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Adjectives of positive evaluation in present-day spoken British English
Krajcsovicsová, Vladimíra ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
The present MA thesis studies adjectives of positive evaluation in present-day spoken British English. Other means of expressing subjective stance (e.g. intensifiers) were repeatedly described as undergoing constant change. However, variation in evaluative adjectives has received little quantitative attention so far (perhaps with the exception of Tagliamonte & Pabst, 2020). Our material consists of two corpora of informal spoken British English: Spoken BNC2014 and the spoken, demographically sampled section of the original BNC (1994). The starting point for the analysis is a frequency list of adjectives, from which we select adjectives with evaluative potential which differ significantly in frequency across the two corpora. Three adjectives: amazing, awesome and cool, are described in greater detail. The use of evaluative adjectives is described from several perspectives. We focus on syntactic functions of the adjectives, their co-occurrence with intensifiers and their collocations. From a sociolinguistic point of view, we describe the use of the adjectives with respect to the age and gender of the speakers. The analysis showed that adjectives of positive evaluation are an unstable category, and the change in adjectival use was reflected in its distribution. At the same time, we note changes in...
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Keywords and Frequent Words of J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
Krajcsovicsová, Vladimíra ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
This BA thesis aims to perform a corpus-stylistic analysis of J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye. The starting point for this analysis is a list of frequent and key words of Salinger's novel which are generated on the basis of comparison of frequency information in two corpora. The reference corpus consists of five novels published between 1996 and 2014 which share some fundamental similarities with Salinger's novel (i.e. the same target audience, informal language, first person narration). The theoretical part focuses predominantly on the relevant research in the area of corpus stylistics and at the same time, it provides definitions for the basic terms which are applied in the practical part. The methodology then introduces the texts which are employed for the analysis, as well as the software used, along with its main functions. In the analytical part, top hundred keywords are sorted into three groups (proper names, grammatical and lexical words) and they are subject to further examination, focusing predominantly on their collocations and n-grams. This analysis uncovered not only the features of the idiolect of the main hero of Salinger's novel, but also some basic characteristics of teenage language in use. At the same time, this research suggests that some of these characteristics...
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