Word order of the Czech word li ("if") in Baroque Czech

Abstract

This article is based on data collected from a corpus of Czech Baroque prints representing different genres and styles of the Czech language of this period (from 1650 to 1750). The main aim of the article is an analysis of word order of the Czech word li ("if") in Baroque Czech. The article also reflects grammatical and semantic features of this word, which play the role of: 1. a wh-word of the yes/no questions, 2. a subjunctor of completive or conditional clauses. The analysis is focused on detection and interpretation of the word-order patterns of this item. The word if: 1. is an operator enclitic of prototypical nature (Migdalski 2009), which is placed after the first stressed word of A sentence (the positioning within the sentence is caused only by extractions); 2. can be hosted by different parts of speech, but it prefers the verb, 3. occupies the first position of the clitic cluster. It seems that the word if is rheme-oriented, i.e. it prefers hosts that has the status of rheme (focus), which could be an indirect evidence of its potential ancient (Proto-Slavic) status of a rhematisator (focalisator).