Abstract
The volume represents the first systematic examination of the functional development of the Old Czech participial adjectives. A detailed qualitative analysis, supported by certain quantitative observations of their distribution in specific contexts, is based on authentic language material and focuses on the relationship between predicative and attributive functions of the form.
The analytic work is centered on the principles of interaction and mutual accommodation between the morphosemantic structure of the participial form and a broader syntactic and semantic context in which it is used. The gradual shift toward a grammatically fixed expression of attributiveness is accounted for in terms of grammaticalization and constructionalization processes, with the help of the analytic apparatus of construction grammar.
The study as a whole is thus grounded in the most recent theoretical approaches to capturing the dynamic nature of grammatical organization, which aim at cognitively plausible explanations of the principles that motivate the emergence of new grammatical categories and a gradual reorganization of grammatical systems.