Distribution of (non-)syllabic present tense forms of the verb býti in the 3rd-person singular in Old Czech

Abstract

In the presented article, I follow the previous works investigating clitics in the history of the Czech language. Particularly, I aim to describe the distribution of the 3sg present tense be forms in Old Czech prosaic texts dated to the 14th and 15th centuries, and, subsequently, assess their status in the scope of the grammaticalization theory. Since each form bears several functions in a clause, I explore the effect of both the verb's function and form on its distribution. The observations made here are then contextualized, compared to the contemporary Czech, as well as the Old Czech situation, especially focusing on the 2sg forms that show a similar formal variation as the 3sg forms. The numerical data presented here are supplemented with statistical tests whose results and methods are in detail published online on GitHub.