Conventions and variability in the use of prefixes in verbs of movement by non-native speakers of Czech
Abstract
The goal of our study is to carry out an analysis of the verbs of movement which are represented all over the levels of CEFR with their prefixes in non-native speakers' writings. We deal with the two chosen verbs of movement: jít 'to go; to walk', and jet 'to go; to drive'.
As they belong to the core vocabulary of the Czech language, we assume that they could also be frequently represented in the texts of foreigners. Our analysis is carried out on the data from the learner corpus CzeSL-SGT release 1.1 that contains writings of non-native Czech speakers with several different L1 (predominantly Slavic languages); its total size makes 1,188,136 tokens.
We focus on a subkorpus of Slavic L1 speakers. Our investigation is conducted in two steps: I. identifying the most frequent patterns of verbal prefixes use, and II. revealing the most prominent difficulties in the non-native use of verbal prefixes.
We focus on the following possibilities in the prefix use: I. underuse: learners use the root verb without any prefix; II. overuse: learners use the verbal prefixes even in the cases in which it is not necessary; III. misuse: learners use wrong prefixes. The results of research suggest that in the production of non-native speakers (comparing with native speakers) the verbal prefixes are fundamentally reduced.
At the same time verbal prefixes represent an area of error with regard to prefix substitutions.