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This paper deals with prepositions with causal meaning in Russian and Czech. In Slavic languages prepositions are closely connected to cases. Russian and Czech prepositions have many common features. Prepositions show a relation in space or time or a special relationship between two or more people, places, things or situations. In the current paper we are dealing with causal relations. There are different ways to express them. Among these means, the most common are prepositional-case forms and complex sentences with a subordinate causal part. We analyze the repertoire of causal prepositions in both languages and describe their statistical representation in corpora. Another task is to reveal translation equivalents between two languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates and compares the inventory of adverbs derived from adjectival present participles in the Polish, Slovak and Czech languages. The particularity of these adverbs is that they do not occur in every language, even if it concerns closely related languages. While in Polish and Slovak this type of adverbs is represented by hundreds of lemmas, in Czech it is almost not represented. The comparative analysis is carried out on the data retrieved from the comparable web corpora Aranea. The sets of adverbs extracted from the comparable corpora of the languages examined are analysed by the following criteria: the total number of the adverb lemmas in the corpus, their relative frequency (ipm), morphemic structure features, collocability preferences. The similarities and differences between the adverb sets are established. According to the corpus data, the adverbs derived from adjectival present participles are more widely used in Polish than in Slovak, and in Czech they are a rare phenomenon represented by a limited number of lemmas with a negligible frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the possibility of creating a paremiological optimum for students of Czech as a foreign language. The selection of proverbs should reflect the frequency, familiarity with and use of proverbs. The study focuses on the most frequent proverbs in written Czech, using contemporary idiomatically annotated corpora. On this basis, our own minimum was created. The paper compares the results with previous studies on the paremiological minima of Czech (Schindler 1993 and Čermák 2003) and shows the intersection of all three minima. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new interactive map-based web application named Mapka was published by the Institute of the Czech National Corpus in 2020. It aims to serve linguists, as well as schools and the general public, and it features various functions described in this paper. Mapka was designed as a supplement to the CNC spoken corpora, starting with the DIALEKT corpus (more to come in the future). Its main function is to display various types of territorial division (primarily in terms of dialect, but also administrative) and networks of localities associated with the corpus. The main dialect regions are provided with overviews of their typical dialectal features and two samples of dialectal discourse – one slightly historical and one contemporary. The application offers the possibility of searching for municipalities, plotting the points on the map and creating a custom map. The paper concludes with future prospects concerning an enhanced and improved version of the application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to reflect on theoretical foundations of Horecký's approach to the relation between language (and more specifically: terms) and thinking (concepts). Reflections are devoted to Horecký's explicit and implicit beliefs on the nature of terms and concepts and their mutual relation, as well as their relation to reality around. Definitions of both term and concept appear in some of Horecký's major papers. The paper focuses on models of term-concept relation proposed in those papers. Finally, an attempt is made to find some convergences and divergences in theories of Horecký and the Czech logician Pavel Tichý. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe the first steps in preparation of a treebank of 14th-century Czech in the framework of Universal Dependencies. The Dresden and Olomouc versions of the Gospel of Matthew have been selected for this pilot study, which also involves modification of the annotation guidelines for phenomena that occur in Old Czech but not in Modern Czech. We describe some of these modifications in the paper. In addition, we provide some interesting observations about applicability of a Modern Czech parser to the Old Czech data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses a new way to measure syntactic complexity in foreign language acquisition. It is based on a recently proposed syntactic unit called linear dependency segment (LDS), the longest possible sequence of words belonging to the same clause where all linear neighbours are also syntactic neighbours. The dataset comprises 5,721 Czech texts from the CzeSL-SGT learner corpus covering five CEFR proficiency levels (A1–C1). The study covers two analyses. First, the development of the average clause length in terms of LDS and the average LDS length in the number of words across the latter language proficiency levels. Second, we consider the differences between Slavic and non-Slavic speakers. The results show an increasing tendency of the average clause length measured in LDS while the average clause length measured in words is decreasing. Results also show statistically significant differences between Slavic and non-Slavic speakers in most