ENGLISH PREPOSITIONAL VERBS COLLOCATING WITH THE PREPOSITION FOR AND THEIR SLOVAK NON-PREPOSITIONAL COUNTERPARTS - Contrastive analysis based on the electronic corpus
Keywords:
prepositional verb, preposition for, prepositional object, adjunct, English language, Slovak languageAbstract
The paper concentrates on the contrastive linguistic analysis of the specific English lexical verbs, which are collocating with the preposition for. The Slovak verbal counterparts, which are not followed by the prepositional object are also analysed. Corpus-based research has been applied. A sample of the verbs are generated from the English-Slovak Parallel Corpus, the sub corpus of the Slovak National Corpus. The threshold, occurrence of the examined verbs in the corpus should be more than 800. Therefore, the most frequent verbs are analyzed. The English-Slovak parallel corpus par-sken-4.0 contains 556 million tokens (261 million tokens in the Slovak half, 295 million tokens in the English one). The oral part of the corpus represents about 10%. The written part of the corpus consists of fiction as well as non-fiction texts. No Sketch Engine tool is used in the Slovak National Corpus to search for results. All examples from the corpus are examined in the context of the sentence from the morphological, syntactical and lexical point of view. The English verbs, followed by the preposition for, can be analyzed within two groups. The first group contains prepositional phrases in the function of the adverbial. The second group maintains prepositional phrases in the function of the prepositional object. It can be seen, that many lexical synonymous verbs can be found in the list. Lexical verbs with similar meaning collocate with the identical preposition and the prepositional phrases fulfills the identical syntactical function, i.e. prepositional object or adverbial, i.e. adjunct of time, adjunct of reason. All English prepositional verbs are compared with their Slovak verbal equivalents, which are taken from the Slovak part of the parallel corpus. Each prepositional verbs are analysed from the contrastive point of view. The Slovak verbs naznačiť, kývať are followed by the object in the Dative case. The verb monitorovať, vybrať si, naznačiť, odporúčať, etc. are followed by the object in the Accusative case, though. Due to the fact that each verb has a specific valence and specific lexical description, each pattern is studied, analyzed individually. From the total number of 93 verbs, 29 English verbs can have the Slovak non-prepositional counterparts. It seems, that the preposition for is transparent in meaning and number of the Slovak verbal-prepositional counterparts prevail over non-prepositional counterparts. There is an evident interplay between the meanings of the individual verbs and the meaning of the prepositions. This impact further influences specific valence pattern of the verb.
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