Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

Section E: Word Order 65
In Czech linguistics, the idea of the natural word order was formulated in a more precise as
the hypothesis of the "systemic order" (P. Sgall, E. Hajičová, E. Buráňová, 1980). According
to the authors, the existence of the systemic order is universal for every language, whereas the
form of the systemic order is language-specific though languages do not differ in this order in
a decisive way. Their study of the Czech word order in 70´s (based on an analysis of hundreds
of sentences and supported by psycholinguistic experiments) showed that the contextually not
bounded participants and adverbials are ordered as follows:
actor – time (when – since when – to when – how often – how long) – location (where) –
manner – measure – instrument (mean) – direction (which way) – addressee – origine –
direction (from where) – patiens – direction (where) – effect – condition – aim – reason
In our paper, we check the hypothesis of the systemic order in Czech with modern means of
the linguistic work – on data from Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT). PDT contains
100.000 Czech sentences, with analyses of morphology, dependency syntactic structure and
topic-focus articulation. It allows to set how far the expected order is exhibited in the real data
and to classify the deviations from the systemic order (e.g. depending on the word length or
on the occurrence in phrasemes).
Having been validated, the Czech systemic order can be compared with systemic orders of
other languages and may become a serious argument in the discussion on the universal form
of the Indo-European natural word order.
References
Preinhaelterová, L. Systemic Ordering of Complementations in English as Tested with Native
Speakers of British English. Linguistica Pragensia, 1997, pp. 12-25.
Seidlová, Ivana. On the Underlying Order of Cases (Participants) and Adverbials. Prague
Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 39, 1983, pp. 53-64.
Sgall, P.; Dressler, W. M.; Půček, M. Experimental Researche in Systemic Ordering.
Theoretical Linguistics 21, 1995, pp. 197-239.
Sgall, P.; Hajičová, E.; Buráňová, E.. Aktuální členění věty v češtině. Praha: Academia, 1980.