Chapters from the Czech Grammar

The aim of this project is to create methodological and descriptive foundations for a fundamentally new, complex description of the grammar of contemporary Czech, based on the grammatical analysis of large computer corpora of texts that are representatively balanced for genre. The project is conceived primarily in terms of structured team-based research into the competing forms and structures of contemporary Czech and how they are or are not contained in the Czech National Corpus. The subject of our attention will be its central and largest component, called SYN2000 (further CNC). Additionally, the Prague Dependency Corpus will be used.
In concrete terms, the aim of the project is to use the CNC: (a) to describe the systemic status, the genre and textual distribution, the frequency and style of forms, structures and competing features found frequently, which nonetheless have till now been described only incompletely or haphazardly; (b) to describe forms and structures that are less frequently attested, borderline, rare or contentious, whose descriptions are incomplete, haphazard or incorrect inasmuch as - by today's standards - they were based on very limited linguistic material; (c) to create a description of the largest possible number of features from the areas of morphology, word formation and the syntax of sentences and texts, which will be published in book form and will serve as the basis for a large-scale corpus-based grammar of Czech.