Pronominal and adjectival attributive possession in spoken Czech
A usage-based perspective
Jan Křivan | Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences
This article analyses two types of possessive constructions in Czech: pronominal attributive possession and adjectival attributive possession. By means of a usage-based approach to language, the aim of the present corpus investigation is to reveal relevant patterns of grammar and usage in order to explain the evolution of the concerned constructions. The main focus is put on spoken language. I analyse the given data from the Czech corpora of both spoken (ORAL2013) and written language (SYN2010). I test the hypotheses concerning different frequency distributions, and the position of the possessor on the prominence hierarchies. The results support functional explanations of emergence of the pronominal and adjectival constructions, based on the prominent status of the possessor.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction: Possessive constructions in Czech
- 2.Attributive possession in Czech
- 2.1Formal properties
- 2.2Semantics
- 3.Pronominal and adjectival attributive possession: Corpus survey
- 3.1Theoretical preliminaries
- 3.2Data
- 3.2.1Corpora selection
- 3.2.2Data extraction
- 3.3Evaluation of data: Prominence hierarchies
- 3.3.1Introduction
- 3.3.2Possessors tend to be pronouns
- 3.3.3Possessors tend to be human
- 3.3.4Possessors tend to be proper nouns
- 3.3.5Possessors tend to be animate, or human, and expressed with a personal pronoun or a proper name
- 3.3.6Possessors tend to be active in discourse
- 3.4Detailed analysis of prototypical possessive adjectives
- 3.4.1Prototype of the proper names class
- 3.4.2Prototype of the common nouns class
- 3.5Comparison of the possessives in the corpora of written and spoken language
- 3.6Summary and explanation
- 4.Conclusion
- Resources
-
Notes
-
References
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.
2013 Possession and ownership: A cross-linguistic perspective. In
Aikhenvald &
Dixon (eds), 1–64.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. & Dixon, R.M.W.
(eds)
2013 Possession and Ownership. A Cross-linguistic Typology. Oxford: OUP.
Ariel, Mira
1990 Accessing Noun-phrase Antecedents. London: Routledge.
Baayen, Harald R.
2001 Word Frequency Distributions. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Beckner, Clay, Blythe, Richard, Bybee, Joan, Christiansen, Morten, Croft, William, Ellis, Nick, Holland, John, Ke, Jinyun, Larsen-Freeman, Diane & Schoenemann, Tom
2009 Language is a complex adaptive system.
Language Learning 59(Supplement 1): 1–26.
Bybee, Joan L.
2007 Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language. Oxford: OUP.
Comrie, Bernard, Haspelmath, Martin & Bickel, Balthasar
2008 The Leipzig Glossing Rules: Conventions for Interlinear Morpheme-by-Morpheme Glosses.
[URL]
Cvrček, Václav, Kodýtek, Vilém, Kopřivová, Marie, Kováříková, Dominika, Michal, Sgall, Petr, Šulc, Táborský, Jan, Volín, Jan & Waclawičová, Martina
2010
Mluvnice současné češtiny, 1: Jak se píše a jak se mluví
. Praha: Karolinum.
Dixon, R.M.W.
2010
Basic linguistic theory, Vol: 2: Grammatical topics
. Oxford: OUP.
Du Bois, John W.
1987 The discourse basis of ergativity.
Language 63(4): 805–855.
Evert, Stefan & Baroni, Marco
2012 zipfR: Statistical Models for Word Frequency Distributions. Version 0.6–6, 3 April 2012.
[URL]
(6 February 2015).
Evert, Stefan & Baroni, Marco
2014 The zipfR package for lexical statistics: A tutorial introduction.
zipfR: User-friendly LNRE modelling in R. 3 October 2014.
[URL]
(6 February 2015).
Haspelmath, Martin
2008 Creating economical morphosyntactic patterns in language change. In
Linguistic Universals and Language Change,
Jeff Good (ed.),
185–214. Oxford: OUP.
Hawkins, John A.
2004 Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: OUP.
Heine, Bernd & König, Christa
2010 On the linear order of ditransitive objects.
Language Sciences 32: 87–131.
Hopper, Paul J.
1987 Emergent grammar. In
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13, 139–157. Berkeley CA: BLS.
Křivan, Jan
2014 The role of information structure in Czech possessive constructions. In
Language Use and Linguistic Structure: Proceedings of the Olomouc Linguistics Colloquium 2013,
Joseph Emonds &
Markéta Janebová (eds), 211–227. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého.
O’Connor, Catherine, Maling, Joan & Skarabela, Barbora
Payne, Doris L. & Barshi, Immanuel
1999 External possession: What, where, how, and why. In
External possession,
Payne, Doris L. &
Barshi, Immanuel (eds.), 3–29. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Piťha, Petr
1992 Posesivní vztah v češtině. Praha: AVED.
R Core Team
2013 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
[URL]
Seiler, Hansjakob
1983 Posession as an Operational Dimension of Language. Tübingen: Günter Narr.
Silverstein, Michael
1976 Hierarchy of Features and Ergativity. Canberra: Australian National University.
Stassen, Leon
2009 Predicative Possession. Oxford: OUP.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.