Cieľom Jazykovedného časopisu je zhromažďovať inovatívne príspevky, ktoré spája záujem o všeobecné a teoretické otázky jazyka, jeho povahy, funkcií, riadiacich princípov a interakcie s kognitívnou a sociálnou realitou. Tento zastrešujúci cieľ však pozýva výlučne k predkladaniu návrhov z oblasti všeobecnej a teoretickej lingvistiky, ale otvára sa širokému spektru tém. Patria sem okrem iného štúdie na úrovni morfológie, syntaxe, sémantiky, štylistiky, pragmalingvistiky atď. Vzhľadom na špecifikáciu cieľa časopis neuverejňuje príspevky zaoberajúce sa štúdiom osvojovania si druhého jazyka a prekladom. Preferované sú príspevky zamerané na slovenčinu a iné, prevažne slovanské jazyky, vrátane porovnávacích príspevkov, v ktorých sa zohľadňujú slovanské jazyky. Návrhy môžu podporovať komparatívnu a/alebo historickú perspektívu, kvantitatívnu a/alebo kvalitatívnu metodológiu a môžu byť ukotvené vo všetkých hlavných súčasných lingvistických oblastiach, ako sú filozofia jazyka, kognitívna lingvistika, konštrukčná gramatika, sociolingvistika, diskurzné štúdie, korpusová lingvistika a iné. Týmto širokým spektrom perspektív chce časopis poskytnúť fórum pre výskumníkov, ktorí sa usilujú o hĺbkové a komplexné vysvetlenie jazykových javov, ako aj o lepšie pochopenie jazyka vo všeobecnosti.
Fonologické procesy v prúde posunkovania
Segments in spoken and sign language interaction do not produce individual units in isolation but in a continuous stream of expression. When using language for communication, the forms of segments can be simplified to make communication more efficient for both communicators and communicants. This communication can result in changes in the way formal units of language are formed. It follows that, as in spoken languages, there are considerable differences in how sign languages are articulated. The differences may manifest in lexis and syntax and in phonetic differences related to social and linguistic factors. In this paper, we focus on the linguistic factors causing differences in the articulation of signs, specifically on the phonological processes within which different adaptations in the forms of signs may occur. For this reason, we will approach several phonological processes in the stream of signing occurring in different national sign languages compared to Slovak sign language and their characteristic features. Understanding phonological processes in the realization of signing can enrich the field of phonetics and phonology in general.
Copyright (c) 2025 Roman Vojtechovský https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Quantitative Corpus Analysis of VladimirPutin’s Speeches
This study presents a quantitative analysis of Vladimir Putin’s public speeches from 1999 to 2024, utilizing a corpus of approximately 1.75 million words sourced from the official Kremlin website. Using computational linguistic techniques, including hierarchical cluster analysis, TF*IDF keyword extraction and temporal trend analysis, the research systematically examines the evolution of Putin’s rhetorical style and thematic content. Significant stylistic and thematic shifts are identified, particularly around 2012, coinciding with his return to the presidency and a notable increase in authoritarian governance. Prominent themes such as national identity, economic policy, security, and international conflicts vary significantly in prominence and shift in emphasis in response to key historical and political milestones. The findings reveal clear correlations between Putin’s language patterns and major political or critical events, including the Chechen conflict, Putin’s political rise and return to the presidency, the annexation of Crimea, and the recent military interventions in Ukraine. These findings demonstrate Putin’s strategic rhetorical adaptability within changing geopolitical contexts.
