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The ongoing changes in the category of identification in contemporary standard and non-standard Czech
Dobiáš, Daniel ; Zikánová, Šárka (referee) ; Čermák, František (advisor)
While the category of in/definiteness in Czech and other Slavonic languages (except Bulgarian and Macedonian, cf. Corbett - Comrie, 2002) is not expressed by articles, the present paper is concerned with the observation that in contemporary spoken nonstandard Czech a) the demonstrative pronoun ten is developing functions of a definite article, and b) the indefinite pronoun nějaký is developing functions of an indefinite article (alongside with the numeral jeden). On the basis of quantitative analysis, I will demonstrate that this development is ongoing predominantly in spoken non-standard Czech, in which speakers mark identification even if it is obvious from other means (e.g. functional sentence perspective), whereas in standard Czech this tendency is still avoided. Methodologically this paper starts from grammaticalisation theory, according to which frequently used expressions are in certain contexts syntactically and morphological1y reanalyzed, and after having grammaticalised, they continue to develop new grammatical functions (cf. Traugott 1995). The general trend in the field of grammaticalisation is that new means are first very productive in spoken language and pervade standard language only after that. As will be shown later, the development of ten / nějaký in Czech is at a stage in which these...
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