Speakers´ assessment of situational contexts of language use: Dimensions of variation in Czech Abstract uri icon

abstract

  • Keywords: register, register, register, Czech,
    There are no conventionalized ways to investigate the results of a multidimensional analysis (MDA) from the perceptual perspective in an experimental setting. Our investigations are based on the Czech MDA results’ interpretation and extended to an experimental study examining the overall research question: how does register knowledge relate to grammatical aspects of linguistic knowledge in Czech language? In our talk, we present the results of a study exploring the perception of different language usage situations. The results form the basis of the study of linguistic properties in the situational context, i.e. register. An MDA of the Czech corpus Koditex (Zasina et al., 2018) by Cvrˇcek et al., 2020 established 8 dimensions of variation based on 122 linguistic features. The first two dimensions of variation identified are labeled as 1. dynamic (+)/static (-) and 2. spontaneous (+)/prepared (-). These two dimensions explain the largest proportion of shared variance between the features and therefore are in the center of our attention. Each dimension is associated with linguistic features with different positive or negative loadings and according to their distribution, the poles of the dimensions are interpreted. In our study, we were interested if some situational contexts of language use evoke stronger associations with the poles of the two dimensions than others. 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 48 descriptions of various situations which we assigned to the respective poles of those scales (e.g. ”Tereza mluv´ı se spolubydl´ıc´ı v ob´yvac´ım pokoji” / Tereza is talking with her roommate in the living room). Czech native speakers (n=40) rated the situations on 7 point Likert-like scales representing the MDA based dimensions. Then, we compared the medians of the rating values between the items and the variance between the subjects. The analysis showed that some situations, mainly those representing the negative poles of the dimensions, are rated more consistently than those representing the positive poles. Moreover, when an item was rated as prepared, it tended to be rated as static as well, and when it was rated as spontaneous, it tended to be rated as dynamic. The results of our study offer an insight into how native speakers evaluate situations of language usage on the scales of preparedness, subjectivity, and interactivity. These situations will be used in the further research to investigate whether there is a situation-dependent relevance of certain linguistic features which corresponds to the MDA based feature distribution in a corpus.

    References
    Cvrˇcek, V., Laubeov´a, Z., Lukeˇs, D., Poukarov´a, P., Rehoˇrkov´a, A., & Zasina, A. J. (2020). ˇ Registry v ˇceˇstinˇe. NLN. Zasina, J., Lukeˇs, D., Komrskov´a, Z., Poukarov´a, P., & Rehoˇrkov´a, A. (2018). ˇ Koditex: A corpus of diversified texts. Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Faculty of Arts, Charles University. www.korpus.cz