The Construction of the Concept of Supplement in Research into Czech Language Teaching

Abstract

This study presents a qualitative multiple-case research into pupils’ understanding of the complement (doplněk) at the end of lower-secondary education. It is grounded in the Czech linguistic tradition’s account of the doplněk and in its implications for the curricular treatment of the topic in basic schooling; the didactic framework is provided by the Theory of Generic Models adopted from mathematics education. The core objective is to test whether exposure to an isolated model of clause incorporation (the transformational characterization of the complement) enables pupils to construct a generic model (generalization) of the concept and to shift their problem-solving strategies from intuitive heuristics to the search for syntactic relations (dual dependency). The findings indicate the didactic usefulness of the model: pupils moved towards identifying syntagmatic relations and, when presented with base clauses, recognized the syntactic properties of the depictive complement. Acquiring this syntactic knowledge strengthens their understanding of the semantics and stylistic value of depictive constructions.