Register investigation on Czech: Designing an MDA-based experimental study Abstract uri icon

Abstract

  • Combining a multidimensional analysis (MDA) (Biber, 1988) of Czech (Cvrˇcek et al., 2020) and an experimental approach, we investigate the following question: how does register knowledge relate to grammatical aspects of linguistic knowledge in Czech language? In the main study, we will present linguistic features associated with MDA dimensions, embedded in different contexts (eg. in spontaneous situation of usage of language). Since we cannot introspectively establish which situations will be perceived as spontaneous etc., we firstly designed an exploratory situation study. We will present its results in this poster. Since the MDA dimensions are labelled by two terms, which can be located on two opposite ends of an imaginary scale, e.g. dynamic - static, we have created descriptions of various situations which we intuitively assigned to the respective poles of those scales. The participants (n=40) rated the situations on 7 point Likert-like scales representing the MDA based dimensions. A descriptive analysis showed that some situations evoked the desired poles of first two dimensions better than others. Moreover, features as formality of the protagonist in the descriptions played a role in ratings. Our study offers an insight into how native speakers perceive situational context of language usage in terms of preparedness, subjectivity, and interactivity.

    References

    Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge UP. Cvrˇcek, V., Laubeov´a, Z., Lukeˇs, D., Poukarov´a, P., Rehoˇrkov´a, A., & Zasina, A. J. (2020). ˇ Registry v ˇceˇstinˇe. NLN.