Copyright (c) 2025 Petr Pořízka, Polina Ivankova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Corpus of Dramas by the Čapek Brothers From a Quantitative Perspective
This text presents the first quantitative analysis of the plays of the Čapek brothers, exploring the linguistic and stylistic differences between their individual and collaborative works. Utilizing computational methods and quantitative approaches, it analyses a corpus of ten plays, focusing on the distribution and proportion of parts of speech in both dialogue and stage directions. The analysis reveals significant stylistic differences: Josef Čapek is characterized by a descriptive language rich in nouns with fewer words overall, while Karel Čapek uses a more dynamic approach with a predominance of verbs. Cluster analysis shows that Josef’s dramas form a separate, distinct group when both dialogue and stage directions are considered, with stage directions showing particularly marked differences. Morphological coefficients, including the noun coefficient (Kn) and Busemann coefficient (B), quantitatively confirm these stylistic differences, with Josef’s plays showing extreme values that indicate high descriptive saturation, especially in the stage directions. This structural analysis not only provides quantitative evidence of different authorial styles, but also lays a foundation for future research.
Copyright (c) 2025 Petr Pořízka, Ján Mačutek https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Longer Words, Easier-to-pronounce Phonemes: A Pilot Study
The study investigates the relationship between word length and phoneme sonority in six languages across diverse language families. Building on the principle of least effort and the Menzerath-Altmann law, the research is aimed to analyze the phoneme sonority using translated New Testament texts in Bilua, Bola, Czech, Gagauz, Jamamadi, and Tongan. The findings reveal that in languages with complex syllables, the tendency of longer words to contain shorter syllables—consistent with the Menzerath-Altmann law— results in a higher proportion of vowels, thereby increasing the mean phoneme sonority. In contrast, languages with simple syllable structures exhibit either a decrease in mean phoneme sonority or no clear trend. Further, mean consonant sonority increases with word length in Bilua, Czech, and Gagauz, while no clear trend is observed in Bola, Jamamadi, and Tongan. Conversely, mean vowel sonority increases with word length in Bola, Jamamadi, and Tongan, but remains stable or decreases in Bilua, Czech, and Gagauz. Overall, the analysis reveals consistent patterns linking word length and sonority across all six languages.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ján Mačutek, Radek Čech, Michaela Koščová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Syntactic Complexity and Political Ideology: A Study of Czechoslovak andCzech Presidential Speeches
This study analyzes syntactic complexity in Czechoslovak and Czech presidential speeches, using a corpus of New Year’s addresses spanning nearly a century. Applying quantitative stylometric methods, we measure average sentence length (ASL), average clause length (ACL), mean dependency distance (MDD), and mean hierarchical distance (MHD) to compare syntactic structures across democratic and communist regimes. The results show that democratic presidents generally use more complex sentence structures, while communist-era speeches are syntactically simpler. However, individual differences are also observed inside groups. Husák exhibits higher complexity among communist leaders, and modern democratic presidents (Klaus, Zeman, Pavel) show a trend toward simplification. These findings confirm ideological influences on presidential rhetoric and highlight a broader shift toward linguistic accessibility in contemporary political speech.
Copyright (c) 2025 Miroslav Kubát, Michaela Nogolová, Xinying Chen, Žaneta Stiborská https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A Corpus-based Analysis of Color Imagery in the Poetry Collection Dar by Maša Haľamová
The study presents a methodological approach that employs an annotated corpus to track the frequency of colors and their shades, as well as to visualize color clusters and their preferences. Corpus analysis reveals that the highest frequencies in the debut collection Dar [The Gift] are found in red, yellow with gold, white, but also gray and green. The results indicate that the color palette in the collection functions as an integral component of lyrical structure and actively contributes to the process of spiritualization. The poetic symbolization of color and its compositional use in expressing spirituality are part of the author’s artistic strategy.
Copyright (c) 2025 Katarína Gajdošová, Ivica Hajdučeková, Peter Malčovský https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Advanced Syntactic Phenomena in the NomVallex Lexicon
NomVallex 2.5 is a valency lexicon of Czech nouns and adjectives that besides valency of particular noun and adjectival lexical units captures several valencyrelated syntactic phenomena, namely (i) active and passive syntax, (ii) systemic and non-systemic valency behavior, (iii) reflexivity and reciprocity, and (iv) negation. These phenomena, represented in the lexicon mostly by deverbal and deadjectival derivatives, are described here with respect to the derivational category of denominal adjectives. Though being regarded as less typical representatives of valency bearers in the non-verbal domain, denominal adjectives turned out to be involved in all of the studied syntactic phenomena. Their syntactic behavior thus can be viewed as similar to other derivational categories, especially to deverbal adjectives.
