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Taming the Corpus pp 37–61Cite as

Vowel Disharmony in Czech Words and Stems

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Abstract

This corpus study describes vowel phonotactics in Czech words. The results suggest that some probabilistic patterns are employed in Czech: some vowel combinations are overrepresented, while others are underrepresented. A syllable containing a short front vowel tends to be followed by a syllable with a long front vowel. A long front vowel is typically followed by a back vowel and a long back vowel tends to be followed by a short vowel; thus, an interesting circular dissimilative pattern can be observed. An explanation of the phenomena can be facilitated by the Shannonian theory of communication. The analysis was performed both on words and word stems (i.e, words without endings), obtaining different results.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Paradigm in the Kuhnian sense (Kuhn, 1962).

  2. 2.

    Phonological Lexical Corpus, which is not a corpus in the traditional sense; it is a list of lexemes (available at http://www.ujc.cas.cz/phword) (Bičan, 2015c).

  3. 3.

    Details on the Hungarian National Corpus and the data are available at http://corpus.nytud.hu/mnsz/index_eng.html (Oravecz, Váradi, & Sass, 2014).

  4. 4.

    The full dataset for this study can be found at http://www.milicka.cz/kestazeni/vowels.zip.

  5. 5.

    As you can see, abbreviations were not excluded from the corpus. This is why some of the rare and underrepresented vowel pairs are instantiated by abbreviations; otherwise, their frequency would be even lower.

  6. 6.

    The black “smudge” near the /r/ vertex is a thick “loop edge.” This means that the /r/–/r/ pairs are really rare.

  7. 7.

    The examples show that there are some errors with stem extraction, namely ubrousek (‘napkin’) is stemmed as ubrous, due to the alternations in the (diminutive) suffix –ek (e.g, obdélníček (‘little rectangle nom sg’)—obdélníčku (‘little rectangle gen sg’)).

  8. 8.

    The (l → é), (ú → ou), (é → ú), and (ú → é) pairs are so rare within stems that there is no example for them in the corpus; the (r → r) example is a long interjection.

  9. 9.

    There might be other patterns that affect the word—its paradigm assignment, both diachronically and synchronically. Their effects might be even stronger than the effects of the phenomena under consideration, but this study does not focus on them.

  10. 10.

    As the number of the statistical units in our corpora is very large, even a small effect size causes statistically significant differences. For example, the overall number of short front–short front pairs in SYN2010 corpus is 14,328,194 out of all 61,503,108 pairs. The same figure for the SYN2015 is 14,243,894 out of 60,963,320 pairs. According to Fisher’s test, the frequencies are significantly different (p < 0.001), while the real-life significance of the difference is quite low—the 95% confidence interval of the risk ratio lies between 0.9964 and 0.9977 (calculated according to Altman, 1990), which is very close to 1, i.e, the relative frequency of the specified vowel pair in the two corpora is close to being identical.

  11. 11.

    Here, we mean entropy in the Shannonian sense, i.e, \( H=-\sum \limits_{a\in A}f(a){\log}_2f(a) \), where A is set of all vowels in the language system. If the phonotactics are not taken into account, then the entropy of a vowel pair is just the doubled entropy of a single vowel.

  12. 12.

    The entropy of the vowel pair is calculated like the entropy of a single vowel, i.e, \( H=-\sum \limits_{a\in A}\sum \limits_{b\in A}f\left(a;b\right){\log}_2f\left(a;b\right), \) where A is set of all vowels in the language system.

  13. 13.

    Admittedly, this principle belongs to the generativist linguistic framework rather than corpus or quantitative linguistics, as it was developed to describe one of the possible transformations of “deep structure” into “surface structure.” But, it is nonetheless worth noting that even the generativist descriptions suggest that the phenomenon of Czech vowel disharmony is not an isolated linguistic process.

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Acknowledgments

This study was written within the programme Progres Q08 Czech National Corpus implemented at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. We would like to thank Václav Cvrček and Masako Ueda Fidler (the editors of this volume), Alžběta Růžičková, Jakub Sláma, and Sadie Gold-Shapiro for their suggestions and comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Comparative Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Nam. Jana Palacha 2, Praha 1, Czech Republic

    Jiří Milička & Hana Kalábová

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  1. Jiří Milička
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Slavic Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Masako Fidler

  2. Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Charles University, Prague 1, Czech Republic

    Václav Cvrček

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Milička, J., Kalábová, H. (2018). Vowel Disharmony in Czech Words and Stems. In: Fidler, M., Cvrček, V. (eds) Taming the Corpus. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98017-1_3

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