Volumen 71 (2020): Heft 1 (June 2020)

This study interprets the forgiveness, pardon and apology formulas in pragmatic contexts. We focus on (a) their interpretation from the perspective of primary and secondary use and on (b) the discoursive success of verb-noun collocations, i.e. collocations of the apologetic verbs and nouns with a common attribute of ‘transgression’. We start from the position of the speaker who presents himself/herself as either the offending or the damaged party. In the role of the offender, he/she either makes an apologetic utterance to the addressee, or asks/begs for an apology, pardon or forgiveness. In the role of the damaged, he/she conveys forgiveness and/or lack thereof, or excuse and/or lack thereof, to the interlocutor. The study focuses on the use of cooperation and politeness strategies (in particular the maxims of generosity and tactfulness) and the public face (we anticipate that the speaker awaits an ‘egocentric’ attitude). The formulas of secondary apologies will be interpreted as a specific politeness strategy that reflects the emphatic nature of the speaker toward the addressee and maximizes speaker's tactfulness. We will show that the Slovak language possesses these functionally supported formulaic and ritualized formulas: phatic and reconciliation formulas, formulas with the ‘lack of understanding’ function, reservations and warnings. The discoursive success of the verb-noun collocations will be identified through correspondence analysis, which renders a correspondence map showing the perimeters of mental apologetic zones in the Slovak language.

The Slovak Comparative Correlative (CC) construction has received little attention, although it is interesting regarding both its semantics and its form: As discussed in Horsch (2019), CCs are characterized by their complex symmetric (parallel change over time) and asymmetric (cause-effect) semantics, which are encoded in a biclausal structure in which each clause consists of a combination of fixed material and obligatory/optional slots. Typically, the first clause (C1) encodes a cause/protasis, and precedes the second clause (C2), which encodes an effect/apodosis: [čím bližšie sa pozeráš,]_C1 [tým lepšie vidíš.]_C2 ‘the closer you look, the better you see.’ However, there are also structures that retain the same meaning but in which C2 precedes C1 (often referred to as CC’): [Tým lepšie vidíš]_C2 [čím bližšie sa pozeráš.]_C1. ‘You see the better, the closer you look.’ Additionally, there is a variant in Slovak where the clause precedes the clause-initial element and comparative element: [Vidíš tým lepšie,]_C2 [čím bližšie sa pozeráš.]_C1.

Embedded in a Usage-based Construction Grammar approach, this is the first large-scale corpus study to investigate the C2C1 order in Slovak, and how semantics influences its formal properties. It is argued that both the significantly higher amount of C1C2 order in the corpus data and the significantly higher amount of C2C1 structures in which the clause precedes the comparative element in C2 can be explained with the principle of iconicity (linguistic form is influenced by the semantics of a construction), which makes certain strings easier to process and thus leads to performance preference. From a cross-linguistic perspective, the present investigation provides evidence in support of Goldberg’s Tenet #5 (2003, p. 219), which posits that cross-linguistic generalizations can be accounted for with general cognitive constraints.

In this paper, we draw attention to reciprocity in Czech light verb constructions – a language phenomenon, which has not been discussed yet. Reciprocity is contributed to light verb constructions by predictive nouns, as they are the nouns that represent the semantic core of these constructions. Here we focus on reciprocal light verb constructions derived by the syntactic operation of reciprocalization. We show that the complex mapping of semantic participants onto valency complementations, characteristic of reciprocalization, is reflected in reciprocal light verb constructions in the same way as in reciprocal nominal constructions. The main difference between reciprocal nominal constructions and reciprocal light verb constructions lies in the morphosyntactic expression of reciprocalized participants. We demonstrate that surface syntactic changes in reciprocal light verb constructions are regular enough to be described on the rule basis: the rule based generation of reciprocal light verb constructions requires a cooperation of two sets of rules – rules for deep and surface syntactic structure formation of light verb constructions and rules for capturing reciprocity.

This article deals with the linguistic competition of the possessive genitive and possessive adjectives in contemporary spoken Czech language. It focuses on the differences between the constructions of the type Barbořin byt (Barbora’s flat), byt (naší) Barbory (the flat of (our) Barbora) and (naší) Barbory byt ((our) Barbora’s flat). The paper’s aimis to find out which of the possessive structures are preferred by speakers (and alternatively for what reason) or whether the frequency of their usage is equal. At first, both ways of expressing the possession with all their restrictions are described from the theoretical point of view. Moreover, the semantic relation of possessivity is specified. The next section suggests the influences which may govern the preference of the speaker. Within empirical research, data from the corpus of spoken Czech (ORALv1) are examined and it is seeked for explanation of factors that influence the choice of the structure. This also demonstrates whether one of the possessive structures has a dominant position or whether they occur in similar numbers.

The article deals with the history of the Polish words with primary meanings ‘animal’ and analyzes different views on their origin. The article describes the phenomenon of zoosemic semantic changes in Polish prison slang from the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Several animal-specific nouns functioning as synonyms for jailer (prison ward) are presented. Sources of individual names are indicated and it is given a description of semantic changes which took place under the influence of foreign languages.