Copyright (c) 2025 Veronika Kolářová, Václava Kettnerová, Jiří Mírovský https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Modelling Valency Frames Using Inheritance: The Case of Czech Adjectives -telný ‘able’
We introduce a first step to modelling valency frames of selected types of nominals. We work on the assumption that nominals inherit – at least to some extent – valency from their base verbs. We illustrate this task in a case study focused on modelling valency frames of Czech deverbal adjectives -telný ‘able’. First, the valency frames of the adjectives -telný contained in NomVallex are compared with the valency frames of their base verbs in VALLEX. Based on this comparison, two formal rules describing valency changes in the valency frames of adjectives -telný are formulated. Second, for each lexical unit of a verb that satisfies the conditions imposed by some of the rules, the derived adjective -telný is extracted from DeriNet, if such an adjective is available. Third, the valency frame of the adjective is derived from the valency frame of the verb based on the respective rule. Lastly, the accuracy of both rules is verified in the corpus data. The experiment has shown that the valency of these adjectives can be modeled on the rule basis. However, if this task is to be accurate, it requires advanced linguistic information, namely the information on semantic class membership of verbs and on compound adjectives.
Copyright (c) 2025 Václava Kettnerová, Jiří Mírovský, Michal Olbrich https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Do Frequency Types Matter in Lexicography?
Word frequency in a corpus can be calculated in several different ways. Amongst the most common frequency types are the absolute frequency, the document frequency, ALDF and ARF. This paper focuses on comparing these four types in terms of “word correctness.” For determining whether a word is correct or not, we use the data gathered for the Czech lexicon used for the recent Czech Dictionary Express project. In this project, each of the top 100,000 most frequent headwords was reviewed by several Czech native speakers, who decided whether the word should be accepted or rejected or has some minor issues. The quality of the “word correctness” is further discussed in the paper.
Copyright (c) 2025 Marek Blahuš, Vojtěch Kovář, František Kovařík https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
From Rule-based Proofreader Beta Opravidlo to AI-powered Opravidlo 2.0
The demand for accurate and error-free written communication in Czech has led to the development of automated proofreading tools. Beta Opravidlo, a rule-based online proofreader launched in 2022, demonstrated high precision and recall in correcting Czech texts. However, its reliance on predefined linguistic rules limited recall and processing speed. With advancements in machine learning and large language models (LLMs), a transition toward AI-powered proofreading became necessary. This article explores the evolution from Beta Opravidlo to Opravidlo 2.0, integrating deep neural networks to enhance correction capabilities. We discuss proofreading as a machine learning task, compare traditional rule-based and neural approaches, and challenges such as explainability, system integration or computational requirements. The most effective solution is a hybrid approach combining rule-based precision with AI-driven adaptability. Opravidlo 2.0 aims to improve recall, optimize inference time, and extend support to other Slavic languages. This interdisciplinary effort highlights the potential of AI-powered proofreading to set new standards in language correction and usability.
Copyright (c) 2025 Hana Žižková, Zuzana Nevěřilová, Jakub Machura, Aleš Horák, Dana Hlaváčková, Patrik Stano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Annotated Slovak Datasets for Toxicity, Hate Speech, and Sentiment Analysis
The rise of social media has led to an increase in toxic language, hate speech, and offensive content. While extensive research exists for widely spoken languages like English, Slovak remains underrepresented due to the lack of high-quality datasets. This gap limits the development of effective models for toxicity detection and sentiment analysis in Slovak. To address this, we introduce three new annotated Slovak datasets focused on toxic language, offensive language, hate speech detection, and sentiment analysis. These native datasets provide a more reliable foundation for automated moderation compared to machine-translated alternatives. Our research also highlights the real-world impact of online toxicity, including social polarization and psychological distress, emphasizing the need for proactive detection systems on social media platforms. This paper reviews existing Slovak datasets, presents our newly developed resources, and provides a comparative analysis. Finally, we outline key contributions and suggest future directions for improving toxic language detection in Slovak.
