Transgressive Agreement and Usage

Both Czech transgressives — the present ("while doing X") and the past ("having done X") — share one feature that startles every English speaker: they agree with the subject in gender and number. English -ing and having done are stone-frozen ("walking home, the man / the woman / the children…"), but a Czech converb changes shape three ways. This page does two jobs. First, it puts both transgressives' agreement into a single combined table so you can read the gender and number straight off any converb you meet. Second, it maps out where transgressives still survive in modern Czech — almost entirely as fixed phrases and in literary prose — so you know which ones to treat as live vocabulary and which to file under "reading-only."

The combined agreement table

Here are both transgressives for one verb of each type, laid out across the three agreement slots. Read down each column to see how the same converb shifts for a man, a woman/thing, or a group.

The pattern is regular once you see it. Reading by column:

• Masculine singular ends in a vowel (-e, -a, -je) for the present, and in -v or a bare consonant for the past.
• Feminine/neuter singular ends in -c (present: -íc, -ouc, -jíc) or -ši (past: -vši, -ši).
• Plural ends in -ce (present: -íce, -ouce, -jíce) or -še (past: -vše, -še).

Agreement is with the main-clause subject

The crucial point: the converb agrees with the subject that performs both actions — the subject of the main verb. The converb has no subject of its own; it borrows the main clause's. So you must look at who did the main verb to choose the form.

Same English "seeing," three Czech forms keyed to the gender and number of the sigher. If the agreement clashes with the actual subject, the sentence is wrong — this is the single most common production error, and the reason native speakers themselves often avoid the construction rather than risk it.

The honest picture: this is bookish grammar

Before the survivors, the blunt truth. Productive use of transgressives — coining a fresh one in a sentence of your own — belongs to (literary) and (formal/written) Czech and, in the past transgressive, to a register that is frankly (archaic). In spoken Czech and ordinary writing (texts, emails, news in plain style), Czechs replace them with:

• an a-clause for simultaneity: Usmíval se a odešel,
• a když-clause for "while / when": Když šel po ulici, …,
• two past clauses for "having done": Dočetl knihu a zhasl.

So the survival of transgressives is lopsided: as living, productive grammar they are essentially gone, but as frozen phrases a handful are alive and well — and those are the ones worth your memory.

The frozen survivors

These transgressives have lexicalised — detached from their verbs and become ordinary connectors, prepositions, or adverbs. Native speakers use them daily without feeling them as verb forms, which is exactly why they survived. They do not agree any more; the form is frozen.

The often-paired počínaje … konče brackets a range — "from X all the way to Y":

A note on the chtě nechtě type

A separate frozen relic worth recognising is the doubled-transgressive idiom chtě nechtě "willy-nilly / like it or not" (literally "wanting, not-wanting"), and its variant chtíc nechtíc for a female or plural subject. Here the agreement does faintly survive in the set phrase, but most speakers use chtě nechtě as an invariable adverb.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Both transgressives agree with the main-clause subject in gender and number — three forms, unlike the invariable English -ing / having done.
• Decode by ending: -c / -ši = fem./neut. sg.; -ce / -še = plural; otherwise masc. sg. -v-/-š- marks the past ("having done"); a vowel or -c without them marks the present ("while doing").
• As productive grammar, transgressives are literary/archaic — replace them in speech with a-, když-, or paired past clauses.
• A handful of frozen survivors are live, invariable connectors worth memorising with their cases: nehledě na, počínaje/konče (+ instr.), soudě podle, vyjma, takříkajíc, nemluvě o, and the idiom chtě nechtě.