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Complex conjunctives and their impact on cohesion and coherence in upper-secondary students' semi-formal essays
Kloučková, Julie ; Pípalová, Renata (advisor) ; Nádraská, Zuzana (referee)
The thesis aims to explore the usage of complex conjunctives in upper-secondary students' semi-formal essays. It deals with written discourse produced by two groups of students of B1 and B2 (CEFR) levels, uncovers the differences in their use, explores their impact on cohesion and coherence and looks at the students' understanding of these concepts. In total, 40 essays in two B1 and B2 subcorpora are analysed through a corpus analysis tool inspired by the framework of Halliday and Hasan. Prior to that, analyses of writing sections in three students' books from the perspective of Teachability Hypothesis and Processability Model are conducted to establish the potential frequency and conjunctive type scale. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses showed that upper-intermediate students employ more complex conjunctives than intermediate students, even though the difference is not substantial. The data also indicate that both groups prefer initial sentence placements to the medial positions, and that additives are used over adversatives. Furthermore, the analyses uncovered surprising results, for example, in the area of paragraph-initially and paragraph- internally used conjunctives. The research shows that complex conjunctives are essential in semi-formal and formal writings and that especially...
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Perception of Religious and Mythological Lexis among EFL Users
Boško, Martin ; Lancová, Klára (advisor) ; Pípalová, Renata (referee)
This diploma thesis explores the perception of mythological and religious lexis among EFL users with an emphasis on mythology. Firstly, it provides a brief theoretical introduction to the topic, after which the main research part describes and analyses the results of research conducted in several Czech lower and upper secondary schools. This research consisted of the assignment of a specially designed worksheet that aimed, among other things, to map students' knowledge of mythological and religious lexis. Two versions of this worksheet were created based on the level of English of the respondents. At the same time, it focused to a small extent on the respondents' ability to link the information within the given worksheet. The research showed that most respondents had some awareness of mythological lexis, with this awareness becoming less important with higher levels of English. However, it also showed that respondents who rated their own knowledge of mythology highly were more likely to succeed in linguistically based exercises. Furthermore, interlingual transfer played a large role in the ability to list the names of planets in English and indicated a relatively significant lack of knowledge on this topic. Finally, neither age nor English level appeared to affect respondents' ability to link...
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Compounding in Four Registers of Contemporary English
Šolcová, Zuzana ; Pípalová, Renata (advisor) ; Matuchová, Klára (referee)
This study investigates the distribution of compounds in four registers of contemporary British English: newspaper reporting, fiction, radio broadcasting, and face-to-face conversation. The studied corpus totals 64000 words and comprises thematically comparable samples of the registers in question. The analysis focuses on the incidence and distribution of compound types and subtypes in the four sub-corpora. The classification is primarily form-based and concerns such criteria as word class, spelling form and the syntactic relation between the compounds'elements. The results of the classification are substantiated with quantification and interpretation of the data. The research reveals great differences in both density and diversity of cases in individual registers. Specifically, we notice contrastive tendencies in the two written and two spoken registers.
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Three ways of expressing future time in modern British fiction and non-fiction (will/shall + infinitive, to be going to + infinitive, present prograsive)
Mikuláš, Martin ; Jančovičová, Ivana (advisor) ; Pípalová, Renata (referee)
This diploma thesis analyses three selected ways of expressing futurity in modern English: will/shall + infinitive; the to be going to construction; and the present progressive tense. The expression of futurity is explored in fiction and non-fiction separately. However, this thesis concentrates only on written English. In Part One, several approaches to the phenomenon of futurity are introduced. In Part Two, the selected expressions of futurity are presented and analysed as to their meaning, distribution, syntactic and Contextual factors. Attention is paid to the proportion of occurrence of these expressions, their meanings, and how these are affected by context (situation, subject, negation, voice) and style. Analysis is made separately for fiction and non-fiction corpus; their comparison is included in the last chapter. The frequency of the occurrence of future expressions and their meanings in the two registers are summarised in tables at the end of the work and in graphs included in the text. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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Gender-based linguistic differences in the context of social variables
Županičová, Lenka ; Pípalová, Renata (advisor) ; Matuchová, Klára (referee)
My diploma thesis deals with the issue of genderbased linguistic differences examined in the context of social variables. The aim of this work is to introduce the theoretical background of the study of gender and language, to present major concepts prevailing across the area of the study of gender and language, compare them and discuss and examine genderbased linguistic differences from the perspective of the society and the influence it has on its speakers.
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Pre-fortis shortening in Czech English
Hrychová, Helena ; Červinková Poesová, Kristýna (advisor) ; Pípalová, Renata (referee)
This bachelor thesis examines the role of a phenomenon called pre-fortis shortening in Czech English. This term is used by phoneticians to represent the shortening of vowels before fortis consonants. It is not characteristic only of English, Matthew Chen even suggested that it could be a language-universal phenomenon. In English it is a very significant feature since English vowel duration was proven by various experiments to serve as a cue to the perception of the voicing characteristic of the following consonant. This thesis advances our understanding of pre-fortis shortening in Czech English where vowel duration was hypothesized to correlate with the speaker's proficiency in English. As a result, this work aims to examine the extent to which 20 Czech students divided into two categories depending on their English level (A2, C1) exploit this phenomenon and whether their proficiency has an impact on vowel durations before fortis and lenis consonants. They were recorded while reading 40 English sentences and their vowel durations were compared to those obtained from two native English speakers.
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Translation and analysis of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom
Halfarová, Anna ; Ženíšek, Jakub (advisor) ; Pípalová, Renata (referee)
This bachelor thesis is focused on the problems which may occur, while translating from English into Czech, using as a foundational material a novel Freedom by American author Jonathan Franzen. The thesis is divided into two sections. For the purpose of the first, practical part, I have chosen two different extracts of the novel, one is taken from the middle of the book, the second one is the last part of the novel Freedom. The second section consists of my analysis, special attention is paid to the problems I had to solve during my translation. I comment on the choices I have made, usually also quoting from the books that deal with translation theories, I found especially helpful those written by Jiří Levý, Dagmar Knittlová and Zlata Kufnerová.
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Sociolinguistic Concept of Political Correctness and lts Impact on Modern Public English
Ženíšek, Filip ; Pípalová, Renata (advisor) ; Matuchová, Klára (referee)
This thesis deals with the sociolinguistic concept of political correctness and scrutinizes the impact it has on modern public English language. It describes the changes proposed by the current trend which are meant to erase any offensive and controversial expressions from both public and priváte speech codes. Brief philosophical, sociological and historical backgrounds of the problém of linguistic discrimination are also provided in order to explain the movement which is aiined at changing the way the people of the European and American civilization express themselves.
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