Studie z Aplikované Lingvistiky (Dec 2017)
Partikule v Pražském mluveném korpusu : Particles in Prague Spoken Corpus
Abstract
The article deals with particles, usually considered to be a residual part of speech, and strives to come to some general conclusions on occurrence and frequency of particles as well as their function in common spoken language. The basic source is the reference Prague Spoken Corpus (PSC) which is a part of the Czech National Corpus. The fact that particles are after verbs and pronouns the third most frequent word in spoken Czech appears for the first time in the Frequency Dictionary of Spoken Czech based on the PSC. This finding demands new tasks on linguists, especially more detailed description of this so frequently used part of speech, which hasn’t been so far thoroughly analyzed on the basis of true authentic data. PSC provides the unique possibility to describe functions and the meaning of particles in the direct authentic context and usage, where they naturally appear. Large contextual scope is the decisive criterion for their identification. Description of particles requires a practical approach and by analyzing their real occurrence and co-occurrence one can prove, deny or change all theoretical premises. What we haven’t found in the corpus is also a positive knowledge — the prove that in the corpus with a size of almost three quarter million tokens a particular word didn’t appear. The article presents all types of particles which appear in the corpus and provides both its quantitative analyses dealing with original particles as well as with those homonymous with other parts of speech. It also deals with the existing processing of particles in various linguistic manuals.
