Czech Sentences Research Articles

When and where did it happen? Systematic differences in recall of core and optional sentence information.

This article reports on four experiments aiming to examine immediate post-sentential recall of core sentence information (conveyed by direct objects), and optional/additional information (conveyed by temporal or locative adjuncts). Participants read simple and unambiguous Czech sentences such as Starší důchodce velmi pečlivě pročetl noviny v neděli v knihovně: "An older retiree read the newspaper very carefully on Sunday in the library." Sentences always appeared as a whole after pressing a space bar. Immediately after the sentence disappeared, an open-ended (free response) question was presented targeting either the direct object (e.g., newspaper), temporal adjunct (e.g., on Sunday), or locative adjunct (e.g., in the library). Altogether, it was found that the core information (conveyed by the direct object) was recalled almost perfectly, whereas additional information, conveyed by temporal and locative adjuncts, was recalled with significantly lower accuracy rates. Information structure also played a role: if the temporal or locative adjunct was focused, it was recalled better than if it was unfocused. The present article thus shows systematic differences in recall success for different pieces of information. These findings suggest the presence of selective attention mechanisms during early stages of sentence processing. Factors such as syntactic function or information structure influence the degree of attention to different pieces of information conveyed by a sentence. In turn, certain pieces of information may not be consciously accessible already after the sentence is processed.

Here come the nouns: Czech two-year-olds use verb number endings to predict sentence subjects

Two-year-old children can use gender or number agreement to predict upcoming words in phrases or sentences. However, most findings showed prediction from freestanding grammatical words, such as articles or copulas. While this shows knowledge of agreement relations, it might be limited to a narrow set of grammatical words. We examined the possibility that children at this age can use grammatical number agreement independently of specific closed-class words, testing whether they predict nouns from bound morphemes on lexical verbs. If this were the case, the emerging grammatical knowledge is unlikely to be lexically specific. Our first experiment replicated existing findings using number-marked copula, while the second experiment marked number on endings of four different verbs. Two-year-old children watched pairs of pictures showing single or multiple items while listening to sentences whose sentence-final subject referred to one of the two pictures. The grammatical Czech sentences contained a copula (Experiment 1: where is/are in the picture car/s?) or one of four number-marked lexical verbs (Experiment 2: Here jump/s the frog/s in the picture). Children in both experiments anticipated the subject from the verb or copula form. Children thus used number agreement predictively in the complex Czech copula system and lexical verbs marked by endings. This suggests that children understand grammatical number independently of specific grammatical words and supports the view that early knowledge of grammar is not lexically specific.

Analysis of Verbal Prepositional “of” Structures

Abstract The article presents empirical research of verbal prepositional “of“ structures, grammatical collocations of the verb and the preposition OF. The preposition OF belongs among the most frequent prepositions in the English language. The study is based on comparisons of English and Czech sentences containing verbs and prepositions that are followed by the object. Material was taken from the electronic data bank Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank 2.0. The structures were examined and analyzed from morphological, syntactical and semantic points of view. The aim of the study is to create English-Czech verbal prepositional counterparts; to create verbal prepositional groups on the grounds of the similar semantic, syntactic features; to identify the features that are the same for each verb group and generalize them; to identify trends and tendencies for verbs when they collocate with a certain preposition. The findings are presented in several charts and tables.

Subcategorization of Adverbial Meanings Based on Corpus Data

Abstract We introduce a corpus based description of selected adverbial meanings in Czech sentences. Its basic repertory is one of a long lasting tradition in both scientific and school grammars. However, before the corpus era, researchers had to rely on their own excerption; but nowadays, current syntax has a vast material basis in the form of electronic corpora available. On the case of spatial adverbials, we describe our methodology which we used to acquire a detailed, comprehensive, well-arranged description of meanings of adverbials including a list of formal realizations with examples. Theoretical knowledge stemming from this work will lead into an improval of the annotation of the meanings in the Prague Dependency Treebanks which serve as the corpus sources for our research. The Prague Dependency Treebanks include data manually annotated on the layer of deep syntax and thus provide a large amount of valuable examples on the basis of which the meanings of adverbials can be defined more accurately and subcategorized more precisely. Both theoretical and practical results will subsequently be used in NLP, such as machine translation.

