Masaryk University Faculty of Education Department of English Language and Literature
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21 commonly placed between the subject and the verb. Intensifiers (adverbs such as rather, very, extremely etc.) precede the verb which they intensify (Dušková 521- 522).
Another characterstics distiguishing Czech word order from the English one is the fact that Czech tends to keep any new information for the end of the sentence, e.g. in question-answer pair: Co děláte? - Hodně studujeme. Jak studujete? - Studujeme hodně. This principle is of course used much broader than only in question-answer pairs. Michael Heim explains how the Czech word order can influence the meaning of communication using these sentences as an example:
stalo matce dnes ráno, it would imply that something had happened to Mother the morning before, which the speaker assumes we know about: '...what happened to Mother this morning.' If the Czech sentence closed with the word order...co se dnes ráno stalo matce, it would mean '...what happened to Mother this morning,' i .e., Mother, and no one else. Where Czech uses word order to provide emphasis, English often uses intonation." (93) 3.3.2 Tenses Tenses of Czech language differ a lot from those of English. Czech distinguishes three tenses: present, past and future. The present tenses in Czech express either an ongoing process and correspond with English present continuous tense, e.g. Dělám úlohu. - I am doing the assignment. or a repeated action as in
tense in Czech corresponds with English present perfect, simple past and past continuous and past perfect. It requires l-participle and the present tense of verb be (být) in the first and second persons: Dělal jsem/jsi/jsme/jste úlohu. As for the future
22 tense, it is rendered by the future tense of the verb be (být) and "the imperfective infinitive for the imperfective future, and the present tense forms of the perfective verb for the perfective future": budu/budeš/budeme/budete/budou dělat (imperfective future) or udělám, uděláš, uděláme, uděláte, udělají (perfective future). The future tense in Czech translates English future forms: will, be going to and present continuous as well as future perfect and future continuous tense (Heim 31-32).
Simple sentence We distinguish three basic types of sentences: declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives and exclamatives. Characteristic feature of English declaratives is placing the subject always before the verb, while in Czech the subject can either precede the verb or follow it. In contrast, subject-verb inversion is quite rare in English. English interrogative sentences differ from the other sentence types in word order, intonation and specific lexical means. On the other hand, in Czech interrogatives the word order does not have any distinctive grammatical function and conjugation of all verbs is the same as in declarative sentences. Specific feature of Czech question is using different particles. As for imperatives, there are not so great differences between Czech and English, because both of them use the second person imperative. Finally, exclamatives of Czech have the same syntactic structure as declarative sentences, whereas in English the exclamative sentence has a distinctive syntactic structure which distinguishes it from other sentence types. The most common type of exclamatives is introduced by initial how or what (Dušková 309-333).
Compound and complex sentence Compound sentences are either connected by conjuctions or without conjunctions by adverbs or adverbials. All clauses of the compound sentence are
23 independent. The most typical combination is two or more declarative sentences, but there are also other possibilities, e.g. declarative and interrogative sentence or imperative and declarative sentence. The order of clauses in the compound sentence is rigid. Therefore, the clause with conjunction cannot be the first one; the clauses can switch only occasionally if the compound sentence includes conjunction and. Besides, the conjunction is the first word in the clause which cannot be preceded by any other word. Nevertheless, Czech conjunction ale sometimes takes the second place: Slunce svítilo, ale vál (vál ale/však) studený vítr. - The sun shone but there was
subject is possible if the agent is the same (Dušková 588-589). A complex sentence consists of two or more clauses while only one of the clauses is the main/matrix clause and the other one (or more) is subordinate/dependent clause. The main indicators of subordination are subordinating conjunctions, relative pronouns, question words and inversion. The order of the clauses in the sentence is not as strict as in compound sentences; they can be mostly switched. Most of subordinating conjunctions come at the beginning of the dependent clause and can be preceded by another conjunction. According to their function in the sentence structure and the way they are introduced, we distinguish these types of dependent clauses: relative clauses, adverbial clauses and
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