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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 28:3 (2018) ► pp.361–390

An initial description of syntactic extensions in spoken Czech

| University of Oulu
| Czech Language Institute
This paper aims to describe different patterns of syntactic extensions of turns-at-talk in mundane conversations in Czech. Within interactional linguistics, same-speaker continuations of possibly complete syntactic structures have been described for typologically diverse languages, but have not yet been investigated for Slavic languages. Based on previously established descriptions of various types of extensions (Vorreiter 2003; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007), our initial description shall therefore contribute to the cross-linguistic exploration of this phenomenon. While all previously described forms for continuing a turn-constructional unit seem to exist in Czech, some grammatical features of this language (especially free word order and strong case morphology) may lead to problems in distinguishing specific types of syntactic extensions. Consequently, this type of language allows for critically evaluating the cross-linguistic validity of the different categories and underlines the necessity of analysing syntactic phenomena within their specific action contexts.
Keywords: interactional grammar, conversation analysis, syntactic extensions, increments, spoken syntax, Czech, ordinary conversation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Turn extensions in various languages
    • 1.2Some basic grammatical features of Czech relevant for turn extension
    • 1.3Different types of syntactic extensions
    • 1.4Data
  • 2.Analysis
    • 2.1Non-add-ons
    • 2.2Add-ons
      • 2.2.1Replacements
      • 2.2.2Increments
        • 2.2.2.1Insertables
        • 2.2.2.2Glue-ons
        • 2.2.2.3Free constituents
  • 3.Discussion
    • 3.1The difference between replacements and glue-ons in Czech
    • 3.2The difference between glue-ons and insertables
    • 3.3TCU continuation vs. TCU extension in Czech
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 27 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.17003.olo
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