Publications
Publication details [#64199]
Oloff, Florence and Martin Havlik. 2018. An initial description of syntactic extensions in spoken Czech. Pragmatics 28 (3) : 361–390.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/prag
Annotation
This paper aims to describe different patterns of syntactic extensions of turns-at-talk in mundane conversations in Czech. Within interactional linguistics, same-speaker continuations of possibly complete syntactic structures have been described for typologically diverse languages, but have not yet been investigated for Slavic languages. Based on previously established descriptions of various types of extensions (Vorreiter 2003; Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007), the initial description shall therefore contribute to the cross-linguistic exploration of this phenomenon. While all previously described forms for continuing a turn-constructional unit seem to exist in Czech, some grammatical features of this language (especially free word order and strong case morphology) may lead to problems in distinguishing specific types of syntactic extensions. Consequently, this type of language allows for critically evaluating the cross-linguistic validity of the different categories and underlines the necessity of analysing syntactic phenomena within their specific action contexts.