(en)clitics; Czech Bible translations;word order positions; development

The presented study deals with the historical development of Czech (en)clitics (AuxP).Based on the data from the previous research (Kosek, 2015a,b, 2017), it focuses on the development ofone group the Czech (en)clitics - on the preterite auxiliary forms. In the article, three hypotheses areformulated and then tested on the data gained from selected parts of historical Czech Bible translations.The suggest that there were two significant word order positions of historical Czech (en)clitics: 1. the post-initial position, i.e. after first word / phrase, 2. the contact position, i.e. an(en)clitic is located immediately before (pre-verbal position) or after (post-verbal position) itssyntactically or morphologically superordinate item (the post-verbal position is the more frequentvariant of the both variants of the contact positions). Since the time when the oldest analyzed text wastranslated, the post-initial position has had the status of the basic word order position of the Czech(en)clitic, while the contact position has had the status of a stylistically, pragmatically or textuallymotivated position. It seems that the contact position begins to retreat only in 19th century and hencethe definitive historical change of Czech auxiliary (en)clitics in the sole second position clitics wasrealized not before 19th or 20th century