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The diachronic distribution of singular they, generic he, and he or she construction in English newspaper corpora.
Kim, Nelli ; Tichý, Ondřej (advisor) ; Beták, Kryštof (referee)
The primary focus of this BA thesis is the choice of the third person singular pronoun in the contexts where the gender of a singular animate referent is unknown or unspecified. Specifically, the use of singular they in this context is examined, as its distribution in the press genre of written language over the past 20 years is analysed using corpus linguistics. In the theoretical part, both grammatical and sociolinguistics factors are considered in order to trace the history of prescription for gender-neutral third person singular pronouns, focusing specifically on the development of the issue in recent years. The research part documents the singular use of pronoun they on five samples from two newspaper corpora (SiBol: Corpus of English broadsheet newspapers for years 1993-2013 and The Timestamped JSI web corpus for years 2014-2020) and analyses its development from year 1993 to 2020. The data acquired from the corpora are partially analysed with the help of artificial intelligence language model. This paper's hypothesis is that singular they grows in popularity; potential sociolinguistics reasons for that change are examined.
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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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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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Nonfinite -ed clauses and their translation counterparts
Luňáková, Barbora ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Beták, Kryštof (referee)
The present thesis offers an analysis of the Czech translation equivalents of English non-finite -ed clauses, or past participial clauses. It describes the -ed clauses and their syntactic functions, focusing on adverbial, absolute, and post-modifying. The thesis is inspired by a study of non- finite -ing clauses which was carried out by Malá and Šaldová (2015) and its results are finally compared to the results of the study. It offers a contrastive analysis of the characters of the two languages, the analytic English on the one hand, and the synthetic Czech on the other. Emphasis is put on the complex condensation capacity of the English language and its tendency to express by means of a non-finite clause the meanings which in Czech would be expressed by a finite clause. The material for this thesis, 100 English -ed clauses, were excerpted from a parallel English-Czech corpus InterCorp, from a sub-corpus of six works of contemporary anglophone fiction.The majority of -ed participial clauses in our sample were post-modifiers (56%), followed by 36% of adverbial clauses and 8% of absolute constructions. Congruent correspondences were represented in the data by deverbal adjectives only, the transgressive proving as too marked and archaic. Deverbal adjectives made up the largest group of translation...
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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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Absurdity and Crisis of Identity in Heller's Catch-22
Beták, Kryštof ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Wallace, Clare (referee)
1 This BA thesis focuses on Catch-22, a novel written by the American author Joseph Heller in 1961. The book is set at the end of the World War II on Pianosa, a small island near Italy. It is about a group of American soldiers led by Colonel Cathcart, who never allows any of his men to return home after having flown certain number of missions, something that soldiers in other squadrons are normally free to do. Instead, Cathcart always increases the minimal number of flights, so all the people in his squadron have to keep fighting, and none of them can escape the war. Colonel Cathcart and other commanding officers create an absurd world of the novel which the enlisted soldiers have to face in order to stay alive. The central aim of the thesis is to analyse the absurdity of the world in which the novel takes place and consequently to scrutinize the crisis of identity which the soldiers experience in their effort to fight and survive, even though the circumstances are unfavourable for them, because both the enemy and their superiors are against them. Having done so, a hypothesis will be eventually stated to what extent Heller was inspired by existentialism and the philosophy of the absurd. The thesis is divided into two fundamental parts: the theoretical and the practical part. The main purpose of the...
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