Abstract
This paper concerns a Czech language minority living in the south-western Romanian region of Banat. First an overview of the situation of Banatian Czech speakers is given, both from a historical and a contemporary perspective, followed by a sociolinguistically focused description of the linguistic conditions present in this language island.
Next, the article examines seven syntactic and morphosyntactic structures found in Bígr Czech, namely three word order phenomena, use of the indefinite article, totality quantifiers and prepositional phenomena. Using the specialized corpora, BANAT for Bígr Czech and the ORAL corpus for Common Czech, the Bígr Czech and Common Czech structures are compared to reveal the following: the placement of the congruent predicate behind the nominal parts of speech and displacing of the reflexive pronoun se, si '-self' were distinctive characteristic features, the fronting of auxiliary verb být 'to be' is equally present in Common Czech; and detailed description of other mentioned phenomena