Slovosled posesivních zájmen ve staré češtině

Abstract

The primary aim of this paper is to compare the word order of possessive pronouns in the noun phrase in Modern Czech and Old Czech. The attention is devoted especially to the type of possessive pronouns, rhythmic articulation, topic and focus phrase, etc. The material basis for this analysis is the private corpus of texts from 14th and 15th century. This corpus includes selected texts of the 1st and 2nd Old Czech biblical translations, various prosaic texts and contemporary research articles. The paper demonstrates that stylistic factors and the rate of original text's influence are basic aspects for the word order of possessive pronouns in Old-Czech. The prenominal position prevails conspicuously in the oldest Old-Czech original prosaic text "Kniha rožmberská" and in the Gospel of Matthew of the oldest Old-Czech translation "Bible drážďanská". The postnominal position is mainly used in texts with the dependence on original Latin texts and in texts, which try to imitate Latin syntactic structures. For above-mentioned reasons the primary prenominal position is assumed for Old-Czech possessive pronouns of 1st and 2nd person.

Keywords

• word order
• possessive pronouns
• Old Czech