Speaker
Affilliation
Charles University, Prague
Abstract
We selected a prepositional group in Czech consisting of the preposition za and of a noun in an accusative form as an example to deal with the task of distinguishing between different adverbial syntactical functions expressed by a morphologically homonymous form. First, we demonstrated the multifunctionality of the analysed form on some motivation examples and summed up the description of the form in the most substantial syntaxes of Czech language and in other related works. We realised that the typology of relevant adverbials is inconsistent in many points. Secondly, we acquired a data set of 1591 occurrences of the selected form from the Prague Dependency Treebank and we used 524 of them for our detailed analysis. We compared our observations with the information collected from the related works and we described twelve adverbial types with different meanings presented by the form za + accusative. Providing as accurate definitions as possible, we made an effort to eliminate existing inconsistency in the adverbial typology. We suggested establishing new adverbial types in some cases -- adverbial of representation, adverbial of countervalue -- or to separate a new subtype -- adverbial of compromise. We also suggested some modifications of the temporal adverbial subtypes system. Finally, we formulated automatic, semi-automatic and manual criteria for recognition of all the described adverbial types and subtypes excluding the adverbial of extent and the adverbial of regard represented in our data set only by a small amount of occurrences. Applying the criteria, we were able to recognise the correct adverbial type for 92.18% of 524 occurrences in total in the analysed data set and for 86.76% of 524 occurrences in total in our training data set.