Czech Approaching English

-       Verbal Forms With Personal Pronouns Across Styles in the Czech National Corpus

 

Renata Blatná – Marie Kopřivová

Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Faculty of Arts, Prague, Czech Republic

 

The poster concentrates on one feature of the contemporary colloquial Czech language: increasing frequency of the personal pronouns, esp. the pronouns „já“ (I) and „my“ (we).

In literary Czech, these pronouns are used esp. when it is necessary to emphasize the specific person, eg. „já, ne ty“ (me, not you). The grammatical forms of verbs are – in  the case of I and we - sufficient for determining of the corresponding person, e.g. in literary Czech „pracuji“ (I work), „pracujeme“ (we work), „pracoval jsem“ (I worked), „pracovali jsme“ (we worked)  while in colloquial Czech there is a strong tendency to use personal pronouns redundantly, e.g. in present tense  „já pracuju“ and in the past tense „já pracoval“ (with omitting of the form of the auxiliary verb „jsem“). The Czech grammars have not reflected this tendency in a more detailed description, yet.

These colloquial forms were studied on the basis of the representative text corpus of the contemporary written Czech language called SYN2000 (100 mil. word forms). The ratio of  the imaginative vs. informative texts in this corpus is 15% : 85%. The imaginative part is divided into several text types:


 

 

 


This percentage was compared to several collocation groups in the corpus SYN2000:

1.     já/my +  past participle, e.g. „já pracoval/my pracovali“ (I worked/we worked)

2.     já/my + word form + past participle, e. g. „já se ptal/my se ptali“ (I asked/we asked)

3.     já/my + 2 word forms + past participle, e. g. „já se ho ptal/my se ho ptali“ (I asked him/we asked him)

4.     já/my + 3 word forms + past participle, e. g. „já se ho minule ptal/my se ho minule ptali“ (I asked him last time/we asked him last time)

5.     regular literary form of the past tense with the auxiliary verb, e.g. „pracoval jsem/pracovali jsme“ (I worked/we worked)

In the groups 1-4 all the auxiliary verbs were omitted.

Results of the search in the corpus SYN2000:

 

 

I. Frequency

 

1st group:

pronoun „já“                                                  pronoun „my“           

imag. vs. inform.         66% : 34% = 2044 : 1017 occurences            47% : 53% = 216 : 240

within imaginative

NOV                           54% = 1122                                                   54% = 117

COL                           23% =  474                                                    14% =   30

FAC                           12% =  239                                                    16% =   34

VER                              4% =    71                                                    12% =   25

SON                             5% =  104                                                    3%  =     7

SCR                              2% =    34                                                    1% =      3

 

The graph compares the distribution of the forms like já pracoval in the outer circle and formas like my pracovali in the inner circle.


 

 

 


2nd group:

 

imag. vs. inform.         67% : 33% = 1654 : 780 occurences              42% : 58% = 121 : 166

within imaginative

NOV                           57%    = 944                                                  59% = 71

COL                           24%    = 397                                                  18% = 22

FAC                           10%    = 177                                                    9% = 11

VER                              4%    =   58                                                    8% =   9

SON                             3,5% =   51                                                    4% =   5

SCR                              2%    =   27                                                    2% =   3

 

 

The graph compares the distribution of the forms like já se ptal in the outer circle and formas like my se ptali in the inner circle.


 

 

 


                                                                       3rd group:

 

imag. vs. inform.         68% : 32% = 845 : 385 occurences                49% : 51% = 70 : 74

within imaginative

NOV                           58% = 487                                                     54% = 38

COL                           21% = 171                                                     16% = 11

FAC                           10% =  85                                                      17% = 12

VER                              4% =  37                                                      10% =  7

SON                             4% =  39                                                      3% =   2

SCR                              3% =  26                                                      0% =   0

 

The graph compares the distribution of the forms like já se ho ptal in the outer circle and formas like my se ho ptali in the inner circle.

