The paper tried to answer the following research questions: What are meanings and functions of the Czech word tak [so in English] in spoken texts used in contemporary media? How is the word tak incorporated into a syntactic structure of a turn? Two TV programmes included in the Dialog Corpus were chosen to be analysed: Otázky Václava Moravce (a very formal discussion with politicians hosted by Václav Moravec) and Uvolněte se, prosím (a very informal, spontaneous talk show). The chosen programmes were intentionally quite different; they noticeably differed even in the total numbers of the tak occurrences caught in them: 74 occurrences in Otázky Václava Moravce vs. 149 occurrences in the talk show Uvolněte se, prosím. In the talk show, we identified an extremely high occurrence of the word tak as the preparative particle as it is called, and even a higher number of this word was found as a simple connector. The connector tak placed at the end of a line appeared only in the talk show. In both programmes, the word tak was commonly used to express various syntactic relations, most often expressing conditions and consequences. The examples often indicated that the word tak might be the only word expressing such relations.
The paper tried to answer the following research questions: What are meanings and functions of the Czech word tak [so in English] in spoken texts used in contemporary media? How is the word tak incorporated into a syntactic structure of a turn? Two TV programmes included in the Dialog Corpus were chosen to be analysed: Otázky Václava Moravce (a very formal discussion with politicians hosted by Václav Moravec) and Uvolněte se, prosím (a very informal, spontaneous talk show). The chosen programmes were intentionally quite different; they noticeably differed even in the total numbers of the tak occurrences caught in them: 74 occurrences in Otázky Václava Moravce vs. 149 occurrences in the talk show Uvolněte se, prosím. In the talk show, we identified an extremely high occurrence of the word tak as the preparative particle as it is called, and even a higher number of this word was found as a simple connector. The connector tak placed at the end of a line appeared only in the talk show. In both programmes, the word tak was commonly used to express various syntactic relations, most often expressing conditions and consequences. The examples often indicated that the word tak might be the only word expressing such relations.