Abstract
The aim of the article is to describe prepositional phrases of the type po česku 'in the Czech way' and po havlovsku 'in Havel's way', a phenomenon on the borderline between word formation, morphology and syntax to which classical grammar pays little attention. The phenomenon is studied on the basis of diachronic, synchronic and parallel corpora of the Czech National Corpus.
The type po česku is documented in old and middle Czech texts; it attained its frequency peak in the 19th century and since then it has been gradually declining, but it is still productive today, with more than 1000 various lemmas found in the SYNv10 corpus. We present the semantic and syntactic properties of this phenomenon, and on the basis of parallel corpora, we study similar phenomena in other Slavic languages.
The prepositional phrase of the type po česku and po havlovsku is the most productive type of prepositional phrases combining a pre-position and a short (nominal) form of an adjective: these phrases are discussed in general at the end of the article.