La Motivation Du Verbe Tchèque

Abstract

If the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign has prevailed in linguistics since the publication of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale, research on iconicity has however never been abandoned, and has recently given rise to an important amount of monographs and articles, which show that there is a motivated relationship between the signifier and the signified, and more generally between the form and the meaning, in a large number of cases. This article deals with the motivation of the verb in Czech, which has, as far as we know, never been studied precisely. We focus from this point of view on the categories of aspect (imperfective, perfective and frequentative) and of verbal person, which are the most important as regards the Czech verb, and we show that these categories are based on two kinds of motivation: a phonosymbolical motivation, and a motivation of quantity. This study intends to represent a contribution to Czech Linguistics as well as to General Linguistics.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.31.17894