The Valency of Sorbian and Czech verbs with the meanings ‘to teach’, ‘to learn’ and ‘to get used to’ in the Diakorp, Hotko and Dotko corpora

0497008 - SLÚ 2019 RIV PL eng J - Journal Article
Brankatschk, Katja - Nedoluzhko, Anna
The Valency of Sorbian and Czech verbs with the meanings ‘to teach’, ‘to learn’ and ‘to get used to’ in the Diakorp, Hotko and Dotko corpora.
Zeszyty Łużyckie. Roč. 52, č. 1 (2018), s. 9-23. ISSN 0867-6364
R&D Projects: GA ČR GA16-10866S
Institutional support: RVO:68378017
Keywords : Valency * Standardisation * Sorbian * Czech * Language contact
OECD category: Specific languages

The paper deals with the development of the valency of verbs meaning ‘to teach’, ‘to learn’ and ‘to accustom’ in three standard languages: Czech, Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian. We examine concordances from diachronic text corpora for these languages. In Czech, we observe for both the simplex and the prefixed verb a stable valency frame for the addressee: učit / naučit se / koho (acc) with the meaning ‘to teach’ (non-reflexive) or ‘to learn’ (reflexive). As for the patient, previously the dative case dominated, but in contemporary standard Czech, the accusative is more typical. In Upper Sorbian, there is a small amount of examples of the prefixed nawučić with the addressee expressed with the dative case instead of the more typical accusative. Moreover, the reflexive verb appears with the reflexive pronoun in the accusative (so) as well as in the dative (sej). In these examples, the verb predominantly has the meaning ‘to accustom’ (non-reflexive) or ‘to get used to’ (reflexive), while the examples with the addressee in the accusative tend to have the meaning ‘to teach’ or ‘to learn’. Such a complemental distribution for the prefixed nawucyś is also found in Lower Sorbian, where there are more examples with the addressee in the dative case. Besides this differentiation of meaning, we also find a very unstable situation in the usage of different variants for the patient in both Sorbian Standard languages, for both the prefixed as well as the unprefixed verbs.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0290155