This article examines selected variations in spoken Czech in two sub-corpora of the Czech National Corpus: the Prague Spoken Corpus (PSC) and the Brno Spoken Corpus (BSC). These include the prothetic 'v-' at the beginning of words starting with 'o-', variations in case endings of hard stem adjectives and the third person indicative plural endings in major verb classes, as well as the usage of the personal pronoun 'já' and/or the auxiliary verb 'jsem' in the past tense forms. Our interpretation of changes in apparent time is checked against data from the relevant literature. The most significant change is the decline of the prothetic 'v-' in the BSC, reported for Brno earlier by Krcmová (1981, 1997). We show that it is female speakers who are leading this change. The PSC informal speech is stable, while a significant shift toward colloquial variants has been identified in formal discourse. In the past tense, the form without the auxiliary 'jsem' is rare except for 'já myslel(a)' in the PSC.
The DIALOG corpus is one of two collections of spoken language gathered in the audio-visual studio at the Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The article begins by recalling the establishment of the corpus in 1997 as part of the project 'Dialogue in a World of People and Machines', defines the aim motivating the collection of data for this corpus, formulates distinctive criteria for this corpus as a specifically 'spoken' one in terms of time, interaction and genre and partially even as topic-specific, and attempts to define the types of spoken dialogues which the corpus can aid in analysing. It characterizes speech in the media, which makes up a focal point here, and details the procedures for storing audio and video recordings of this speech and the resulting transcriptions. The second part provides an overview of the fundamentals of transcription systems and offers theoretical support for transcription method selection as determined by the aim of capturing segmental, supra-segmental, sequential, para-linguistic and extra-linguistic phenomena, including several examples of practical solutions. The third part reports on how this corpus has been thus far utilized in linguistic research, both in the creation of a contemporary Czech theory of dialogue and in the analysis of specific features of spoken Czech. The article concludes by detailing the prospects for further use of this corpus.
The Czech passive participle is often considered a bookish form whose usage is confined to written language, especially to technical and specialized literature. Czech speakers often use 'the long form' of the respective deverbative adjective instead of the passive participle and they do so ever more frequently, not only when speaking but often also when writing in Literary Czech. This situation has been the subject of discussion by Czech linguists for decades. The article presents the findings of a research based on the DIALOG corpus, a large linguistic corpus of contemporary spoken Czech containing transcripts of TV political debates and talk shows. The research reveals that the past participle forms are comparatively frequent in the corpus analysed, while, in contrast, the alternative forms of the long deverbative adjective used in a manner which can be classified as non-standard or non-literary are rare. The results also partly confirm that the passive voice of perfective verbs is considerably more common than that of imperfective verbs, while on the other hand the instances of imperfective passive forms found in the corpus show that their use is fully appropriate. The last section deals with the relation of the use of passive participles to code-switching between Literary and Colloquial Czech.
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