Si představ, by mě zajímalo, ti to ukážu: Jednoslabičné začátky syntaktických segmentů v mluvené češtině

The paper deals with a phenomenon frequently encountered in the syntax of spoken Czech, namely one-syllable words, mostly of pronominal or verbal nature (se, si, sem, ste, sme, mě, mi, mu, tě, ti, bych, bys, by…) at the beginning of syntactic segments. At this stage, the analysis focuses on three forms: by, si, ti. The authors address the issue of the difficult identification of segment boundaries, including the influence of turn-taking in dialogue. The data was taken from the ORAL2013 corpus; the paper further looks into the usefulness of this corpus for the investigation of dialogue syntax, its query options and the possible interpretation of the presented evidence. The results have shown so far that the one-syllable beginnings in question are based on the elision of certain, mostly pronominal, expressions, or less frequently on word-order inversion. Furthermore, to a certain extent, they correlate with selected non-verbal discourse phenomena (longer pauses, silence, laughter), with syntactic phenomena (repetitions, corrections, parentheses, aposiopesis, etc.) and also with speaker turn-taking and topic change.