Několik myšlenek k tvorbě hesel

Osmiznakových řetězců složených z malých a velkých pismen ceske abecedy a cislic existuje zhruba 6 × 10 15 . Drtivou větsinu z takových hesel si vsak nikdo neni schopen zapamatovat, protože se ani vzdaleně neasociuji s žadným „rozumným“ obsahem. V tomto textu dochazime k odhadu, že pocet smysluplných ceských vět o ctyřech až pěti slovech je urcitě o několik desitkových řadů vyssi (a nezaleži přitom přilis ani na tom, zda použijeme nějake velke pismeno), přicemž takto tvořena hesla se navic daji snadno zapamatovat. Dale ukazujeme několik jednoduchých způsobů, jak rozsiřit „prostor“ takto tvořených hesel až k hranicim kolem 10 40 teoreticky možných řetězců, aniž by se pro uživatele přilis zkomplikovala zapamatovatelnost zvoleneho hesla. Tim nabizime metodu efektivni tvorby silných hesel. Klicova slova: Heslo, cestina, abeceda, gramatika, bezpecnost. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18267/j.aip.78

Processing of conceptual relationships within simple Czech and English sentences--ERPs and behavioral correlates.

The paper presents findings of an experiment the participants of which were native Czech speakers (L1 ) possessed of perfect knowledge of English (L2). We assumed that the subjects could process differently each of the three types of English and Czech sentences; the first type represented correct sentences, the other two violated sentences. Violated sentences differed in the precise relationship between the verbs, their preceding noun phrases, and their preceding context. ERPs to critical verbs, the accuracy rate for both English and Czech sentences processing and decision time for each were evaluated. Participants' personality traits were assessed too. It has been shown that our subjects, who learned English after the age of 15, displayed significant differences in all measured parameters. It was especially the longer latency N400, the lower accuracy rate of English sentence processing, the longer decision time, and the same dynamics of all measured ERPs parameters. Possible causes of these differences are discussed.

Über Argumentstruktur, Fokussierung und modale Satzadverbien im Tschechischen und Russischen

Prototypical features of modal sentence adverbial constructions are analyzed and compared with the prototypical features of the so-called rhematizers such as only (focalizers or focus sensitive particles, cf. Hajicova 1995 ; Koktova 1986, 1987 ; McCawley 1996 ; Boguslavskij 1985) in Czech and Russian sentences. The analysis is based on the assumption that the syntactic position of the surface word order of arguments and adjuncts reflects (also in its relation to sentence prosody) the categorical representation of the cognitive meaning of the sentence. In secondary cases, an adverbial of mood can also occur in the topic position of the sentence (i.e. in the leftmost position) without necessarily ascribing the sentence an existential meaning as proposed for locative sentences by Babby (1980, 101). Following Hajicova (1995), it seems to be necessary to distinguish between the focus of a rhematizer, the focus position of the adjuncts (adverbials) and the focus of the arguments. In addition, several Czech and Russian modal sentence adverbials and focalizers are discussed which exhibit interesting syntactic relations. The analysis is based on the dichotomy of topic and focus articulation as developed in the tradition of Prague School (Firbas 1992 ; Hajicova, Partee, Sgall, in prep.), but it entails also some considerations on informational structure of adjuncts and arguments (Grimshaw 1991) as described in the Minimalist program (Chomsky 1995 ; Kayne 1995 ; Kosta 1997). Also the notions of pragmatic ordering principle, of contextual boundness (Krifka 1995), of salience and the hierarchy of communicative dynamism offer convenient tools for a sufficiently detailed description of the sentence structure of Czech and Russian modal sentence adverbials