A corpus-based study of the competition between synthetic and analytic comparative and superlative adjective forms in contemporary Czech

Abstract

The research aims to determine the possibility of competition between synthetic and analytic comparative and superlative adjective forms in contemporary Czech, based on the Synek corpus (11,959,431 tokens). The Synek corpus is a proportionally reduced reference corpus of contemporary Czech written texts SYN2000 (120,908,724 tokens), therefore adequately reflecting, according to its compilers, the current linguistic situation of the Czech language and being part of the Czech National Corpus project. At the same time, the Synek corpus, which contains more than a million contexts of use of various adjective forms and constructions, is large enough to extrapolate the conclusions based on it to the entire array of Czech synthetic and analytic comparative and superlative forms. The scientific novelty of this research lies in proving the existence of competition between synthetic and analytic forms of the comparative and superlative degrees in contemporary Czech written discourse, contrary to the opinion of the authors of the Prague “Russian Grammar” (1979), and in reliably documenting this competition. The research findings showed that the relevant sections of the grammar of the contemporary Czech language concerning the possibility of forming Czech synthetic and analytic comparative and superlative forms need to be adjusted.

Research materials

1. Korpus SYNEK (= SYNchronní Elektronický Korpus) – десятикратно пропорционально редуцированный корпус SYN20000. https://wiki.korpus.cz/doku.php/cnk:uvod

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About this article

Publication history

• Received: June 30, 2025.
• Published: August 6, 2025.

Keywords

• чешский язык
• чешский письменный дискурс
• Чешский национальный корпус
• конкуренция синтетических и аналитических форм
• компаратив и суперлатив прилагательного
• Czech language
• Czech written discourse
• Czech National Corpus
• competition between synthetic and analytic forms
• comparative and superlative adjective forms

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