Abstract
The talk explores one of the central challenges in grammatical analysis, namely, capturing the inherently dynamic, variable nature of grammatical structure. The theoretical issues are illustrated on one particular syntactic form in Czech that has been largely ignored in the grammatical literature: relative clauses with the non-declinable relativizer co + resumptive pronoun.
The relevant analytic categories, with implications for relativization strategies beyond this clause type, revolve around the referential type of the relativized noun, the interaction between relativization and deixis, and the semantic contribution of the proposition expressed by the relative clause. Using the analytic and representational tools of Construction Grammar, the talk shows how grammatical generalizations can be organized in cognitively and communicatively coherent networks of overlapping grammatical patterns.
The networks provide a way of identifying points of fluctuations within the usage of a particular form and tracking incipient shifts within a functional space.