Confrontation of developmental tendencies in the use of enclitic -s and its textual distribution in contemporary spontaneous spoken Czech an in older developmental stages of Czech
Abstract
The paper focuses on questions of textual distribution of the so-called enclitic -s in Czech. The past tense form of the 2nd person singular of the auxiliary verb být (to be) can in some cases be represented by the shortened form -s instead of its basic form jsi.
This element can be added as a suffix directly to the form of a lexical verb l-participle (e. g. hodil jsi to do schránky ˃ hodils to do schránky) or to another word in the sentence (e. g. na té svatbě jsi byl ˃ na té svatběs byl). The analysis attempts to describe the textual distribution of the enclitic -s in terms of its basic constraints.
The structural principle applied in this analysis is based primarily on part-of-speech affiliation and syntactic position of the textual word to which the -s element can or cannot be added. Synchronic part deals with the contemporary spoken language, which is highly typical for its frequent presence of the so-called enclitic -s and which is - for the purposes of this paper - represented by spontaneous, informal dialogue.
The diachronic part is mainly based on texts from the Old Czech period (XII-XV century). As a result of the analysis, the paper not only presents obtained particular data concerning the tendencies in grammatical behaviour of the enclitic -s, but also strives to provide general patterns governing it.
Among these patterns are, for example, (i) gradual restriction in using enclitic -s, which takes place in the course of language development, and (ii) the significant difference between its behaviour in the spoken and the written language; this pattern reveals, quite surprisingly, provable closer relation between the older written language and the contemporary spontaneous spoken language. The data for the analysis in the older developmental periods of Czech are based on the DIAKORP corpus.
Data for analyzing informal spontaneous spoken texts are taken from corpora of informal spoken Czech (ORAL2006, ORAL2008).