Užívání trpných příčestí v současných veřejných dialogických projevech

The Czech passive participle is often considered a bookish form whose usage is confined to written language, especially to technical and specialized literature. Czech speakers often use “the long form” of the respective deverbative adjective instead of the passive participle and they do so ever more frequently, not only when speaking but often also when writing in Literary Czech. This situation has been the subject of discussion by Czech linguists for decades. The article presents the findings of a research based on the DIALOG corpus, a large linguistic corpus of contemporary spoken Czech containing transcripts of TV political debates and talk shows. The research reveals that the past participle forms are comparatively frequent in the corpus analysed, while, in contrast, the alternative forms of the long deverbative adjective used in a manner which can be classified as non-standard or non-literary are rare. The results also partly confirm that the passive voice of perfective verbs is considerably more common than that of imperfective verbs, while on the other hand the instances of imperfective passive forms found in the corpus show that their use is fully appropriate. The last section deals with the relation of the use of passive participles to code-switching between Literary and Colloquial Czech.