How Czech students perceive action and time in their mother tongue: A case study

Abstract

Based on 207 questionnaires that investigated how undergraduate students of Czech Philology perceive action and time, it was found that their understanding of these terms varies. Students’ interpretation was influenced not only by the knowledge they had and the language rules they applied, but also by their intuition and natural language perception, which inherently complement the process. We concluded that more attention should be paid to deverbal adjectives because their recognition proved to be particularly challenging.

Keywords

• absolute and relative time
• action-related perspective
• deverbal adjectives
• grammatical categories
• semantic time