Abstract
The present monograph, Romance Languages and Czech in the Light of Parallel Corpora verifies the possibilities of use of the parallel corpora (concretely the parallel corpus InterCorp - http://ucnk.ff.cuni.cz/intercorp) for contrastive studies of the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese) and Czech. Is explores four selected topics that represent structurally different phenomena in the Romance languages.
With the help of the parallel corpus InterCorp their Czech equivalents are analysed. The studied phenomena are: causative constructions hacer / faire / fare / fazer + infinitive, complex word with prefixes re- / re- / ri- / re- and suffixes -ble / -ble / -bile / - vel, ingressive verbal periphrases and the gerund.
The analysis is always introduced by a description of the state-of-affairs in Romance languages (all the important aspects of studied phenomena are briefly summarized). Later, a characteristic of possible systemic equivalents in Czech is presented, which results into their general typology.
The analysis based on the data from the parallel corpus (the Spanish-Czech corpus contains 9 326 150 positions, the French-Czech contains 1 533 451 positions, the Italian-Czech 1 631 204 positions, the Portuguese-Czech 1 485 541 positions) which follows, quantifies the frequency of use of each type of typological equivalent and, consequently, it offers a statistically-based reflection of the differences between Czech and the Romance languages that has never been published before.