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In:Possession in Languages of Europe and North and Central Asia:
Edited by Lars Johanson, Lidia Federica Mazzitelli and Irina Nevskaya
[Studies in Language Companion Series 206] 2019
► pp. 149–168

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Pronominal and adjectival attributive possession in spoken Czech

A usage-based perspective

 | Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Published online: 5 March 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.206.08kri
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
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