Pragmatické užití instrumentálu v češtině

本書檢視捷克國家語料庫中捷克語抽象名詞工具格的句構與使用，驗證其語意以及語用的關聯；在此之前，捷克語工具格的相關論述從未涉及「空殼名詞」或是「標記性名詞」，因此本書建立了捷克語抽象名詞工具格標記作為「空殼名詞」的論述框架，對於捷克語工具格的相關研討提供創新的研究視角。

This study proposes one pragmatic use of the Czech instrumental case, defined as ‘shell nouns’ by Schmid (2000) or ‘signaling nouns’ by Flowerdew (1994, 2003; Flowerdew & Forest, 2015), referring to abstract nouns which “deal with the creation of cohesive ties within the text, and signal textual units and the boundaries between them” (Vergaro, 2018, p. 17). The main reason to propose such pragmatic use of the Czech instrumental case is based on the Czech translation of 149 example sentences with English shell nouns (Schmid, 2000): out of this number, the assumed Czech ‘shell nouns’ most commonly seen with nominative case marking hold 28.86 %, followed by 26.85 % used with the instrumental case marking.

Within the hypothesis of this study, the author further investigates natural language use, including the written SYN v. 8 for L1 data, and the learner corpora CzeSL-SGT and LCSL for L2 data. From the results of the corpus analysis in Chapter 3, the L1 data confirm the hypothesis that there are construction patterns where the Czech instrumentals function as ‘shell nouns’. On the other hand, as discussed in Chapter 4, such patterns of instrumentals are likely to be problematic for L2 learners.

To sum up, this study not only establishes a theoretical model and puts forward a hypothesis, which is derived from a crosslinguistic construction comparison, but also arrives at the conclusion that one language-specific strategy of such constructions in Czech is the instrumental use, when the abstract nouns appear in instrumental and in specific lexico-grammatical patterns.

Second, this study opens up with a different discussion on the use of Czech instrumentals from the pragmatic point of view, and such discussion indicates that the Czech instrumental use can represent a continuum joining syntactic and semantic linguistic expression, and can reveal the possible conscious of the language user’s choice of case-marking, which is to signal the role notion has in a text (Janda et al., 2022).

In addition, based on the L1 corpus analysis, this study points out further that different shell nouns have different construction pattern preferences, and the commonly used construction patterns of non-prepositional instrumental shell nouns are ‘SN + být + N/NP’, and ‘SN + být + INF’, and both perform the pragmatic functions, mainly focusing and topicalizing with an emphatic or contrastive focus (Schmid, 2000, p. 337). On the other hand, for prepositional instrumental shell nouns, the frequent construction patterns include ‘s + SN + N-GEN’, and ‘s + SN + INF’. According to Schmid (2000, pp. 330-331), such construction patterns tend to be used as a focus on new information, but not necessarily related to the context.

Moreover, the investigation on L2 data reveals that the Czech instrumentals are on average much less used than in L1 data. This implies the learners may be unfamiliar with their usages, or may not know the usages at all due to the lack of a complete and comprehensive teaching guide in learning. In addition, in L2 data there is a limited number of construction patterns of instrumental shell nouns, and the low usage is quite evenly distributed among the learners of Czech without different to their knowledge of Czech or length of study. It is clear that the use of these instrumental shell nouns is not directly relevant with the learners’ Czech language levels or their Czech study time length.

This study further focuses on L1 Chinese learners’ language data, and concludes that a contrastive analysis between Czech and Chinese shall be beneficial to the pedagogy instructions on the uses of the Czech instrumental shell nouns. Flowerdew (2010, p. 38) also considers, the pedagogic intervention of ‘shell nouns’ or ‘signaling nouns’ as significant, in order to “help in bringing the learners nearer to an L1 model, which, it is assumed, is likely to be more coherent”. Therefore, from the perspective of L2 pedagogy, this study brings forward that the appropriate use of the Czech instrumentals as ‘shell nouns’ can be considered as an important dimension not only in learning Czech writing performance in text organization, but also the reading ability in information tracing and text summarization for learners of Czech.