cases. Our results indicate that using LDS may be a useful unit of syntactic complexity measure in foreign language acquisition research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language corpora usually contain, in addition to their own texts, various types of annotations. The most common one is a morphological annotation, which consists in assigning a lemma and a morphological tag to each wordform. For morphological tagging, morphological dictionaries are traditionally used. Our paper presents a new version of the so-called "Prague" morphological dictionary MorfFlex used for tagging many Czech corpora (particularly Prague Dependency Treebanks, corpora published by the Institute of the Czech National Corpus in Prague or large Czech web corpora of the Aranea series). Three basic principles were used to update the dictionary: the Golden Rule of Morphology, the Principle of Paradigm Unity, and the Principle of Paradigm Uniqueness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on dynamics of changes of several linguistic and text properties in diachronic development of Czech. Specifically, we analyze the proportion of identical word-forms (types), the average type length, text length, the proportion of hapax legomena, the moving average type-token ratio, and entropy. For the analysis, seven translations of the Gospel of Matthew from the 14th to the 21st century were used. The study reveals some differences in dynamics of changes of particular properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper presents a specialized language corpus UcebKo built from textbooks of Czech for foreigners. The corpus integrates three subcorpora (UcebKo-A2, UcebKo-B1, and UcebKo-B2) which allow research of Czech as a second/foreign language at chosen language levels (A2, B1, and B2). In this case, the research is focused on word-formation, where the first results, i.e., mapping of derived words denoting persons, illustrate the approach and methodology used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to explain the origin of the long é in the Slovak word dcéra 'daughter', which is the only word of the original lexical layer that has a long é in its root. Its length is difficult to explain by comparative Slavic accentology since relevant languages generally show a short vowel in this position. Another peculiarity of this word is the fact that é did not undergo the Central Slovak diphthongization that otherwise regularly occurs after c. The author offers a solution in the cultural influence of Czech, which Slovaks had been using as a written language for centuries. It is argued that the original Common Slavic word *dъťi had been lost in Slovak and replaced by a word *děvъka, while dcera was introduced into the Slovak vernacular through Czech religious texts. The initial Czech graphic cluster dc- had been realized as a geminated [cː] by Slovak priests, the pronunciation of which was interpreted as compensatory lengthening of the following vowel, and this length was subsequently phonologized. The lengthening of e and consequent phonologization could be linked to the spread of Czech printed books, so it must be posterior to the Central Slovak diphthongization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on labelling words by subject in a non-specialized dictionary. We compare the existing monolingual dictionaries of Czech and their ways of labelling terms of medicine and related fields; besides apparent differences between dictionaries, there are also inconsistencies within one dictionary. We consider pros and cons of domain labels as such and their usability in the light of needs and limits of dictionary users, with the aim to motivate further discussion on related issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages, some words can be written in several ways. We call them variants. Values of all their morphological categories are identical, which leads to an identical morphological tag. Together with the identical lemma, we have two or more wordforms with the same morphological description. This ambiguity may cause problems in various NLP applications. There are two types of variants - those affecting the whole paradigm (global variants) and those affecting only wordforms sharing some combinations of morphological values (inflectional variants). In the paper, we propose means how to tag all wordforms, including their variants, unambiguously. We call this requirement "Golden rule of morphology". The paper deals mainly with Czech, but the ideas can be applied to other languages as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the use-case study of the annotation of the mobile app reviews from Google Play and Apple Store. These annotations of sentiment polarity were created for later use in the automatic processing based on machine learning. This should solve some of the problems encountered in the previous analyses of the Czech language where data assumptions play a greater role than annotation itself (due to the financial constraints). Our proposal shows that some of the assumptions used for English do not apply to Czech and that it is possible to annotate such data without extensive financing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper presents the tool CZEDD which enables the user to learn how to predict the meaning of words. The CZEDD consists of (semi) automatic definitions for derived words because a lot of these words have predictable lexical meaning. The tool will be intended for foreigners who learn the Czech language and it could be useful as a dictionary and/or translator in which the definitions based on the word's structure are stored. Two detailed case examples (the suffix -tel, and the suffix -ista) illustrate the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

