Czech Approaching English : Verbal Forms With Personal Pronouns Across Styles in the Czech National Corpus

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