Department of Grammar

Contact:

Letenská 123/4
118 00 Praha 1

About the Department of Grammar:

The Department of Grammar’s work focuses primarily on:

Comprehensive description of the grammatical system of Czech.
Analysis of verbal semantics.
Research into grammatical categories.
Methodology of grammatical analysis.
Frailty of contemporary grammatical standards.

The synchronic corpora of the Czech National Corpus form the material basis for this research. We interpret corpus data both qualitatively (meaning) and quantitatively (frequency).

Our current work:

Comprehensive academic grammar of standard Czech

The Department of Grammar is developing a four-volume work titled Comprehensive academic grammar of standard Czech, edited by F. Štícha. It is a collaboration between the Department of Grammar staff and experts from Czech and foreign universities. The work contains the following sections:

I. Morphology. Part 1. Parts of speech/word formation (published in 2018 by Academia publishers)
II. Morphology. Part 2. Morphological categories / Flexion (will be published at the end of 2020 by Academia publishers)
III. Syntax. Part 1. Syntagma/Sentences/Complex and compound sentences
IV. Syntax. Part 2. Text/Modality (work on both syntax sections is currently underway)

Research into verb semantics and aspect

This research project focuses mainly on the following phenomena: verbal aspect, presupposition, negation, modality, reflexivity and reciprocity, both separately and in relation to one another and from both the theoretical and empirical points of view (which cannot be separated from one another). We are gradually publishing the research results in journal studies and monographs.

In 2020 the key result of the grant project Causes of aspectual unpairedness in Czech (GA CZ, reg. no. 16-19561S) was the publication of a monograph titled Chapters on Verbal Aspect (Not Only) in Czech (editor: L. Veselý), which was elaborated by the Department of Grammar staff with colleagues from other institutions.