DIALEKT, a corpus of Czech dialects, has been continuously curated and expanded by the Spoken Corpora section of the Institute of the Czech National Corpus. The following paper aims first to give a concise characteristic of the corpus, addressing its sociolinguistic parameters and possible subcorpora derivable thereof, its two-layer approach to the transcription of dialect recordings, and lemmatization & morphological tagging of the corpus. Subsequently, we move on to examples of how linguists can use the corpus and discuss two related projects which expand upon currently available possibilities: an archive of dialect-specific differential phones of the Czech language (completed) and an interactive web environment for spatial map-based visualization of data from all kinds of spoken corpora (in preparation). Thanks in part also to these additional tools, the DIALEKT corpus should serve both experts in the field as well as the general public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the relationship between language and culture has recently found an interesting source of inspiration in the theoretical-methodological basis of cognitive linguistics and ethnolinguistics. The paper draws on this resource, especially on the findings of J. Bartmiński's Ethnolinguistic School of Lublin and the theory of culturally key words by Anna Wierzbicka, and following the previous ethnolinguistic research of Czech Christmas, it focuses on the image of the Christmas giver Ježíšek in contemporary Czech (private and public) discourse. This image has been reconstructed based on the analysis of language data and culturally significant texts dealing with the Ježíšek topic, and also based on a survey conducted among Czechs on social networks. The objective of the analysis is to contribute to the formulation of the so-called cognitive definition connected to the Ježíšek conceptualization, and to identify some of its aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper, we present our efforts to annotate evaluative language in the Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0. The project is a follow-up of the series of annotations of small plaintext corpora. It uses automatic identification of potentially evaluative nodes through mapping a Czech subjectivity lexicon to syntactically annotated data. These nodes are then manually checked by an annotator and either dismissed as standing in a non-evaluative context, or confirmed as evaluative. In the latter case, information about the polarity orientation, the source and target of evaluation is added by the annotator. The annotations unveiled several advantages and disadvantages of the chosen framework. The advantages involve more structured and easy-to-handle environment for the annotator, visibility of syntactic patterning of the evaluative state, effective solving of discontinuous structures or a new perspective on the influence of good/bad news. The disadvantages include little capability of treating cases with evaluation spread among more syntactically connected nodes at once, little capability of treating metaphorical expressions, or disregarding the effects of negation and intensification in the current scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces the ORTOFON corpus of spontaneous spoken Czech and the DIALEKT corpus of Czech dialects, their design principles and practical solutions adopted during data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex adverbial prepositions with spatial meaning have not been sufficiently studied so far in Czech. To establish a set of these expressions in their actual usage, the resources of the Czech National Corpus were used in this study. The research has shown that the SYN2020 corpus is a relevant tool for searching for two-word expressions with a LOCATIVE ADVERB – SIMPLE PREPOSITION structure that have the same function as a one-word locative preposition. The article describes a method for the extraction of these expressions from the corpus, as well as a method for the collection of their quantitative data using corpus tools. As a result of the research, a list of expressions that are presumably complex prepositions is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ORAL and ORTOFON, general corpora of the spoken Czech language, capture authentic and prototypical informal spoken language. DIALEKT, a specialized corpus, represents traditional regional dialects of the Czech language. Since the corpora's goals and the nature of the captured language data differ, different data collection methods were required. It concerns not only the choice of speakers, but the whole communication situation. Samples chosen from these three corpora are included in the Mapka application and reflect the distinct character of the corpora. The ORAL and ORTOFON samples show general spoken language in various informal situations and capture a wide range of speakers. The DIALEKT samples represent traditional regional dialects spoken by chosen types of speakers in a semiformal situation of guided interview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though it is sometimes argued that synonymy is undesirable in legal language, legal language is not devoid of it. In fact, legal language involves cases of syntactical synonymy and lexical synonymy as well as cases of absolute and partial synonymy. Therefore synonymy must be addressed in a legal translation classroom to make trainees aware of all the issues that it may involve, as well as of the fact that terms that may be perceived as synonymous by laypeople are not actually synonymous to