Between Syntax and Pragmatics: The Causal Conjunction Protože in Spoken and Written Czech

Abstract

Research into causal conjunctions suggests that there are various degrees of causality and that causality is better situated on a cline between strong and weak. Some studies of English because/'cause/cos suggest a diachronic change in the spoken language, where the use of because is shifting from prototypical subordinator to discourse marker (Stenström, in: Jucker, Ziv (eds) Discourse markers, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1998; Burridge in Aust J Linguist 34(4): 2014). This study examines in detail the use of the most frequent Czech causal conjunction protože in both written and spoken language, thus making a further contribution to cross-linguistic research into causality and to research into the differences between spoken and written language more generally. There are two major language varieties of Czech: the common vernacular and the standard literary language (the codified norm). These two varieties differ in a number of respects-at the morphological, lexical and phonological levels. In comparing spoken and written Czech, very few studies include syntactic features and none are based on large-scale authentic spoken data. Based on the corpus data, the conjunction protože occurs strikingly more frequently in spoken Czech than in written language. This study looks at some differences in its distribution. The study is based on extensive corpus data of both written Czech (comprising fiction, newspapers and academic texts) and spoken Czech (corpora of spontaneous conversations and TV debates).

Is there a core general vocabulary for Czech? Introducing the Czech General Service List

“…The concept of diglossia is defined as the coexistence of two varieties of the same language, usually occurring when a literary or prestige language variety differs substantially from the variety spoken by everyday language users. Modern Czech linguists continue to debate whether or not Czech should be considered diglossal, semi-diglossal or something else entirely (Sgall et al, 1992;Sgall & Hronek, 2014;Bermel, 2014;Čermáková et al, 2017;Nekula & Šichová, 2017), however the general consensus in the field is that written and spoken Czech differ substantially, regardless of which label it receives. Sgall and Hronek (2014) used the diglossia debate itself as evidence of the existence of diglossia:…”

“…After establishing through data piloting that wordlists of length 10k were better able to differentiate between written and spoken Czech, further data piloting was necessary to determine the extent to which corpora of written and spoken Czech differ from one another. Although linguists disagree whether or not Czech constitutes a truly diglossal paradigm, there is strong theoretical evidence derived from native speaker intuition that written Czech is different from spoken Czech (Sgall & Hronek, 1992;Bermel, 2010Bermel, , 2014Čermáková et al, 2017;Nekula & Šichová, 2017).…”