Abstract
On the problem of the inflection of non-derived surnames of women with the ending -a in Czech. - The codification of Standard Czech requests a morpho- logical derivation of most surnames of women according to the feminine gender, typically masculine Novák (nominal type) > feminine Nováková (with suffix -ová and adjectival inflection), masculine Malý (adjectival type) > feminine Malá (adjectival inflection). However, for some time the legislation of the Czech Republic has allowed the use of the non-derived surnames of women.
When used in texts, in most cases they are indeclinable, especially when ending in a consonant (cf. Novák).
However, a number of Czech surnames end in -a (e.g., Smetana, Svoboda), which is a typical ending of feminine nouns in Czech. By a corpus analysis we show that in written Czech there is (besides the use of uninflected forms) a certain tendency to inflect the surname of a woman like a feminine noun in such cases, not only when it is mo- tivated by a homonymous feminine appellative such as smetana "cream" or svoboda "freedom".
In some cases, the inflected forms predominate. Surnames in -a also arise from the integration of derived surnames of women from other Slavic languages (e.g., Gladkova), these surnames oscillate sometimes between nominal and adjectival de- clension in Czech.