Šéry: O rodové nevyhraněnosti a způsobech jejího zkoumání
On the Czech word šéry: gender ambiguity and how to investigate it

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the morphological character of the Czech noun with the first person plural form šéry (‘skerries’). It is based on the observation that standard Czech codification sources contained the word šéry only as an inanimate masculine noun šér, but corpora also show its considerable use as a feminine noun. A corpus analysis is thus carried out in order to find out whether the codification was justified or whether the non-codified variant is frequent enough to suggest that both of the variants are partly normative among the users of standard Czech. The paper shows that in some cases, even when the gender of the word cannot be determined, it can in fact be identified unambiguously on the basis of other occurrences of the word in the same text/source. The paper arrives at the conclusion that both of the variants are part of the standard Czech norm.

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