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Discourse-pragmatic functions of "like" in spoken discourse
Raušová, Veronika ; Brůhová, Gabriela (advisor) ; Dontcheva-Navrátilová, Olga (referee) ; Kozubíková Šandová, Jana (referee)
The discourse-pragmatic (D-P) uses of the word like represent a functionally versatile phenomenon typical of informal, spoken language. A marked increase in the use of this word and the resulting omnipresence in spoken discourse gave rise to many studies of various facets of its use in the past thirty years. Nevertheless, the research potential has not been exhausted, especially with the emergence of new, contemporary corpus data. Therefore, combining a quantitative approach typical of corpus linguistics with a qualitative approach inherent in pragmatics, the present "short-term diachronic comparable corpus linguistic [research]" (Leech et al., 2009: 28-29) aims to describe the changes that have occurred in the usage and of the D- P like between the early 1990s and the 2010s. The present study is based on a twofold analysis of 1000 random tokens of the D-P like; one half drawn out from the demographically sampled component of the original Spoken BNC1994, and the second half extracted from its successor, the Spoken BNC2014. Firstly, the quantitative analysis of the data was performed, revealing that the pronounced increase in the frequency of the word like in the BNC2014 is caused by the D-P uses, whose relative frequency per million words is estimated to have increased approximately nine times....
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Mathematical texts from the perspective ofdistributional phraseology
Steidlová, Lucie ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Dontcheva-Navrátilová, Olga (referee) ; Gledhill, Christopher (referee)
The thesis focuses on the distributional phraseology of mathematical research papers with the aim of providing a phraseological profile of this discourse through the description of its characteristic building blocks. It relies on inductive corpus-driven methodology, which is in accord with the exploratory character of the research. Specifically, the thesis makes use of the methodology promoted by Gledhill (2000) and Groom (e.g. 2010, 2019), which uses grammatical keywords as starting points for qualitative concordance analysis. The target discourse is represented by a corpus of mathematical research papers across three subfields which was designed and compiled for the purposes of the present study. A corpus of academic journal papers from a wide range of disciplines is used as the reference corpus. The detected keywords are used as pointers to potentially interesting phraseological units of the texts. Grounded in the framework of construction grammar, the thesis provides a detailed description of around fifty such units, i.e. the individual constructions the keywords appear in. Going one step further, the constructions are positioned in a network which represents their mutual relationships. Through the detailed descriptions on the one hand, and the relational networks on the other hand, the thesis...
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Developing communicative competence through online discussion tasks: computer mediated communication and the skill of writing
Tůma, František ; Píšová, Michaela (advisor) ; Betáková, Lucie (referee) ; Dontcheva Navratilova, Olga (referee)
This dissertation deals with the developing and development of EFL learners' communicative competence in writing in a blended learning course. The dissertation addresses issues related to the conceptualization of developing communicative competence and measuring learners' progress as well as using ICT in foreign language teaching. The underlying research question was whether learners' communicative competence changed after using a series of online discussion tasks, and if so, in what manner. The empirical research was conducted as a case study in which 18 learners in an EFL course at the CEFR A2 level participated in three discussion tasks conducted online, using asynchronous discussion forum. The discussions were built on social constructivist learning theories. Methods of data collection and analysis included pre- and post-tests, learner corpus compiled from the texts written by the students in two online discussions and its analysis, and a questionnaire survey. The results showed that learners' overall level of communicative competence in writing improved. Specifically, the syntactic complexity of learners' language produced at the beginning and at the end of the course increased and learners' perceived fluency in writing improved. These findings support the claim that learners' active participation in...
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Lexical coselections in non-native speaker English text
Felcmanová, Andrea ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Kudrnáčová, Naděžda (referee) ; Dontcheva Navratilova, Olga (referee)
The research reported in this thesis explores the degree of authenticity of the formulaic language used by NNSs and the extent to which a learner's L1 interferes in the production of different types of multi-word units, namely non-idiomatic recurrent three and four-word combinations (lexical bundles), phrasal and prepositional verbs and collocation. Drawing on Granger's Contrastive Interlanguage analysis (CIA 1996), the investigation is conducted on two different learner sample corpora and subsequently contrasted with a native sample corpus. The study aims to prove that multi-word units pose a challenge for learners for several reasons. In general terms, learners are assumed to operate predominantly on what Sinclair calls the open-choice principle, that is to say their production will be less idiomatic than that of native speakers'. This assumption is independently tested on different types of phraseological combinations. As regards non-idiomatic recurrent word combinations, learners are expected to be more repetitive in their three- and four-word combinations and use less creativity in their writing. Concerning the phrasal verbs, it is highly likely to observe a small number of phrasal verbs in the non-native writing whereas prepositional verbs are considered problematic for learners due to the...
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