Department of Grammar
Address:
Letenská 123/4
118 00 Praha 1
Scope of research:
The work of the Grammar Department focuses mainly on:
- comprehensive description of the grammatical system of the Czech language,
- analysis of verb semantics,
- research on grammatical categories,
- research on synsemantic parts of speech, particularly prepositions and particles,
- methodology of grammatical description of language,
- shifts in current grammatical norms.
Research is based on material from the synchronic corpora of the Czech National Corpus. We interpret the corpus data in terms of quality (meaning) and quantity (frequency).
Current projects:
Velká akademická gramatika spisovné češtiny (The Great Academic Grammar of Literary Czech)
The Grammar Department is compiling a four-volume Great Academic Grammar of Literary Czech, edited by F. Štícha. This endeavour involves collaborations with experts from Czech and foreign university departments. The structure of the series is:
I. Morfologie. Část 1. Slovní druhy / Tvoření slov (I. Morphology. Part 1. Parts of speech, word formation. Published in print in 2018 by Academia).
II. Morfologie. Část 2. Morfologické kategorie / Flexe (II. Morphology. Part 2. Morphological categories / Flexes. Published in print in 2022 by Academia).
III. Syntax. Část 1. Syntagma / Věta / Souvětí (III. Syntax. Part 1. Phrases, sentences, compound and complex sentences. The book manuscript was submitted to Academia in 2024).
IV. Syntax. Část 2. Text / Modalita (IV. Syntax. Part 2. Text, modality. This volume is currently under development).
Research topics
The Grammar Department’s research focuses mainly on the following phenomena: verb aspect, reflexivity and reciprocity, presupposition, negation, grammaticalization of parts of speech, etc., both independently and in interaction, from the theoretical and empirical points of view (one cannot be separated from the other). Research results are intermittently published in journals and monographs.
In 2020, a monograph titled Chapters on the Aspect of a Verb (ed. L. Veselý) was published in Czech and other languages as the main output of the grant Causes of Aspectual Unpairedness in Czech (Czech Science Foundation, project ID 16-19561S). The monograph was written by Grammar Department staff in collaboration with staff from other departments. From 2021 to 2024, the department implemented the grant project Semantic Types and Pragmatic Aspects of Reciprocal Verbs in Czech in the Light of Corpus Data (Czech Science Foundation, project ID 21-13807S). The project outcomes were published as studies in journals.Staff members:
Staff members:
PhDr. Vojtěch Veselý, Ph.D.
head of the department