Copyright (c) 2025 Zuzana Sokolová, Maroš Harahus, Daniel Hládek, Ján Staš https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Tailored Fine-tuning for Comma Insertion in Czech
Transfer learning techniques, particularly the use of pre-trained Transformers, can be trained on vast amounts of text in a particular language and can be tailored to specific grammar correction tasks, such as automatic punctuation correction. The Czech pre-trained RoBERTa model demonstrates outstanding performance in this task (Machura et al. 2022); however, previous attempts to improve the model have so far led to a slight degradation (Machura et al. 2023). In this paper, we present a more targeted fine-tuning of this model, addressing linguistic phenomena that the base model overlooked. Additionally, we provide a comparison with other models trained on a more diverse dataset beyond just web texts.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jakub Machura, Hana Žižková, Patrik Stano, Tereza Vrabcová, Dana Hlaváčková, Ondřej Trnovec https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
AI and the Translation of Idioms – Challenges, Success, and a Corpus Perspective
This study explores the capabilities of artificial intelligence in translating English idioms into Slovak, with and without contextual information. Using a dataset of 100 idioms and evaluating AI-generated translations against a validated bilingual dictionary of idioms, both qualitative and statistical analyses were employed. The results show an unexpectedly high accuracy in context-free translations, while context occasionally led to deterioration. McNemar’s test and a t-test confirmed a statistically significant shift in performance. The study highlights key advantages and limitations of AI, suggesting further research into reverse and cross-linguistic translation as well as employment of corpus-based methods.
Copyright (c) 2025 Filip Kalaš, Pavol Lipták https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Financial Question-answering Dataset for Slovak Language Model Evaluation
The limited availability of language resources for Slovak presents a significant challenge for the development and evaluation of language models. In this paper, we introduce a multiple-choice question-answering dataset specifically designed for the financial domain in Slovak. The dataset contains 1,334 questions, each with one correct answer and four incorrect ones. It is systematically organized by topic and difficulty level to facilitate structured evaluation. Using this dataset, we assess the performance of several Slovak generative language models and compare their results against a general questionanswering dataset to analyze domain-specific model capabilities. The best-performing model is a monolingual Slovak model. Furthermore, the observed performance differences between financial-domain and general question-answering tasks suggest that domainspecific language modeling requires further research.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daniel Hládek, Kristián Sopkovič, Ján Staš, Zuzana Sokolová, Matúš Pleva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Redefining Terminology Work: The Role of Glossaries and TMs in Customized AI-driven Machine Translation
This study investigates whether traditional terminology work in the customization of machine translation (MT) systems can be effectively replaced by translation memories (TMs) alone. Given the growing reliance on AI-driven translation tools, we evaluated three MT configurations using English–Slovak technical documentation: a baseline (non-customized system), a system customized with both TMs and a glossary, and a system customized with TMs only. Since the text corpora for the given area were sufficient, we used the LLM model to generate additional training data. Results show that TM-only customization can achieve terminology translation accuracy nearly equivalent to setups that include glossaries—particularly when supported by high-quality, domain-specific bilingual data. Nonetheless, glossary-based customization further improves consistency, and terminology errors persist across all systems. This suggests that although automation of translation processes can reduce dependence on traditional terminology building, terminology databases remain essential for ensuring the quality (QA) of the output text. The study offers practical guidance for translators, terminologists, and developers of translation tools by emphasizing the importance of collaboration between automated and human-driven translation processes. It also underscores both the promise and limitations of LLM-generated data for domain adaptation in low-resource language settings.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jakub Absolon https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Development of a Database and Models for Children’s Speech in the Slovak Language for Speech-oriented Applications
Children’s speech differs significantly from adult speech due to physiological and cognitive developmental factors. Key differences include higher pitch, a shorter vocal tract, greater formant frequencies, slower speaking rates, and greater variability in pronunciation and articulation. These differences result in acoustic mismatches between children’s and adult speech, making traditional automatic speech recognition models trained on adult speech less effective for children. Additionally, linguistic differences, such as limited vocabulary and evolving grammar, further contribute to this challenge. This paper focuses on the creation of a children’s speech database for the low-resource Slovak language. This database has been used to train acoustic models for the automatic recognition of spontaneous children’s speech in Slovak. In this research, we compared three different approaches to speech recognition, with self-supervised learning achieving results comparable to similar studies in this area, despite using relatively small amounts of training data.
