Abstract:

In the paper, we aim to explore and describe in detail multiword compositional phrases in Czech that significantly contribute to the overall text coherence, one of the basic proprieties of each well-structured text. We focus on the fact how these coherence expressions are used by students in their school essays.

Coherence may be manifested by various language expressions, very often by conjunctions (e.g. “but”, “and”, “or”) or adverbs (e.g. “then”, “however”, “nevertheless”). However, a significant portion of text relations is expressed by other, more complex devices – multiword compositional phrases. This group of cohesive expressions is very heterogeneous and exhibits a high degree of variability concerning grammar or lexical aspect. At the same time, these phrases are closely related to coreference and anaphora, as they often contain a referential component (“for this reason”, “as a result of this”, “due to this fact” etc.).

In our research, we focus on a subgroup of compositional phrases with optional reference in Czech, i.e. on phrases that may appear in two variants in the text – either with a referential component (“příkladem toho je” – “an example of this is”) or without it (“příkladem je” – “an example is”). In our analysis, we observe which of these variants is preferable (more frequent in texts) and why. We explore whether there are some general tendencies in using these phrases. Especially, we focus on the cooperation between two important principles that apply in text formation – the economy principle and the principle of maximal comprehensibility. These two principles are in contrast to a certain degree; however, their coexistence is natural in communication.

Methodologically, we use the corpus material from the Czech National Corpus. First, we explore the acquisition corpus – large language data containing texts written by Czech pupils and students at elementary and secondary schools. The texts were produced during language classes. For comparison, we use also the data from the large non-acquisition corpus – we focus mainly on the newspaper and academic texts written by authors with professional knowledge of Czech. In both corpora, we search for the most frequent compositional phrases with optional reference and we explore whether there are some differences in using these phrases by students and professional authors. We support our research results with statistical measurements.

Finally, we discuss how our conclusions can be helpful for improving the writing skills of Czech students and their overall communicative competence. The aim of the paper is to explore how students formulate their texts and to observe possible differences in the area of text coherence in comparison with texts written by professional authors. The results may be used in teaching praxis, e.g. in lessons that focus on the teaching of writing essays and improving the text-formation skills of students.

Keywords:

Communicative competence, writing skills, text formation, coherence, discourse, anaphora, coreference, Czech.