This paper compares the state of Czech legal order before and after the reform of the Private law. The analysis is based on the linguistic investigation of corpora containing legal texts. We analyze two corpora of Czech legal texts and show the relation between the changes (amendments and modifications) in the wording of law acts and their transparency. Our work explores changes on the level of words, collocations and legal terms. The tools used in this research are the corpus manager Manatee/Bonito with integrated Word Sketch Engine and Czech morphological analyzer Majka. Our results thus obtained lead us to conclude that the functionality of the Czech legal system is under threat from its own opacity and obfuscation. and V článku předkládáme porovnání stavu českého právního systému před reformou soukromého práva a po ní, které je založeno na zkoumání korpusů obsahujících právní texty. Zkoumáme dva korpusy českých právních textů a demonstrujeme vztah mezi změnami v textech zákonů a jejich transparentností. Zkoumáme tedy změny na úrovni jednotlivých slov, kolokací a právních termínů a rovněž i jejich počty a frekvence. Nástroje, s nimiž tu pracujeme, jsou korpusový manažer Manatee/Bonito s integrovaným vytvářením slovních profilů (Word Sketch Engine) a morfologický analyzátor Majka. Takto získané výsledky přesvědčivě prokazují, že analyzované změny ohrožují funkcionalitu českého právního systému.
This paper is based on a study which was conducted within the research grant ''Institutions in Life Stories. Multilevel Comparative Analysis of Biographical Narratives of Three Groups of Participants in Czech Society in 20th Century''. The aim of this research was both to describe one possible way of using a corpus to identify relevant differences between three types of text (in this case biographical narratives of three groups of speakers: communist officials, dissidents and so-called common people) and to serve as a basis for further analysis (be it a linguistic, sociological or historical analysis). We tried to point out typical features of the language of each group based on the most frequent expressions (nouns, adjectives etc.) and especially collocations. We also compared the corpus Příběhy (Stories) as a whole with the ORAL2008 corpus of synchronic spoken Czech, the SYN2005 corpus of synchronic written Czech and the Totalita corpus (a corpus of communist propaganda).
This contribution, which in a brief, succint and almost aphoristic way, critically brings forward to the reader a number of problems of today’s corpus and computational linguistics as well as their unsatisfactory solutions, is trying, at the same time, to do away with a number of myths and simplified opinions in the field. and Příspěvek ve stručné a téměř aforizované podobě připomíná řadu kritizovaných problémů a jejich neuspokojivých řešení v dnešní korpusové a komputační lingvistice a snaží se tak odstranit řadu mýtů a zjednodušujících představ.
Disease in its general is in contemporary Czech most frequently denoted by lexemes nemoc, neduh, and choroba (illness). Nemoc and neduh have been part of the Czech lexis since the earliest periods; the expression choroba has its origins in the National Revival era. In Old Czech, the third most frequented lexeme is nedostatek. The material base for Old Czech lexemes analysis comes from the Old Czech text database (Old Czech Corpus) accessible in the Vokabulář webový application (http://vokabular.ujc. cas.cz). Special attention is paid to collocations of these lexemes, terminological (medical) collocations in particular, or to expressions with a potential to enter into this type of collocations. The most frequent collocation patterns are N + Adj; N + preposition v (in), na (on), po (on) + Nloc; N + Ngen and N + ot (caused by) + Ngen. The lexeme present in the greatest number of syntactic patterns is nemoc, then comes neduh, and finally nedostatek with the smallest collocational potential. Collocation categories are distinguished above all by denoting the ailing body part (e.g. head: nemoc hlavní, nemoc v hlavě, nemoc hlavy). Another category involves denotation of the disease origins (e.g. heat), following the N + Adj (nemoc horká) or N + Ngen with a preposition (nemoc ot horkosti). The analysis confirms that the expression nemoc, referring to non-health in general, is within both Old and Modern Czech lexis the one most firmly embedded.