A corpus-based study of adjective comparison degrees in contemporary Czech

The objective of the present study is to establish the core system of comparative and superlative adjective forms in contemporary Czech, based on the Synek corpus (11,959,431 tokens), which is a proportionally reduced subset of the SYN2000 corpus (120,908,724 tokens) included in the Czech National Corpus. The SYN2000 corpus was compiled using sociological data on the reading habits of Czech Republic citizens regarding fiction, specialized literature, and periodicals; therefore, according to its creators, it adequately reflects the current linguistic situation of the Czech language. The scientific novelty of this research lies in the reliable determination of the quantitative relationship among positive, comparative, and superlative adjective forms in contemporary Czech written discourse. Moreover, the findings demonstrate the possibility of competition between synthetic and analytic forms of the comparative and superlative in this discourse, contrary to the view expressed by the authors of the Prague “Russian Grammar” (1979), who argue that analytic comparative and superlative constructions in Czech only arise when the formation of the corresponding synthetic forms is impossible.