Copyright (c) 2025 Ján Staš, Stanislav Ondáš, Matúš Pleva, Matej Horváth, Richard Ševc, Patrik Michalanský https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Phrasemes and Collocations in the Corpus – How to Find Unknown Variants
This paper addresses the identification and annotation of multiword expressions (MWEs) in Czech corpora, focusing on enhancing the search procedure through transformations of existing lexicon entries and the addition of new entries based on syntactic patterns. We discuss the limitations of current annotation systems and introduce a new, efficient annotation system that leverages a comprehensive MWE dictionary. Our methodology includes the use of syntactic patterns to identify new collocations, automatic transformations of known MWEs, and manual searches for creatively varied expressions. The results demonstrate significant improvements in the success rate of corpus annotation, with newly identified collocations and transformed MWEs contributing to a richer and more accurate linguistic resource.
Copyright (c) 2025 Hana Skoumalová, Přemysl Vítovec, Milena Hnátková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Syntactic Structures in Czech Multiword Units: Types and Tokens in the Totalitarian Era and Today
We compare six selected types of syntactic structures in the Czech multiword units (MWUs) of the language of communist totalitarian journalism, represented by the Frap Totalita corpus, to the same types of structures in the MWUs of the post-totalitarian journalistic language, represented by the Frap SYNv13-PUB corpus. Attention is also paid to their lexical content. For some structures there are relatively large frequency differences in usage, while in others they are (considerably) minor. In terms of the MWU lexical setting, the languages represented by the corpora differ substantially.
Copyright (c) 2026 Vladimír Petkeviˇč https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
MasKIT – Anonymization and Pseudonymization of Czech Legal Texts
MasKIT is a command-line tool, an on-line web application and a REST API service for anonymization and pseudonymization of Czech legal texts. Taking a plain text as input (e.g. a letter sent by a legal authority to a citizen), it runs external services for dependency parsing and named entity recognition and then via a rule-based approach identifies and replaces sensitive information in the text.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jiří Mírovský, Tereza Novotná, Barbora Hladká https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Challenges in Developing a Glagolitic Reverse Dictionary of Croatian Church Slavonic
The Glagolitic script is the oldest Slavic script and one of the two Slavic scripts (the other is Cyrillic). It was actively used in Croatia until the 19th century. Today, the Glagolitic script is a symbol of Croatian national identity. It has significant cultural, artistic, and esthetic value. The goals of the Old Church Slavonic Institute are researching, discovering, recognizing, systematically listing, and editing Glagolitic manuscripts, inscriptions, and printed books. One of the Institute’s main tasks is to create a digital version of the Dictionary of the Croatian Redaction of Church Slavonic. This is a long-term project, and the dictionary has so far only been published in printed form (A to I). In addition to the creation of the digital dictionary, additional web content is being developed (e.g. games), which will provide an additional source and tool for dictionary compilers and users. One of these additional contents is the reverse dictionary, which consists of the headwords written in Glagolitic from the Dictionary. A reverse dictionary is a dictionary in which the words are sorted alphabetically by their final rather than initial letters, i.e. the words are sorted based on their endings. This allows users to look up words by focusing on their final segments. Reverse dictionaries are useful for scientific research, especially for the study of word-formation (e.g. the study of masculine-feminine pairs), but they can also be used for other purposes, such as finding rhymes and compiling educational games. A reverse dictionary for Croatian Church Slavonic is thus a useful tool for further research. The problem is not only that the word search is not done in a classic matter (where the string is searched from the beginning of the word) but also that the Glagolitic script has some specific letters which have to be mapped to certain characters in the Latin script and that the reverse dictionary has headwords in two scripts (Latin and Glagolitic). Currently, no available software solution can accommodate for these problems, so the reverse dictionary is being developed from scratch using a custom code. This paper presents the challenges and solutions in the development of the Croatian Church Slavonic Reverse Dictionary.
