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Languages in Contrast: Online-First Articles

Reflexivity patterns in West-Slavic languages

Between introversion, extroversion, and mutuality

ORCID logo | Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Language Institute, Czech Republic
The aim of this paper is to analyse differences in reflexive coding in Slovak, Czech and Polish and to evaluate the factors responsible for using phonologically more or less complex reflexive markers. To address this issue, we looked at preferred reflexive coding strategies in Slovak, Czech, and Polish, relying on data extracted from InterCorp multilingual corpus. The results are then verified by data from monolingual corpora of investigated languages for one semantic group of verbs labelled as ‘Prevarication’ in FrameNet. The results show that semantic frame underlying the meaning of lexical items cannot be the only possible explanation for distribution of reflexive markers but there are also other semantic, syntactic and pragmatic factors playing a pivotal role in reflexive coding strategies, often unique for a given language.
Keywords: reflexivity, reciprocity, parallel corpus, contrastive analysis, Czech/Polish/Slovak
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Reflexivity as formal and semantic phenomenon
  • 3.Research of reflexive marking in the parallel corpus
    • 3.1The database and the sampling method
    • 3.2Results of corpus analysis
    • 3.3Discussion
      • 3.3.1Between introversion and mutuality
      • 3.3.2Between reflexivity and passivity
      • 3.3.3Between reflexivity and decausativity
  • 4.Research of reflexive marking in the monolingual corpora
    • 4.1Data and sampling method
    • 4.2Frequency results
    • 4.3Discussion
      • Verbs with low extroversion ratio
      • Verbs with middle extroversion ratio
      • Verbs with high extroversion ratio
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00039.iva
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