Abstract
Multidimensional analysis (MDA) of register variation (Biber 1991; Biber & Conrad 2009) has proven its worth in the empirical study of English and a typologically varied handful of other languages (incl. Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan, Korean, Somalian).
However, it has never been extensively applied to Slavic languages, which are known for their rich inflection, distinctive morphology (e.g. verbal aspect) and a fairly long literary tradition shaping the registers and styles of different genres and text types. This paper aims to discuss specific issues encountered when applying MDA to Czech (a West Slavic language), as well as to point to some methodological innovations we adopted while working on the project.
Although there is sufficient Czech language data (in terms of both extent and diversity) available for this type of research, no extensive investigation of this area has been carried out so far (with the exception of an unfinished and unpublished study by Vilém Kodýtek). Czech is also a highly interesting language for this type of research from the point of view of methodology: it exhibits a high degree of inflection (which goes hand in hand with abundant morphological variation) and a sociolinguistic situation bordering on diglossia (see e.g.
Bermel 2014 for a recent overview).