Abstract
The present study analyzes the semantics of the Czech polyfunctional word už in comparison with the Russian words uže and už. Over the last decades, these words have become easier to study because researchers can check hypotheses on the basis of a huge body of data in text corpora.
Using relevant lexicographic information, theoretical investigations and corpus data, the study aims to identify and describe additional distinctive features of užthat should be included in its lexicographic description. The empirical data have been collected from the Czech National Corpus (CNK), subcorpus SYN2010.
I have considered the temporal and metatextual uses of už, as well as certain uses in which there is no temporal or metatextual meaning.