Prepositional phraseological patterns in Czech and English

Towards a contrastive study resource

Abstract

This pilot study aims to identify differences in native and non-native phraseologies, focussing on prepositional patterns. Previous research suggests L2 users’ limited phraseological choices may hinder the accuracy of their language production, and prepositions can pose a particular challenge to Czech learners of English, given the lack of correspondence between translation equivalents. Further, prepositional patterns contribute to text structuring, making them an important part of learners´ competence. Using representative corpora of English and Czech, 3- to 5-grams containing the equivalent preposition pair in/v are extracted. The identified patterns are classified by their semantics and textual functions. While in/v patterns mostly fulfil corresponding functions in the languages compared, the distribution of these functions differs. Specifically, some pattern types are only found in English, highlighting its analytic nature as opposed to inflectional Czech.