Converse phrasemes and collocations in Czech: The case of dát ‘give’ and dostat ‘receive’

Abstract

The article focuses on lexical converse verbs which are part of phrasemes and collocations. Pairs of converse verbs express a lexical opposition, which however does not necessarily have to materialize within phrasemes, or can be restricted. One verb may have multiple opposites for a given type of collocation. This study builds upon the basic opposition between the two verbs which occur most frequently as part of phrasemes. In Czech, these verbs are dát ‘give’ and dostat ‘receive’. The converseness analysis was performed on the current largest corpus of Czech written texts, SYN_v7, using a pilot version of phraseme annotation. Even though dát is polyfunctional, as evidenced by its large number of valency frames and collocation lemmas, the material yielded an abundant amount of instances of converse phrasemes and collocations. Some pairs showed notable differences in frequency distributions in texts, indicating a preference for one of the perspectives on the given situation in actual language use. Capturing this property in the lexicographical description of phrasemes and their annotation in corpus data could contribute towards a more accurate theoretical account of phrasemes, as well as practical applications in contrastive phraseology and phraseme teaching.