Corpora studies of comparatives in contemporary Czech written discourse

The article presents the experience of corpus analysis of adjectival comparative forms in modern Czech written discourse. The investigation is focused on the availability of analytical comparative constructions of adjectives in the modern Czech language, where such forms are considered acceptable only in case of impossibility of formation of synthetic ones. However, the coexistence of complex and simple forms of comparatives in other Slavic languages leads to a hypothesis about similar coexistence of Czech adjectives. The goal of the study was to detect contexts where analytical forms are used instead of synthetic ones, as well as to determine the possibility of competition of such forms. As a source of factual material, the Synek corpus was used, which is a tenfold proportionally reduced SYN2000 corpus. The selected contexts were processed using the systemic and functional methods developed by the Soviet school of Bohemian studies. The competition table was constructed using a statistical method. Based on the material of the Synek corpus, it is shown that in modern Czech discourse, analytical forms of the type 'více populární' are available and can be used even if their synthetic analogs of the type 'populárnější' are possible. The article describes the algorithm for constructing a table of competition and presents 72 correspondences between analytical and synthetic forms – from the form více rovný 'more equal', with 12 contexts of use and 5 synthetic matches, to the form víc silný 'more powerful', with 1 context of use and 343 matches. The table also shows the percentage of analytical constructions among the examples described. The obtained data allow us to judge the absolute and relative frequency of use of analytical comparatives in the modern Czech language.

corpora studies, Slavistics, Czech National Corpus, Czech, Czech written discourse, comparative degree, comparative form, adjectival degrees of comparison, analytical comparative forms, competition of comparative forms