The Czech converb confronted with its French and Polish counterparts: Investigation of the potential impact of diachronic and typological factors defining the properties of converbs
Abstract
The present study aims at investigating formal and semantic properties of the Czech converb (transgressive, přechodník) in contrast with its converbal counterparts in Polish (imiesłów przysłówkowy) and in French (gérondif). Czech and Polish belong to the same linguistic family (Western Slavic), share the same areal features and, as in other Slavic languages, their converbs derive from (co-predicative) participles.
By contrast, the French gérondif originates in ablativus gerundii, like other converbs of the Romance linguistic family. We could therefore hypothesize that given the diachronic, typological and areal closeness, the Czech and Polish converbs can display similar formal and semantic properties as well as similar frequency, in contrast with the French gérondif, different in all these variables. However, the results based on large corpus data (both monolingual and parallel) show that the typological, areal, and diachronic affinities are not the decisive factor in shaping similarities and dissimilarities among the three converbs.
In their syntactic and semantic properties, the three converbs show striking similarities, independently of the source construction and the linguistic family. By contrast, converbs in the three languages show important differences in their morphological properties and frequency (4,000 ipm in Polish, 1,700 ipm in French and only 200 ipm in Czech).
These differrences are due to specific diachronic evolution (in French - categorial blending of the converb with the present participle, the delimitation of the converb by the preposition en and important functional overlap of the two forms in contemporary language) and to sociolingustically motivated normative interventions (in Czech - grammarians in the 19th century reintroduced to the language the archaistic morphology of the 16th century; for this reason, Czech is the only Slavic language requiring the agreement of the converb with its subject and the form has a strong stylistic mark in contemporary language).