Morphological variation in the present-tense third-person plural of the sázet conjugation type on the Czech television main news programme
Abstract
This paper summarises the results of an inquiry into the morphological variation in the present-tense third-person plural of the sázet type. There are two possible forms in Standard Czech: sázejí and sází (the form sází was codified alongside sázejí in 1993).
The sample examined contains 1160 occurrences from the Czech television main news programme Události ČT (200 issues broadcast from January 2014 to December 2015). The analysis shows that the prevailing form is sázejí.
This fact seems to confirm that the codification of the sází form in the early 1990s (based on a long-term tendency within the IV-verb-class containing verbs with the present stem suffix -í) didnʻt encourage its use the way expected. The most likely reason is that the sází form can be used both in the third-person plural and the third-person singular while the sázejí form is unique in the IV-verb-class conjugational paradigm.
However, there are several verbs for which a more frequent incidence of the equivalent of the sází form can be regarded as an increasing tendency (particularly chybět, stavět, smět, umět, vyrábět).