Abstract
In the present paper, adnominal counterparts of adverbal objects expressed by prepositionless Genitive (Gen; e.g. obávat se čeho ‘to-be-afraid of-sth’, dotázat se koho ‘to-ask of-sb’) are studied. The intention was to find out if Czech nouns derived from verbs by non-productive means can be modified by Patient (PAT) or Addressee (ADDR) expressed by Gen as well; neither other papers nor valency dictionaries mention this form of the participants.
It has turned out that several nouns modified by PAT expressed by Gen can rarely be found in the corpus (e.g. CNC SYN2005, cf. odvaha spolupráce ‘courage of-cooperation’, jeho dotek puku ‘his touch of-the-puck’; other forms of PAT, i.e. prepositional groups, sometimes also infinitive or an embedded objective clause, are more frequent).
Factors that influence possibility or impossibility to be modified by PAT or ADDR expressed by Gen are typically connected with the type of the semantic group the noun belongs to (cf. the difference between nouns denoting “positive” vs. “negative” mental state or dispositions, e.g. naděje úspěchu ‘hope of-success’ vs. *obava následků ‘fear of-consequences’, or the tendency to avoid syntactic homonymy of Actor (ACT) and ADDR expressed by Gen, which is typical of nouns of saying, cf. dotaz kamaráda.ACT vs. *dotaz kamaráda.ADDR ‘question of-the-friend’).