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Converse Phrasemes and Collocations in Czech: The Case of dát ‘give’ and dostat ‘receive’

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Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology (EUROPHRAS 2019)

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Abstract

The article focuses on lexical converse verbs which are part of phrasemes and collocations. Pairs of converse verbs express a lexical opposition, which however does not necessarily have to materialize within phrasemes, or can be restricted. One verb may have multiple opposites for a given type of collocation. This study builds upon the basic opposition between the two verbs which occur most frequently as part of phrasemes. In Czech, these verbs are dát ‘give’ and dostat ‘receive’. The converseness analysis was performed on the current largest corpus of Czech written texts, SYN_v7, using a pilot version of phraseme annotation. Even though dát is polyfunctional, as evidenced by its large number of valency frames and collocation lemmas, the material yielded an abundant amount of instances of converse phrasemes and collocations. Some pairs showed notable differences in frequency distributions in texts, indicating a preference for one of the perspectives on the given situation in actual language use. Capturing this property in the lexicographical description of phrasemes and their annotation in corpus data could contribute towards a more accurate theoretical account of phrasemes, as well as practical applications in contrastive phraseology and phraseme teaching.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In other words, we do not pay attention to opposition expressed via other linguistic means, e.g. the passive (porazit někoho ‘defeat sb’ – být někým poražen ‘be defeated by sb’). In studies of syntax, this topic is often introduced in the context of semantic diathesis alternations [1] and lexical-semantic conversions [2]. A comparison of several semantic diathesis alternations in Czech, Russian and Polish is provided by [3]. In the case of phrasemes however, there are numerous anomalies.

  2. 2.

    In the balanced corpus SYN2015, the ranking is different, with dostat demoted to the 12th place. This shift is due to the composition of the SYN_v7 corpus: dostat often occurs in verbonominal combinations, and these are very common in journalistic texts (cf. [19]).

  3. 3.

    In its pilot version, the FRANTA tool for automatic annotation of phrasemes and collocations is configured to maximize precision. This means that if the encountered form of a phraseme candidate is the same as a more frequent literal word combination, the candidate is not labeled as a phraseme. In our data set, this affects e.g. the collocation dát přes ústa, which often continues with an object like kapesník or masku, and therefore is not an instance of the phraseme ‘give a smack on the gob’, but simply means ‘put a handkerchief/mask over one’s mouth’. Another similar case is the collocation dát pětadvacet ‘give twenty-five’, which is often followed by various nouns, e.g. tisíc ‘thousand’ (referring to money), let ‘years’, bodů ‘points’, again invalidating the phraseme reading (‘give twenty-five [blows]’).

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Acknowledgments

This paper resulted from the implementation of the Czech National Corpus project (LM2015044) funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic within the framework of Large Research, Development and Innovation Infrastructures.

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  1. Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Marie Kopřivová

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  1. Marie Kopřivová
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Correspondence to Marie Kopřivová .

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  1. University of Malaga, Malaga, Spain

    Gloria Corpas Pastor

  2. University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK

    Ruslan Mitkov

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Kopřivová, M. (2019). Converse Phrasemes and Collocations in Czech: The Case of dát ‘give’ and dostat ‘receive’. In: Corpas Pastor, G., Mitkov, R. (eds) Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology. EUROPHRAS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11755. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30135-4_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30135-4_16

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