Work

Variation of Adverbial Markers of Reciprocity in Czech

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This paper presents a study on variation between adverbial markers of reciprocity in Czech: navzájem/vzájemně ‘each other, mutually’ and spolu ‘with each other’. The study demonstrates in practice what method quantitative-qualitative empirical research on grammatical variation should follow. The qualitative analysis can be integrated with the quantitative description in a two-step manner: (1) the qualitative analysis is often necessary to determine the frequencies of the variants; (2) an in-depth qualitative analysis should follow to establish the functional relationship between the variants. The two adverbs form a semantic opposition (navzájem/vzájemně indicates binary conjunctive reciprocity, while spolu indicates single-event reciprocity) but become variants if certain semantic and pragmatic conditions are met. The corpus analysis showed that the co-occurrence of navzájem/vzájemně with single-event reciprocals is facilitated when the number of reciprocants is greater than two.

Source: Studia z Filologii Polskiej i Słowiańskiej

DOI: 10.11649/sfps.3404

Author: Vojtěch Veselý

Institutions: Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Language Institute

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: Grantová Agentura České Republiky

Award: Semantic types and pragmatic aspects of reciprocal verbs in the light of corpus data