Postavení ambipozic v češtině

• Authors: Jakub Sláma , Barbora Štěpánková

Title variants

EN

The position of ambipositions in Czech

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The study proposes that some words in Czech, including navzdory ‘despite’ and počínaje ‘starting from,’ should be treated as ambipositions, i.e., adpositions that may either precede or follow their complement. This avoids the awkwardness of the traditional view on which the former, for instance, is a preposition when preceding a complement and a homonymous adverb when following one. Based on 3,234 corpus instances of navzdory ‘despite,’ nevyjímaje ‘including,’ nemluvě o ‘not to mention,’ počínaje ‘starting with,’ konče ‘ending with,’ and počínaje – konče ‘from – to,’ the study examines the factors determining whether ambipositions in Czech precede or follow their complements. Special attention is paid to the length and the syntactic complexity of the complement, but also to the text type and the position of the adpositional phrase in the clause. The study uses the random forests algorithm to gauge the relative importance of the variables for each of the ambipositions examined. The length of the complement is systematically the best predictor of the position of ambipositions: the longer the complement, the more likely the ambiposition is to precede it. This is argued to follow primarily from the limits of the human working memory.

Keywords

CS

adpozice; ambipozice; kognitivní lingvistika; princip komplexity; random forests; syntaktické varianty; slovosled

EN

adposition; ambiposition; cognitive linguistics; the complexity principle; random forests; syntactic variants; word-order

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: 2023
• Volume: 84
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 91-121
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Jakub Sláma

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

author

Barbora Štěpánková

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