Abstract
We present a corpus-based analysis of the use of possessive and reflexive possessive pronouns in a newly created English-Czech-Russian parallel corpus (PCEDT-R). Automatic word-alignment was applied to the texts, which were subsequently manually corrected.
In the word-aligned data, we have manually annotated all correspondences of possessive and possessive reflexive pronouns from the perspective of each analysed language. The collected statistics and the analysis of the annotated data allowed us to formulate assumptions about language differences.
Our data confirm the relative frequency of possessive pronouns in English as compared to Czech and Russian, and we explain it by the category of definiteness in English. To confirm some of our hypotheses, we used other corpora and questionnaires.
We compared the translated texts in Czech and Russian from our corpus to the original texts from other corpora, in order to find out to what degree the translation factor might influence the frequency of possessives