparability, while reception changes constantly; (2) it emphasises diverse composition of the corpus as a language sample; (3) corpus SYN2015 serves not only as a representative sample, but also as a large pool of texts from which different subsets (subcorpora) based on various linguist-specified criteria can be drawn.
The current codification of neuter plural agreement in Czech does not fully reflect contemporary usage and has no convincing support in arguments from a functional or communicative perspective. This article presents the results of a corpus analysis focusing on agreement in the noun phrase (nová/é/ý města ‘new towns’) and in the active participle (města byla/y ‘towns were’) with respect to the variability of Czech registers. The analysis of the frequencies of variants in eight different corpora representing various types of written texts, internet communication and spoken registers shows that the occurrence of non-codified forms is influenced by the mode of communication (written vs. spoken), and the degree of formality and spontaneity of the given communication; e.g., in more formal and prepared monologues, non-codified variants are as frequent as the codified ones. Exclusive occurrence of the codified forms can be detected only in those written texts whose authors take considerable account of the codification. The results of the study highlight the need to reconceptualise the language policy of Czech.
The article summarizes the theoretical foundations and results of a corpus-driven study of register variability in contemporary Czech. The descriptive framework is based on the methodology of multidimensional analysis, as previously applied to various other languages (see Biber 1995). The starting point is a quantitative analysis of a custom-built genre-diversified corpus in which linguistic features have been identified that are likely to be related to functional and systematic variability on different linguistic levels. Statistical processing using factor analysis then yields a model which identifies (in the case of Czech) 8 dimensions of variation of the texts. The greatest proportion of variance is explained by the first two dimensions, which can be described as dichotomies distinguishing between dynamic vs. static and spontaneous vs. prepared.
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