The article concerns primarily the distribution of the single-word conjunction aniž and its synonyms, which are the compounds bez toho, aby/bez toho, že and the most complex form bez toho, aniž by. The author argues that this complex conjunction, which consists of four words (the word aniž itself being, form the historical point of view, a fusion of three words - a - ni - ž), is a problematic innovation in contemporary standard Czech. The reason is that the shorter innovation of bez toho, aby or bez toho, že was invented (or adopted from other languages) after November 1989 to replace the singleword aniž probably for stylistic reasons (aniž being felt as strongly formal or literary). Now, the most complex bez toho, aniž by combines the newly used bez toho, aby/že with the formal aniž, which, in fact, should have been replaced by the bez toho, aby/že. a fully non-functional device thus appears within the system of Czech conjunctions and only future usage will determine whether this will be adopted in standard Czech. As the corpus findings show now, the single-word aniž is much more frequent in written standard Czech than both the bez toho, aby/že variant and the most complex bez toho, aniž by.
This article engages in polemic with two papers on the status and prospects of corpus linguistics that were recently published by two Czech linguists in the journal Naše řeč (Our Language). These linguists claim that corpus linguistics relies too heavily on description, in general, and doesn’t provide sufficiently rigorous explanations. In contrast, the present author argues that working with large corpora (billions of tokens) does not necessarily lead to mere descriptions of language phenomena. Rather, descriptions based on large corpora facilitate rigorous explanations of grammatical phenomena. In addition, the author argues that until data-based descriptions became an integral part of work in the natural sciences, philosophically based explanations did not fully succeed at enabling us to understand the physical world. Language is a part of the natural world, and satisfactory grammatical explanations of natural languages require much more empirical evidence than could be obtained in the past without electronic corpora. Several examples of empirical evidence and their critical relevance to linguistic analysis are cited.
The semantic aspectuality of the German present participle (participle I) is not mentioned in Grammars of German, and in specialized studies it is taken for granted that the aspect of this sort of verbal derivative (e. g. besuchende ''visiting'') is only imperfective. In Štícha (2009) it is shown that the German attributive participle I can also be used and interpreted in the meaning of the Slavic perfective aspect. In this article, a special attention is paid to the aspectual meaning of the modal usage of the present participle with the free syntactic morpheme zu (zu besuchende ''to be visited''). Examples of sentences containing this sort of modal attribute are selected from the corpus material (Corpus W - all free accessible corpora - of the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany) to show that the modal participle must be interpreted as perfective in most of its sentence usages. Some elementary statistics are added to strengthen the arguments. and Vidový význam německého modálního participia I v německých gramatikách není zmiňován a ve speciální literatuře se předpokládá, že tento druh verbálního derivátu (např. besuchende - navštěvující/navštívící) má význam imperfektiva. Ve Štícha (2009) bylo ukázáno, že atributivní participium I bývá v němčině užíváno a chápáno také ve významu slovanského perfektiva. V tomto článku se speciálně zabýváme vidovým významem modálně užívaného participia I s volným syntaktickým morfémem zu (zu besuchende - ''mající být navštíven''). Na korpusovém materiálu (prohledáván byl Korpus W - všechny veřejně přístupné korpusy - mannheimského Ústavu pro německý jazyk) se ukazuje, že ve většině případů modálního užití participia I s zu jde o význam perfektivní. Na podporu teoretických argumentů je připojeno několik elementárních statistik.