Pseudo-coordination of a verb jít /go in the syntax of contemporary Czech

Svatava Škodová Technical university of Liberec

SCLA 2009 Prague

This proceeding was supported from an internal grant (IGS FP TUL 2009) of Fakulty of Science, Humanities and Education, Technical University of Liberec.

a type of coordination that uses coordinator and on the surface level for connection of two verbs into a construction V1aV2, without coordinating two events

The verb in the first position V1 can lose its primary meaning

meaning of the verb in the position V2 is modified

S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination , SCLA 2009

S. Škodová: Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009

Jít/go – a/and – V2

A tak Petr šel a četl celou tu knihu. And soPeter went and read the whole book.

Caesar went and read the parchment!

It went and rained

Thomas Carlisle was very much impressed by the work of people like Wordsworth and Coleridge because they were just a bit before him and he actually went and met Coleridge (BNC, KGW 569)


1611 sentences with the pattern jít-a-V2

ProKoor PseKoor923 examples 688 examples


Swedish - Gunlög, 1991; Wiklund, 2005; Darnell, 2008, Norwegian - Lødrup, 2002, English - Carden – Pesetzky, 1997, Grootjen- Kamphuis – Sarbo, 1999; Quirk, 2000; Wulff ,

2004; de Vos, 2005; de Vos, 2007). Russian – Kuznetsova, 2006 Czech – Škodová, 2009


1. major uses of jít – a –V22. uses of PseKoor Jít-a-2V - motivated by

a combination of the image schematic properties of the verb jít and the more richly specified semantics of V2

3. the precise nature of this mechanism: the image-schematic properties evoked by jít blended with the event structure of the V2 to allow the speaker to construe the event denoted by the second verb in accordance with the image-schematic meaning of jít.


the two verbs are not coordinated to create a complex clause,

they form a single syntactic unit similar to analytical form of a verb

Typically there are described 4 semantic fields concerning this construction:

1. speakers annoyance, 2. speakers surprise, 3. proceeding without hesitation, 4. actual motion.

S. Škodová Pseudo-coordination, SCLA 2009

a speaker expresses his annoyance about the event described by V2

A jak to bylo všechno hloupé! Kuchařka to přece pozná -musí to poznat! Jako bych šel a sám si plivl do obličeje.

as would.I go. PAST and myself spit. I PAST REFL to face

Jak je to jenom možné?

(And it was so silly! The cook will recognize it – she must recognize it!It was as if I went and spitted to my own face. How is it possible? )


a speaker expresses his surprise about an unexpected action described by V2

Uhla zabil padesátkrát víc lidí ne tím nožíkem , ale tím , že je nakazil . A když tu nemoc rozesel všude kolem ,

šel a sám na ni umřel . " go. HE PAST and himself of it die. HE PAST

(Uhla killed fifty times more people not by the little knife, but by the infection. And when he had spread the illness all around he went and died of it himself.“)


speaker expresses that the action was fulfilled without hesitating and thinking about any obstacles and difficulties connected with the event

(…) dal nám knihu a řekl : " Je to nejhezčí kniha na světě . Čtěte ji , uchovejte si ji . "

Šly jsme a četly jsme .

go. WE PAST be. WE PAST and read. WE PAST be.WE PAST

Matka však zuřila .

(…) he gave us a book and said: „This is the most beautiful book in the world. Read it, protect it. And we went and read . But our mother was furious.


using the jít-a-V2 construction, it is possible to express as dynamic also those events that are in its own nature static, the verb jít/go postures its own dynamic capacity to the event of V2, which we can accept as dynamic.

" Bylo by fajn , kdyby nám tu zase brečelo nějaké dítě , " podotkl někdo z rodiny ,

a tak šli a opatřili si dítě

and so go. THEY PAST and equip. THEY PAST themselves. PARTICLE REFL a baby

ze St . Cloud's . from St. Cloud´s .

(“It would be nice to have a crying baby around again,” some member of a family said, and so they went and equipped themselves by a baby from St. Cloud´s.)

S. Škodová:

In Czech the jít-a-V2 construction is very frequent in the imperative form, again the verb jít/go is semantically bleached here and its function is the one of urgent entreaty or command.

Hovořila se mnou - vyprávěla mi o mém bratru Markovi – a pak mi řekla, abych šel a běžel závod. and then me say. SHE PAST, to. I KOND go and run the race.

(She was talking to me – telling me about my brother Mark – and then she told me to go and run the race.)

S. Škodová:

- the jít-a-V2 construction exhibit some semantic

regularities

that are rather surprising

if one assumes that jít/go means “jít/go”

or nothing at all (if considered to be a semantically

empty auxiliary)


Another meaning associated with the pseudo-coordination of jít in Czech but not in English is the meaning of “activity in progress for an extended period of time”. In English this meaning does not join pseudo-coordination of go, because English own special syntactic construction expressing this quality of the time duration of event.

Nechtějí se organizovat . Lidi se dřív dali dohromady , people PARTICL.REFL. In the past give. THEY PAST together, šli a pomáhali si . go.THEY PAST and help. THEY PAST one another. PART REFL.

Svépomocí pro sebe mnohé udělali .

They do not want to be organized. In the past people joined one another, they were helping one another. They did many things by themselves.


jít/go is not used in arbitrary ways

There is systematicity in using the construction

this systematicity is related to the meaning of the verb jít/go


….… ……. ……. TR LM


….… ……. ………… .…….

TR LM

S. Škodová:

TR LM


1. “actual motion” is the basic meaning of all schemas in Figures 1-4; that is the reason, why we do not consider jít to be a semantically empty auxiliary.

2. meanings like “continuous action” and “progressive aspect” more generally can be accounted for in terms of a metaphorical extension of the schema in Figure 2 from “motion over an extended period of time” to “action over an extended period of time” in Czech language this is combined with the aspectual characteristics of V2 to encode a progress of an event to its right boundary.

3. meanings like “surprise” and “unexpectedness” result from the same metaphorical extension applied to the schema in Figure 3. Here, the expected conceptual path corresponds to the expected flow of, and the divergence from the path corresponds to an unexpected event;


4. meanings like “annoyance”, “disappointment”, “disapproval”, or “evaluation of an action as silly” are also accounted for by the schema in Figure 3, with the difference that the expected conceptual path corresponds to the kind of actions that the speaker considers desirable or rational, and the divergence from this path corresponds to an event that is not desirable or rational from the speaker´s perspective.

5. meanings like “proceeding without hesitation”, “paying no attention to obstacles” can be counted for in terms of the same metaphorical extension as before, this time applied to the schema in Figure 4, where the obstacles correspond to potential reasons not to act in a certain way.


Pseudokoordinations using jít-a-V2 are motivated by aspects of conceptual structure

There is the incorporation of the image-schematic structure of jít into the event structure of the V2.

the main verb encodes some event structure jít encodes some construal structure in accordance

with its image schematic meaning, a coordinating conjunction encodes the blending of

the two.


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Pseudo-coordination of a verb jít /go in the syntax of contemporary Czech

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