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Investigating prosody in spoken Czech: A corpus-linguistic approach
Lukeš, David ; Vondřička, Pavel (advisor) ; Volín, Jan (referee) ; Čech, Radek (referee)
Prosody is a key aspect of spoken language, yet it is currently underrepresented in the spoken Czech corpora on offer at the Czech National Corpus. This is mainly because spoken corpora are very expensive and manual work intensive as it is, and adding more annotation manually is infeasible. The present dissertation thus charts a way to provide an automatic prosodic annotation for the spoken corpora of the CNC using the Prosogram framework, in combination with other tools and various custom postprocessing strategies and heuristics. Acaseisalsomadeinfavoroftheory-light,predominantlydescriptiveapproaches when preparing general-purpose spoken corpus annotations for the consumption of the linguistics research community at large, in a variety of contexts and research tasks. This case is philosophically anchored in a discriminative approach to meaning, which is shown to be the correct, paradox-free alternative to the currently more dominant paradigm of compositionality. Finally, a selection of results based on the Prosogram-generated annotation is presented. A particular focus is given to pitch range, which is characteristically restricted in Czech compared to other languages like English, but other features such as glissandos are also considered. Keywords: Czech, speech, prosody, corpus linguistics,...
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Frequency distribution of nominal inflection in Czech
Janda, Vojtěch ; Křivan, Jan (advisor) ; Lukeš, David (referee)
Employing methods of usage-based linguistic approaches, this paper tests the claim that differerences in frequential distributions of cases of nominals in Czech can be explained with the animacy hierarchy. Grammatical profiles consisting of information about gender and number are extracted from SYN2015, a balanced corpus of contemporary written texts, and analysed by hierarchical clustering which groups the grammatical profiles according to similarities of relative frequential distribution of cases. The cluster analysis and subsequential conditional inference tree modelling that animacy divides the sample into two groups. Key words: frequency analysis, animacy hierarchy, cluster analysis, corpus method
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Perceptual sensitivity to music and speech stimuli in the frequency and temporal domains
Lukeš, David ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Skarnitzl, Radek (referee)
The subject of this thesis is perceptual sensitivity with respect to subtle frequency-based and temporal manipulations in speech, music and mixed stimuli. We hypothesize that an individual's sensitivity to variation in all three types of stimuli should be similar (i.e. a correlation should exist), seeing that findings in evolutionary biology, neurosciences, psy- chology and experimental phonetics are pointing towards a relatively strong link between the mechanisms of perception in speech and music. Our listening experiment revealed mostly intermediate correlations; additionally, we argue that by employing syntactically less complicated stimuli, which would target specifically fundamental sensitivity without requiring a complex syntactic analysis in parallel, even more robust correlations could be obtained. While the influence of prior formal linguistic education on performance in the test was negligible, the influence of musical experience was considerable, which lends further support to the idea of simplifying especially the music stimuli in future research. Key words: music, speech, perception, sensitivity, correlation
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Textual Identity in Selected Novels by Philip Roth: Representation, Dissimulation, Creation
Lukeš, David ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Pilný, Ondřej (referee)
The present study seeks to explore the ways in which Jewish identity is discursively deployed in three novels by Jewish-American writer Philip Roth: Portnoy's Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000). Calling upon a framework of philosophical approaches to identity structured around the key terms of otherness, performativity and ethics, culled from theoretical writings by Judith Butler, Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Lévinas, the thesis analyses how writing about Jews in America functions as a political act, initially perhaps against the author's will, and engages the terms of "majority" and "minority." The central topos is that of otherness, viewed as inaccessible and irreducible (Lévinas), but endowed by the characters we will apprehend with powerful fictions, both appealing and repulsive, foci of desire and derision. In relation to our Jewish protagonists, white otherness (Chapter 1), black otherness (Chapter 2) and other Jews (Chapter 3) will be unearthed as crucial sites of imaginative investment which inform the creation of their individual Jewish-American selves. These selves are performed in discourse alternately with and against their discursive precedents, underscoring the aspect of performativity that Butler calls citationality and establishing an intricate...
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