On corpus-driven research of complex adverbial prepositions with spatial meaning in Czech

Abstract

Complex adverbial prepositions with spatial meaning have not been sufficiently studied so far in Czech. To establish a set of these expressions in their actual usage, the resources of the Czech National Corpus were used in this study. The research has shown that the SYN2020 corpus is a relevant tool for searching for two-word expressions with a LOCATIVE ADVERB – SIMPLE PREPOSITION structure that have the same function as a one-word locative preposition. The article describes a method for the extraction of these expressions from the corpus, as well as a method for the collection of their quantitative data using corpus tools. As a result of the research, a list of expressions that are presumably complex prepositions is provided.