ON WORD ORDER AND ITS RELATION TO GENRES OF OLD CZECH LITERATURE

The paper focuses on a phenomenon that has not been systematically studied in Czech paleo-bohemistics so far – how the word order behaviour of possessive pronouns in noun phrases (NP) is related to genres of Old Czech literary texts. The word order analysis of the excerpted data has shown that the word order of possessive pronouns in Old Czech NPs largely depends on the individual style of the author and on the genre of the text. One can therefore probably assume that the word order behaviour of possessives in Old Czech NPs was considerably affected by style. Our research has thus also confirmed what is often mentioned in connection with the texts of the first and second Old Czech biblical redactions: one of the typical features of the new translation of the New Testament of the second biblical redaction (unlike the oldest translation) is its dominant tendency to preserve the original Latin structures in the translated text. In terms of word order, this adherence to the Vulgate results in a dominant tendency to put the modifying (adnominal) components of the NP to the post-nominal position. It is therefore likely that the post-nominal position of possessive pronouns, which had been probably activated by the word order in Latin, was used for stylistic reasons.