Word Order of the Conditional Auxiliary in Old Czech Olomouc Bible

The goal of the article is to analyze word-order positions of conditional auxiliary forms (AuxK) of the Czech verb ‚býti‘ in selected parts of the first redaction of the Old Czech Bible translation (com- posed in the second half of the 14th century). The extant younger copies of the original are examined, mainly the manuscript Olomouc Bible (Olomoucká bible), partially the manuscript Dresden bible (Drážďanská bible). The examined data indicate the following word-order properties of AuxK in Old Czech: 1. AuxK behaves as both accented and unaccented word (in terms of traditional descriptive Czech linguistics as a ‛non-stable or non-permanent enclitic’, i.e. nestálá příklonka). This prosodic variety is determined by the grammatical function of AuxK: only those forms of AuxK that have the function of a subjunctor (complementizer) or of an optative particle are accented, while the forms of AuxK without these additional functions are unaccented (clitic). The clitic forms of the AuxK appear in many clause positions, which depend on the following word-order patterns: a) a post-initial position, b) a verb-adjacent position, c) an isolated position of the AuxK (without connection to the participle) in the middle of a clause. The frequency of these positions in the examined text shows that the basic position is the post-initial position, whereas the verb-adjacent position and the isolated position in the middle of a clause are rare: these positions are motivated by textual or stylistic factors.