Investigating syntactic-semantic characteristics of denominal prefixed verbs in Czech based on annotated corpus data

Abstract This paper investigates the syntactic-semantic properties of Czech denominal verbs created by the addition of a prefix (e.g., nalodit ‘to put on a ship’, pomoučit ‘to cover in flour’) in relation to their word-formation characteristics. We examine the connection between the semantic relation of the verb to its base noun and the form of the prefix and the number and types of syntactic arguments the verb appears with when used in a sentence, using large data extracted from corpora. We use a sample of 237 Czech verbs extracted from a list of verbal lexemes annotated for their morphemic structure and the types of syntactic arguments they appear with in 5101 manually annotated corpus concordances (from the SYN2000 corpus, Čermák et al., 2000) to quantify the extent of the association between the attested syntactic patterns and the word-formation characteristics of the verbs and to describe the prominent patterns. Our results show that there is a non-random association between the form of the prefix and the syntactic patterns, as well as between the syntactic patterns and the semantic relation between the verbs and their base nouns. At the same time, we only find systematic patterns for the semantic relations, while for the prefixes we observe weak probabilistic associations based on individual lexemes or small groups of lexemes.