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English and Czech somatic phrasemes
Špotová, Šárka ; Vašků, Kateřina (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
The diploma thesis deals with the analysis and comparison of chosen English and Czech phrasemes from the lexical field of the human body. The first part covers a theoretical overview of basic concepts of phraseology and a classification of phrasemes. It also describes the class of somatic phrasemes, the role of the human body in cognitive linguistics, and focuses on methods of contrastive phraseological research. The main part concentrates on the analysis of the most frequent heart- and nerve-phrasemes which are obtained from the web corpora Araneum Anglicum Maius and Araneum Bohemicum Maius. They are arranged into tables according to the formal-structural classification and ordered on the basis of their frequency. The subsequent semantic description of the most frequent phrasemes also concentrates on conceptual metaphors associated with the heart and nerves. The final part concerns the comparison of two Czech phrasemes with their English translations in the parallel corpus InterCorp and their functional equivalence. The analysis tests three hypotheses - heart- phrasemes are more frequent than nerve-phrasemes, web corpora should provide more phrasemes than the phraseological dictionaries, but some dictionary phrasemes will not appear in the corpora, and some phrasemes will have the same or very...
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Content-oriented Hedging in Academic English Generated by ChatGPT
Kobzová, Dorothea ; Raušová, Veronika (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
The aim of this diploma thesis is to compare the use of content-oriented hedges in published articles from the Journal of Pragmatics with their equivalents generated by the artificial intelligence language model ChatGPT. Content-oriented hedges are devices of academic discourse that help authors communicate their results truthfully, only at the level for which they have evidence for. The means through which this type of hedging can be expressed include epistemic modal verbs and epistemic adverbs, which are used in this thesis to compare the frequency and diversity of content-oriented hedges in the discussions/conclusions of published articles with their respective equivalents generated by ChatGPT. The most important finding is that the content-oriented hedges used by ChatGPT do not appear as frequently and with such variety as in published articles. This result is supported mainly by significant differences found in the use of epistemic adverbs in the ChatGPT corpus. As a whole, the thesis attempts to contribute to the study of academic discourse produced by artificial intelligence, namely the language model ChatGPT.
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The influence of CLIL teaching on children's lexicon
Skočilová, Tina ; Cilibrasi, Luca (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
This study focuses on the longitudinal impact of CLIL on learning English as a foreign language in Czech schools. Two groups of children were subjected to testing twice over the span of five months, one of the groups learning via CLIL, the other group learning English in school in usual English classes. In each group, eighteen participants aged 11-13 were subjected to a 110- question-long vocabulary test based on Paul Nation's Picture Vocabulary Size Test, and 5 short reading comprehension passages. The same test was repeated five months later. The vocabulary test was comprised of four sections: part was the original PVST test designed by Paul Nation, then ten words from an everyday vocabulary were another part, and the last two parts were concerned with mathematics and history vocabulary. The groups were then compared, and statistical analysis was used to compare the two attempts of each group. The analysis showed that whilst the overall vocabulary scores were not significantly different, the everyday vocabulary showed marginal progress in the CLIL group and not in the control group, and the progress in reading comprehension was significantly better for the CLIL group. Even though the results were not as strong as those observed in previous research, these findings indicate that CLIL had a...
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Conceptualization of Menstruation in Czech and English Cultural Background
Malečková, Nikola ; Vašků, Kateřina (advisor) ; Šebestová, Denisa (referee)
Menstruation continues to be one the most severe taboos due to its intimate nature and its involving bodily effluvia. This taboo has also been transferred into language and so speakers often have to opt for alternative expressions in order to be able to talk about menstruation covertly without using the most transparent and taboo names such as menstruation or menses. The study of these alternative terms may inform us about the underlying attitudes towards menstruation as a concept. The aim of the present research is thus to uncover and describe the conceptual metaphors which exist in English and Czech and which structure speakers' understanding of the concept of menstruation. The thesis is based on a data set composed of metaphorical expressions which serve as alternative names for menstruation, and which were collected from online discussion forums. The present thesis is based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and further developed by Kövecses (2010). The research is primarily qualitative in nature and serves as an exploratory study, describing the menstruation expressions encountered. Based on the collected menstruation expressions the underlying conceptual metaphors existing in the two languages in question were formulated. These were further described with...
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Neither of/Either of/None of and S-V agreement: corpus based study
Ševčuková, Anastázie ; Brůhová, Gabriela (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
The thesis discusses constructions neither of/ either of/ none of in a position of a subject and the agreement they trigger with their respective verb. The theoretical part provides general overview of the pronouns in focus as well as rules for subject-verb agreement after these pronouns in constructions with the preposition of. It also provides definition of notional concord and proximity principle and discusses problematic aspects of the subject-verb agreement and alternative approach to the matter. Furthermore, it discusses subject-verb agreement production in spoken language. The analytical part is based on a corpus based study of two corpora: BNC and 'BNC 2014 Spoken'. From these corpora the highest possible number of examples of neither of/ either of/ none of and a verb are extracted. Followingly, using relative frequency the percentage of verbs in singular and plural in the subject-verb agreement is compared between the two corpora. The thesis aims to support the following hypotheses: the constructions with neither of/ either of contain cases with erroneous verb number caused by notional concord and proximity principle, in the case of none of, the proform triggers more plural agreement in the written language than the other two proforms and, compared to the written language, the agreement after the...
