Chapter 8

Non-prepositional English correspondences of Czech prepositional phrases

The study explores overt non-prepositional English translation correspondences of the four most common Czech prepositions, v/ve, na, s/se, and z/ze (‘in, on, with, from’). Some of the divergent counterparts are conditioned lexically or peculiar to one preposition. However, some of the most frequent types appear to be quite systematic and associated with the typological differences between the two languages – inflectional Czech and predominantly analytical English. They reveal the consequences of the word-order principles prevalent in the two languages both at phrasal and clausal level. These are particularly prominent where the Czech adverbial prepositional phrase is paralleled by the English subject noun phrase. The clause-initial position of the subject in English coincides with the unmarked position of the theme, i.e. an element which can convey information on the setting or circumstances of the content of the clause. In English the subject therefore tends to assume ‘adverbial’ semantic roles to a much larger extent than in Czech.