This is an assignment for students of KOL/MORS to deepen their understanding. You should work in pairs (or if there are an uneven number of students, one group of one or three). Each group submits one paper. Include a short contribution statement at the end of the paper (after the conclusion, before the references) saying who did what.
Your task is to describe an interesting linguistic phenomenon. Interesting is subjective, you need to motivate why you think it is interesting. If you are not sure discuss it with me. Your paper should include
Ideally you should also include one or more of the following
The final paper should be in LaTeX, eight to twelve pages single column (use article.sty, 12pt) + references. You should submit PDF via moodle, don't forget to include your names!
You can take these, or come up with your own, but run it past me first.
Describe the most common paradigms, and note which forms are under-specified. Make a type hierarchy of cases that has nodes for all relevant cases. For example, for feminine nouns ending in a (such as žena), ženy could be gen.sg, nom.pl, acc.pl or voc.pl; ženě can be dat.sg or loc.sg, while žena is only nom.sg. So there must be at least nodes that cover gen.sg+nom.pl+acc.pl, one that covers dat.sg+loc.sg and one that covers only nom.sg, ...
Czech will often use an adverb where English uses an adjective
What kind of contexts are these? Can you describe them precisely?
Czech clitics must go in the second position. What do you do if there are two of them?
There may be multiple strategies. This would be a good choice if you like to survey people, ...
From five upwards, a Czech numeral takes the genitive plural, and the verb shows default neuter singular rather than agreeing with the noun.
Where does the agreement come from, and which element is the head? Does the same pattern hold in the other cases, and with the numerals tisíc, milion, or pár? Good for the formal analysis option.
For masculine animate nouns the accusative looks like the genitive; for inanimates it looks like the nominative.
Which nouns count as animate, and what do you do with the ones that waver (robot, sněhulák, names of teams, names of viruses)? This extends the paradigm question above, so a second pair could take it. Good for the formal analysis option.
English fronts one wh-phrase; Czech fronts all of them.
Which orders are possible, and which are not? What does this say about the filler-gap mechanism we develop for long distance dependencies? Good for the formal analysis option.
Czech requires negation on the verb even when the clause already has a negative pronoun.
What licenses what? Is the negative marking on the verb the same thing as the negation in nikdo, or something else? Good for the formal analysis option.
The same forms turn up as reflexives, as reciprocals, on inherently reflexive verbs, and in impersonal passives.
Is this one lexical item or several? This overlaps with the second position question above, so one pair could take the clitic placement and another the lexical entries. Good for either option.
When two nouns are coordinated, something has to decide the gender and number of the verb.
What happens with two inanimates, with mixed animacy, or when the nearest conjunct disagrees with the resolved form? Speakers do not all agree, which is what makes this worth asking them. Good for the speaker survey option.
Czech prefixes change aspect, and sometimes more than aspect.
Which part of this is morphology and which is syntax? Do any of the prefixes change the valency of the verb, and if so, how would you record that in the lexicon? Can you stack prefixes?
Czech derives an adjective from a noun to express possession: matka gives matčin, otec gives otcův.
The result is an adjective, but it still has a possessor --- and that possessor cannot be modified. There is no good way to say "my mother's book" using matčin. Why not? What does that tell you about where the derivation happens? Good for the formal analysis option.
pes gives psík and pejsek, and the process can apply more than once.
How productive is it, what does it attach to, and what does it actually mean? It is not simply "small".
Neither half of this is a well-formed clause on its own, and yet the whole is fine.
What is the construction, and what are its parts? A good fit for Sign-Based Construction Grammar, and it does not need Czech.
Many languages require a classifier between a numeral and a noun: Mandarin sān běn shū "three (volume) books", Japanese hon san-satsu "books three-(volume)".
What determines which classifier a noun takes? What happens with loanwords and new coinages? A good choice if you speak one of these languages.
These course materials are available on github and archived with Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17147961).