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Conceptual Metaphor in Female Stand-Up Comedy
Shumilova, Sofia ; Vašků, Kateřina (advisor) ; Šebestová, Denisa (referee)
This diploma thesis investigates the usage of conceptual metaphor by female stand-up comedians. The theoretical part discusses the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the Blending Theory, theories of humor and the relation between metaphor and humor. It also presents the history and characteristics of the genre of stand-up comedy. The analytical part of the thesis focuses on the most recurring topics in the corpus and attempts to unravel the underlying messages and attitudes the comedians convey with the help of conceptual metaphor. The corpus, which was specifically created for the purpose of this thesis, contains 154 examples, 71 of which are analyzed in depth. The analysis revealed a substantial display of negative sentiments and outlooks across the majority of the examined topics. The thesis provides an insight into the notion of conceptual metaphor and its usage in a creative genre, and hopes to contribute to the greater understanding of its inner workings and potential. keywords: conceptual metaphor, female stand-up, blending, humor theory
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Metaphors associated with the perception of time in English and Czech
Cibulková, Anna ; Vašků, Kateřina (advisor) ; Beták, Kryštof (referee)
This thesis deals with the use of temporal conceptual metaphors in connection with the word time / čas in English and Czech. It focuses on the most frequent verbs which are associated with the word time / čas and on the corresponding metaphorical concepts into which these verb phrases can be categorised. In the theoretical part, the subject of metaphors is described and explained in general. The analytical part is based on corpus data from the British National Corpus and Czech National Corpus and focuses in more detail on individual metaphorical concepts and its diverse utilisation within the two languages. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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Conversion in English and Czech: a corpus study of semantic relations between nouns and verbs
Hledíková, Hana ; Ševčíková, Magda (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
The aim of this MA thesis is to carry out a corpus-based contrastive study of the semantic relations between verbs and nouns in conversion pairs in English and Czech. Pairs of verbs and nouns like run.v - run.n, salt.n - salt.v in English and běžet/běhat 'run.v' - běh 'run.n', sůl 'salt.n' - solit 'salt.v' in Czech are taken to be the result of a word-formation process called conversion, in which a new word belonging to a different word class is created without the addition of any derivational affixes. Using a sample of 300 such pairs in both languages, extracted from the British National Corpus for English and from the SYN2015 corpus for Czech, we analyse and classify the different semantic relations existing between the nouns and verbs. We adopt a cognitive approach and classify the semantic relations based on conceptual event schemata and their elements. Because the nouns and/or verbs are often polysemous, the semantic classification also accounts for the possibility of multiple semantic relations existing between the verb and the noun in one conversion pair. In the analysis, we examine and compare the frequencies with which the different semantic relations appear in the conversion pairs in English and Czech, as well as the patterns of multiple semantic relations that appear together in a single...
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Metaphors associated with the perception of time in English and Czech
Cibulková, Anna ; Vašků, Kateřina (advisor) ; Beták, Kryštof (referee)
This thesis deals with the use of temporal conceptual metaphors in connection with the word time / čas in English and Czech. It focuses on the most frequent verbs which are associated with the word time / čas and on the corresponding metaphorical concepts into which these verb phrases can be categorised. In the theoretical part, the subject of metaphors is described and explained in general. The analytical part is based on corpus data from the British National Corpus and Czech National Corpus and focuses in more detail on individual metaphorical concepts and its diverse utilisation within the two languages. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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Cleft-sentences in Academic Prose: Diachronic Development of their Frequency and Functions in Natural Sciences and Humanities
Beták, Kryštof ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
This diploma thesis maps the diachronic tendencies in the frequency and functions of it-cleft sentences in two sub-registers of academic prose, humanities and natural sciences, from 1800 to 2019. Biber and Gray (2016) showed changes in grammatical complexity in academic writing, namely the shift between phrasal and clausal grammatical complexity and explicitness, which motivated the hypothesis of this thesis, i.e. that the frequency of it-clefts is expected to decrease in the course of 20th century in both sub-registers with the development being faster and more salient in natural sciences. General description presents the syntactic and semantic properties of it-clefts together with discussion about FSP and the distinction between new and given information, as the objective of the thesis is also to study the development of the functional types of clefts. The empirical part analyses a corpus of 170 academic texts, covering the time period under study. It is divided into sections based on time periods displaying similar features concerning the frequency of it-clefts in natural sciences and humanities. The analysis confirms that the expected decrease in the frequency of it-clefts is clearly notable in the case of natural sciences, while in humanities the frequency of it-clefts in individual texts...
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