„Protestovali před a v budově řeckého ministerstva financí.“ Krátké nahlédnutí do problematiky zeugmatu

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on one of the deviations from sentence structure, the zeugma, specifically its frequency in different types of texts. Existing linguistic publications treat usually zeugma as an error to be avoided. In addition to defining the term, we also draw attention to ellipsis and condensation, which are related to zeugma. The frequency of its occurrence in texts will be verified by corpus analysis; the corpus used will be the SYN2020 corpus of written Czech, the ORTOFON_v2 corpus of spoken, informal Czech, the ORATOR_v2 corpus of formal texts, and the web corpus, Araneum Bohemicum Maximum. The analyzed examples illustrate that zeugma occurs in different types of texts and, thus, is not bound to one particular mode. The prevalence of zeugma in professional texts suggests that this device does not affect the clarity and precision of expression that are typical for them. This finding could open up a debate as to whether to consider the zeugma as a standard stylistic device by which language users condense their utterances.