Copyright (c) 2025 Josip Mihaljević https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Annotating Mood, Tense and Voice in Czech Corpora
In the corpora of the Czech National Corpus, the verbtag attribute was introduced for annotating the mood, voice, person, and tense of both simple and compound verb forms. This article presents this attribute and the process of its automatic annotation. We then show an example of the use of verbtag in corpus research by comparing five different text genres in terms of verbal categories expressed in this attribute.
Copyright (c) 2026 Tomáš Jelínek https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
When Data Meet Tools: Using the Monitor Corpus for the Analysis of Language Development
The aim of this paper is to introduce an infrastructure developed within the HiČKoK project to enable full-fledged corpus-based diachronic research of Czech. The individual sections of the paper present the components of this infrastructure, which links well-balanced, representative and annotated data with tailor-made tools for diachronic research. The forthcoming monitor corpus, covering the entire period of written Czech, along with its composition and annotation strategies, is briefly introduced. In the following sections, the potential of the application and its four modules—simple query, comparison, time-based associations, and diachronic collocations—are demonstrated through mini case studies. Combining large-scale data (as representative as possible) with a tool that enhances standard corpus functionalities, enriches them with a diachronic perspective, and enables result visualization makes diachronic research on language change more accessible and comprehensive.
Copyright (c) 2026 Václav Cvrček, Martin Stluka, Klára Pivoňková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Annotation of Rhetorical Roles and Syllogistic Relations in Czech Argumentative Legal and Administrative Texts
We present KUKY 1.0, a publicly available corpus annotated by lawyers for rhetorical structure and relevance. We explain the concepts as well as the annotation procedure. Eventually we discuss the challenge of inter-annotator agreement.
Copyright (c) 2026 Silvie Cinková, Jana Šamánková, Barbora Kubíková, Tereza Novotná, Vítek Eichler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A Quantitative Analysis of Slovak and Czech Supreme Courts Decisions
The paper focuses on the comparison of the quantitative characteristics of the decisions of the Slovak and Czech supreme courts, using publicly available databases of their decisions, which can be analyzed from the point of view of quantitative linguistics and stylometry using the Czech application QuitaUp and further investigated mainly by means of the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test. The aim of the paper is to identify possible statistically significant differences in the representation of selected quantitative measures in the samples of decisions of both courts and to consider the possibilities of how to interpret these differences in terms of a closer comparative stylistic research aimed at Slovak and Czech legal texts.
Copyright (c) 2026 Miroslav Zumrík https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Sonority Sequencing Principle in Historical Czech: A Corpus-based Study
This paper investigates the application of the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) in historical Czech through a corpus-based approach. Drawing on texts from the 14th and 17th centuries, we examine the structure of word-initial and word-final consonant clusters with respect to both the strict and mild versions of the SSP. The results reveal two frequent types of violations: those involving liquids—specific to the diachronic development of Czech—and those involving sibilants, which are common crosslinguistically. Our findings provide new empirical evidence for the study of historical phonotactics in Slavic languages.
