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The bychom and bysme forms from both the theoretical and empirical points of view

Publication at Faculty of Education |
2020

Abstract

In present-day Czech, the conditional forms of the auxiliary verb být (bych, bys, by, bychom, byste, by) are the only survival of aorist, the original unmarked past tense that (by the end of the 16th century) was superseded by the analytic past tense. Since the personal endings of the conditional forms don't correspond with the personal endings of other verb forms (hence, we can call them irregular), in nearly all dialects some original aorist forms have been replaced by regular forms, particularly in the plural form of the first person (bysme instead of bychom).

This paper aims to answer the question to what extent the non-codified form bysme is applied in present-day TV interviews. The examined specimen contains 200 recordings of the Interview ČT24 show.