lawyers (e.g. murder, homicide, manslaughter). What also needs to be addressed in a legal translation classroom are situations of near-synonyms, whose usage is governed by collocational or contextual restrictions (e.g. breach, violate, infringe) and sometimes involves slight nuances in meaning (e.g. liability v. responsibility, or unlawful, illegal, illicit, etc.). This article introduces a step-by-step approach designed to introduce legal translation trainees to a variety of issues related to (non-)synonymy in legal language, and presents a series of exercises that have been prepared to this end in line with the scaffolding approach. Although the exercises are designed for the English–Czech language pair, they are easily transferable to any teaching context involving English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orchard meadows are appreciated as an integrated land use of high cultural and biological value. While such meadows are typical habitats for temperate Europe, they experienced a decline in their total area during the second half of the 20th century, both in Western and Eastern Europe. In this contribution, we compare their current area and status in terms of semantics, law, public support in general, and the efficiency of public support in both Saxony and the Czech Republic. We estimated the area in Saxony on the basis of three public mapping projects. In the Czech Republic, where no recent mapping included orchard meadows as a specific land-use type, we carried out our own mapping. Hence, we mapped 124 randomly selected plots of 1 km2. To cross-reference results from both countries, we used the pan-EU project LUCAS (Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey). According to various different sources, the orchard meadows cover 0.09–0.55% of Saxony and 0.01–0.72% of the Czech Republic. Interestingly, the results of the three mapping projects conducted in Saxony vary from each other. Although orchard meadows are supported by financial incentives of the respective governments in both countries, the Saxon approach concentrating more on individual activities (sanitation of old trees, planting, grassland management), seems more focused than the single measure practised in the Czech Republic. One key to a greater public awareness of the orchard meadow problematic can lie in the promotion of a simple expression referring to this specific landscape feature in Czech, similar to the phrase common in the German language: 'Streuobstwiese'. Our suggestion for the Czech language is: 'luční sad'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is one of the few studies dealing with gender in the Czech language using corpus methods. It focuses on the issue of gender in Czech journalistic texts from the years 2010-2014. The main goal was to investigate the extent of stereotypical images of men and women in the press. This analysis is based on adjectival collocations of the lexemes muž 'man' and žena 'woman' and their semantic categorization. The research uses a journalistic part of the SYN2015 corpus. First, gender-specific adjectival collocates were identified. Second, adjectival collocates were classified into semantic categories and analyzed within journalistic genres. This study has shown that certain adjectives tend to co-occur with one of the examined lexemes and project a gender-stereotypical image of men and women within particular journalistic genres. It was confirmed that men are strongly associated with age specification, strength, appearance, and negative situations as a subject of crime, whereas women are related to motherhood, attractiveness, ethnicity, nationality, and are more often seen as victims of crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study concerns the impact of the collocation/phraseme disambiguation component within the complex system of the rule-based morphological disambiguation of Czech. This system constitutes one of the two main disambiguation subsystems that are responsible for the morphological disambiguation of the corpora of synchronic Czech within the Czech National Corpus project. We will show that although the part of texts constituted by collocations/phrasemes (generally multiword expressions - MWEs) is relatively small and consequently the errorfree morphological disambiguation of MWEs covers only a small portion of textual material, such perfectly disambiguated fragments in sentences help to improve the disambiguation of the rest, non-MWE part of sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compound adverbs represent an interesting issue in terms of Automatic Morphological Analysis (AMA). The reason is that compound adverbs in Czech are expressions formed by compounding existing words that are different parts of speech without any change in their form. An indicative sign of compound adverbs is that they can always be decomposed again. Compound adverbs may be written as one word but sometimes a multiword form coexists. A word that is originally a different part of speech gains an adverbial meaning and becomes an adverb. This article presents the results of a corpus probe aimed at mapping expressions that are demonstrably compound adverbs and were not recognized by AMA or were incorrectly tagged by AMA as another part of speech. Analysis of data obtained from the Czech National Corpus (ČNK) SYN v3 show that the unrecognized and incorrectly tagged units can be divided into several groups. Based on knowledge of these groups it is possible to refine part of speech tagging by AMA. The corpus probe examined units written in accordance with the current codification as well as substandard units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]