Cover not available
Part of
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

Pronominal and adjectival attributive possession in spoken Czech

A usage-based perspective

| 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.

Keywords: Czech, corpora of spoken and written Czech, pronominal and adjectival adnominal possessive constructions, prominence hierarchies, frequency distributions
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
Published online: 5 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.206.08kri
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.
2013 Possession and ownership: A cross-linguistic perspective. In Aikhenvald & Dixon (eds), 1–64.Google Scholar
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. & Dixon, R.M.W.
(eds) 2013 Possession and Ownership. A Cross-linguistic Typology. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Ariel, Mira
1990 Accessing Noun-phrase Antecedents. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Baayen, Harald R.
2001 Word Frequency Distributions. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan L.
2007 Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace
1987 Cognitive constraints on information flow. In Coherence and Grounding in Discourse [Typological Studies in Language 11], Russell Tomlin (ed.), 21–51. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Comrie, Bernard, Haspelmath, Martin & Bickel, Balthasar
2008 The Leipzig Glossing Rules: Conventions for Interlinear Morpheme-by-Morpheme Glosses. [URL] Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Dixon, R.M.W.
2010  Basic linguistic theory, Vol: 2: Grammatical topics . Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W.
1987 The discourse basis of ergativity. Language 63(4): 805–855. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Evert, Stefan & Baroni, Marco
2012 zipfR: Statistical Models for Word Frequency Distributions. Version 0.6–6, 3 April 2012. [URL] (6 February 2015).Google Scholar
2014 The zipfR package for lexical statistics: A tutorial introduction. zipfR: User-friendly LNRE modelling in R. 3 October 2014. [URL] (6 February 2015).Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin
1999 External possession in a European areal perspective. In External Possession [Typological Studies in Language 39], Payne, Doris L. & Barshi, Immanuel (eds), 109–135. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Creating economical morphosyntactic patterns in language change. In Linguistic Universals and Language Change, Jeff Good (ed.), 185–214. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A.
2004 Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd & König, Christa
2010 On the linear order of ditransitive objects. Language Sciences 32: 87–131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hopper, Paul J.
1987 Emergent grammar. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 13, 139–157. Berkeley CA: BLS.Google Scholar
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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Connor, Catherine, Maling, Joan & Skarabela, Barbora
2013 Nominal categories and the expression of possession: A cross-linguistic study of probabilistic tendencies and categorical constraints. In Morphosyntactic Categories and the Expression of Possession [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 199], Kersti Börjars, David Denison & Alan K. Scott (eds), 89–121. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
R Core Team
2013 R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. [URL] Google Scholar
Seiler, Hansjakob
1983 Posession as an Operational Dimension of Language. Tübingen: Günter Narr.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael
1976 Hierarchy of Features and Ergativity. Canberra: Australian National University.Google Scholar
Stassen, Leon
2009 Predicative Possession. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Corbett, Greville G.
2021. Chapter 10. Feature-based competition. In All Things Morphology [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 353], ► pp. 171 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 march 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.