Copyright (c) 2025 Markéta Ziková, Radek Čech, Martin Březina, Pavel Kosek https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Idioms in Disguise: How Grammatical Profiling Reveals Phraseological Patterns
This article examines how morphological anomalies – specifically, the unusually high frequencies of certain singular noun forms – can reveal idiomatic usage in Czech. Using data from the GramatiKat tool, 1,102 noun lemmas were analyzed, of which 28% participated in idiomatic expressions. The study identifies clear distributional patterns across grammatical cases, with idioms most frequent in the accusative, genitive, locative, and instrumental singular. Monocollocational idioms are distinguished, as they are associated with specific structural patterns. The results show that idiomatic expressions can influence morphological distributions and leave measurable traces in corpus data. The approach is further applicable to other parts of speech, such as verbs and adjectives, suggesting a broader role for grammatical profiling in the identification of idiomatic and phraseological patterns.
Copyright (c) 2026 Anna Vysloužilová, Dominika Kováříková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Mapping Recurrent Lexico-grammatical Patterns in English Through Subtree Fragments
This paper examines subtree fragments (StF) as a corpus-informed method for identifying recurrent lexico-grammatical structures and compares them to two established approaches: collocational frameworks (Sinclair and Renouf 1988) and pattern grammar (Hunston and Francis 2000). StFs differ from these approaches in two major respects. First, they are grounded in a theoretical linguistic assumption that lexical heads project syntactic structures, incorporating part-of-speech categories, phrase structures, and thematic role assignment. Second, StFs are identified semi-automatically from parsed corpora by exploring patterns of grammatical words and syntactic categories, in contrast to the predominantly manual, concordance-based methods of the other two approaches. The findings suggest that StFs provide a productive interface between theory-driven syntactic analysis and data-driven corpus linguistics, allowing for fine-grained mapping between form, meaning, and use while retaining compatibility with probabilistic and statistical perspectives.
Copyright (c) 2026 Aleksandar Trklja https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A Mountain of Evidence? A Corpus Study of the Argument Structure of Transferred Senses of Nouns in English
Based on an earlier observation, the study poses the question of whether the presence or absence of a valency complement of a noun relates to whether the noun is used literally or non-literally, in a transferred sense (typically based on metaphor). Two case studies are presented, one concerning 13 body part nouns (such as foot) and their transferred uses, and the other concerning two landscape nouns, mountain and flood. Both studies show that non-literal uses of nouns are much more likely to take an overt complement. This might relate in part to the type shift of sortal nouns into relational nouns and in part to the low degree of lexicalization of some transferred senses, which renders them more reliant on contextual cues, such as the use of a complement, for adequate interpretation.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jakub Sláma https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
No doubt, but... on Connective Functions of Epistemic Markers
Epistemic markers are usually treated on the basis of their primary function to express the level of certainty of a speaker about a given proposition. They are often described as items operating on higher levels than syntax. In this paper, we focus on cases in which epistemic markers actually contribute to the syntactic organization of text, either by developing a text-organizing function or a discourse connective function. Specifically, we address three patterns which appeared in the corpus data: a confrontation of modalities, a function of a topic orientation marker, and a contrastive pattern with concessive features.
Copyright (c) 2026 Lucie Poláková, Jana Šindlerová, Barbora Štěpánková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Adverbs and Particles: Part-of-speech Homonymy in Corpus Data and Media Discourse
The study addresses the part-of-speech homonymy between adverbs and particles in Slovak, with a focus on linguistic data from corpora and media discourse. Four lexemes were analysed: absolútne, konečne, očividne and prirodzene, examining differences in their frequency, collocations, and contextual functions. The results revealed that lexical and pragmatic factors are crucial for distinguishing adverbs from particles, and that the meaning of the context plays a significant role in their interpretation. The study contributes to the debate on the exact criteria for distinguishing parts of speech and highlights the importance of a comprehensive approach in corpus and media linguistics.
Copyright (c) 2026 Kristína Piatková, Mária Stanková https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0