Difference between Written and Spoken Czech: The Case of Verbal Nouns Denoting an Action

Abstract

Abstract The present paper extends understanding of differences in expressing actions by verbal nouns in corpora of written vs. spoken Czech, namely in the Czech part of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank and in the Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Czech. We show that while the written corpus includes more complex noun phrases with more explicit expression of adnominal participants, noun phrases in the spoken corpus contain more deletions and more exophoric references. We also carried out a quantitative analysis focusing on relative frequencies of combinations of participants modifying verbal nouns; although the written corpus shows higher relative frequencies, the order of the relative frequencies of particular combinations is the same in both types of communication.