 

                                  


 


4th group:

 

imag. vs. inform.         57% : 43% = 349 : 262 occurences                49% : 51% = 41 : 43

within imaginative

NOV                           64% = 226                                                     54% = 22

COL                           18% =   64                                                     12% =   5

FAC                           12% =   41                                                     12% =   5

VER                              3% =   12                                                     12% =   5

SON                             2% =   10                                                       8% =   3

SCR                              1% =     6                                                       2% =   1

 

The graph compares the distribution of the forms like já se ho minule ptal in the outer circle and formas like my se ho minule ptali in the inner circle.


 

 

 

 


The fifth group is very large as it is still the centre of the Czech grammar, i. e. past participle + auxiliary verb:    

singular           88 324 occurences, imag. vs. inform. 55 124 : 33 200, i. e. 62% : 38%

plural              38 429 occurences, imag. vs. inform. 11 647 : 26 782, i. e. 30% : 70%

 

It appears that the form „já + past participle“ is used – in comparison with the form „my + past participle“ much more freqently in storie while less frequently in poetry.           

 

The following two graphs show the distribution of the forms „pronoun já/my + past participle“ in each group

a)     in %

 


 


b)    in number of occurences

 


 

 


II. Lexical and semantic representation

 

Each group has its range of most frequent Czech verbs. Some of the verbs (translated into English) are common for more groups – „to be, to have, to want, to start, can, must“. Other verbs are given in the Table 1 (see Appendix):

 

 

                                                           III. Morphological representation

 

The groups 2-4 have also specific combinations of word forms (parts of speech) inserted between the personal pronoun and the past participle:

 

Table 2

 

 

JÁ

MY

2nd group

adverb

pronoun    

 

pronoun   

adverb

 

particle

particle

 

conjunction

conjunction

3rd group

pronoun-adverb

pronoun-adverb

 

adverb-adverb

preposition-pronoun

 

preposition-pronoun

adverb-adverb

4th group

preposition-pronoun-noun

pronoun-preposition-noun

 

pronoun-preposition-pronoun

pronoun-preposition-pronoun

 

pronoun-adverb-adverb

 

 

 

IV. Conclusion

 

The analytical verbal forms with pronouns are very close to those forms used in English, cf. Czech                   já         myslel             (instead of „myslel jsem“)

English            I          thought

Therefore a short investigation concerning the percentage of occurences from the literature translated from English was done: in the 3rd group it is 14% for the pronoun „já“ anad 9,5% for the pronoun „my“.

It is obvious that Czech and English become closer not only on the lexical but also on the grammatical level.

Literature:

F. Čermák: Czech National Corpus: A Case in Many Contexts, International

 Journal of Corpus Linguistics Vol. 2, 1997, 181-197

J. Kocek- M. Kopřivová – V. Schmiedtová, V.: The Czech National Corpus.

Proceedings of the 9th EURALEX International Congress, Heid U., Evert S.,

Lehmann E., Rohrer Ch. (eds.), Stuttgart 2000, 127 - 132

R. Blatná: The proliferation of the English -ing in the Czech Vocabulary.

In: Heid, U. - Evert, S. - Lehmann, E. - Rohrer, Ch., eds.:

Proceedings of the Ninth EURALEX International Congress, Volume II,

Universität Stuttgart 2000, 731-737

 

Appendix – Table 1

 

 

JÁ

MY

1st group

to know

to go

 

to think

to sit

 

to see

to stand

 

to go

to stay

 

to say

 

 

to stand

 

 

to feel

 

 

intellectual activity

body position and motion

2nd group

to know

to know

 

to see

to get

 

to consider

to wait

 

to say

to need

 

to try

to go

 

 

to think

 

intellectual activity

intellectual activity and obtaining sth

3rd group

to think

to say

 

to ask

to get

 

to get

to know

 

to know

to try

 

to say

to feel

 

to remember

to prepare

 

 

to answer

 

intellectual activity (getting information)

speech and preparation

4th group

to think

to get

 

to believe

to love

 

to say

to see

 

to try

 to hope

 

to attempt

 

 

to forget

 

 

to suspect

 

 

intellectual activity and feelings

esp.feelings

5th group

to say

to go

 

to see

to get

 

to know

to play

 

to go

to start

 

to ask

to know

 

to hear

 

 

to get