A Diachronic Study of the Dative in the Written Czech Language

The present paper deals with the study of the semantics of the dative case in the written Czech language from the point of view of cognitive semantics. Its aim is to apply the semantic configuration of the Czech dative – mainly provided by Janda’s A Geography of Case Semantics (1993) and Janda and Clancy’s The Case Book for Czech (2006) – to a large corpus composed of 8,355 datives belonging to four significant periods in the history of Czech written language: old Czech, middle Czech, new Czech, and contemporary Czech.