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Semantic Analysis of Selected Czech Key Words. Theory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage Applied to Czech
Pavlásková, Marie ; Císařovská, Lily (advisor) ; Ivan, Michal (referee)
Diploma thesis, which is based on Anna Wierzbicka's natural semantic metalanguage theory, discusses certain specific features of Czech language worldview and compares them with specific features of English language worldview. This intercultural comparison is made possible by the cultural neutrality of the natural semantic metalanguage which serves as a language in which explications of analyzed words are formulated and compared to their English counterparts. Analyses of Czech keywords are based mainly on the use of dictionaries (explanatory and etymological dictionaries and dictionaries of phrases and idioms) and Czech corpora. The analysis aims to show differences between Czech and English cultural norms and values as reflected in different semantic structures of analyzed concepts, which presumably indicate deeper differences in perceiving and interpreting reality in both languages.
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Teaching English and Pupils with Special Educational Needs
Kociánová, Janka ; Felcmanová, Lenka (advisor) ; Šumníková, Pavlína (referee)
TITLE: Teaching English and Pupils with Special Educational Needs AUTHOR: Janka Kociánová DEPARTMENT: Department of Special Education SUPERVISOR: PhDr. Lenka Felcmanová, Ph.D. ABSTRACT: The thesis deals with the teaching of English of pupils with special educational needs, focusing on pupils with specific learning disabilities (SLD). The issue of pupils with SLD and didactics of English language are described in the theoretical part. The aim of the practical part was to find out how pupils with SLD are taught English in primary schools, which forms of education, the most frequently aids (textbooks, materials, etc.) and methods are used. Quantitative as well as qualitative methods were chosen for the research - the questionnaire survey (the questionnaire for teachers), aids and analysis of materials, interviews with teachers and case studies. On the basis of the obtained data, the effectiveness of the various activities is evaluated and a list of the recommended teaching aids, materials and resources is presented. KEYWORDS: English, dyslexia, Foreign Language, special educational needs, specific learning difficulties
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English grammar checker and corrector: the determiners
Auersperger, Michal ; Pecina, Pavel (advisor) ; Straňák, Pavel (referee)
Correction of the articles in English texts is approached as an article generation task, i.e. each noun phrase is assigned with a class corresponding to the definite, indefinite or zero article. Supervised machine learning methods are used to first replicate and then improve upon the best reported result in the literature known to the author. By feature engineering and a different choice of the learning method, about 34% drop in error is achieved. The resulting model is further compared to the performance of expert annotators. Although the comparison is not straightforward due to the differences in the data, the results indicate the performance of the trained model is comparable to the human-level performance when measured on the in-domain data. On the other hand, the model does not generalize well to different types of data. Using a large-scale language model to predict an article (or no article) for each word of the text has not proved successful. 1
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Analysis of English and French true friends (vrais amis) in a corpus of authentic text samples
Pípalová, Mariana ; Jančík, Jiří (advisor) ; Listíková, Renáta (referee)
This final project provides a parole analysis of vrais amis (true counterparts) in current French and English. To this end a specialized English-French translation corpus was assembled, composed of three subcorpora equal in length, namely Religious, Political and Fiction discourse, amounting altogether to approximately 60,000 words. With the help of the AntConc instrument, true friends employed in the corpus were generated, here conceived of as a register-specific phenomenon exclusively. Using the frequency criteria, a central set of 64 most frequent counterparts was delineated. These central counterparts, marked by (almost) identical frequencies, identical contexts and the same registers, were subjected to a multiaspectual analysis, scrutinizing the pronunciation, spelling, word classes, share of derivation, and frequency of types and tokens. Since English proved to be the borrowing language in all instances, the research also indirectly addressed the degree of their integration in the English words stock by reference to frequency bands. For most of the researched aspects, three zones of counterparts were identified, namely those exhibiting identity, close similarity and relative difference. As a result, employing the Theory of Centre and Periphery (Daneš 1966), we may arrange true counterparts...
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Language Policy in the U.S.: Debating Official Language
Mertová, Viktorie ; Sehnálková, Jana (advisor) ; Zukerstein, Jaroslav (referee)
U. S. does not have an official language even though the country is home to the highest number of English speakers in the world and English is the primary language spoken there. Since 1980s, there have been efforts to make English the official language of the land. However, they have not been successful so far. The paper Language Policy in the U. S.: Debating Official Language attempts to clarify why English has never been officialized. First, the language policy debates since the American Revolution are examined and the role of official language in the debates is defined. Second, the actors of official English debates are introduced, their motivation is explained and arguments for and against making English official are presented. Third, potential impact of official language legislation is scrutinized based on a comparative analysis of five official English bills. Thus, the paper provides an overview of the topic of official English debates and gives reasons why the U. S. Congress has never passed an official language law.
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Machine Translation of Spoken English into Czech
Cífka, Ondřej ; Bojar, Ondřej (advisor) ; Helcl, Jindřich (referee)
Spoken language translation, the process of translating speech in one language into another language automatically, is in increasing demand as a means of overcoming the language barrier. In this thesis, we focus on translation of spoken English into Czech, employed as an aid for international tourists. We built a fully functional speech translation system using freely available components and used it for collecting samples of user input. We then focused on replacing the core components of the system, namely speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT), with our own, domain-adapted models. We evaluated our improvements on the collected data. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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Czech "copak" and its English translation equivalents in parallel texts
Petrová, Zuzana ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
This diploma thesis examines the Czech expression copak and its translation counterparts. It focuses on the individual functions and meanings of copak and the ways these are expressed in the English translation. The aim of the present paper is to determine to what extent the discourse meanings of copak as a particle are maintained in the translations and what means English uses to do so. Regarding the pronominal function of copak, the main issue is to examine whether the postfix -pak is reflected in the English translations or not and what equivalents are used in comparison to the forms without the postfix. Another objective is to analyse the English counterparts according to their formal representation and define their discourse functions in respect to the discourse meanings of the Czech originals containing copak. The research carried out in the present thesis was based on material drawn from the parallel corpus InterCorp. A total of 240 examples with the expression copak was excerpted with the English translations aligned to them. The analysis was divided into five parts, according to the particular word class of copak. Particles proved to be the most productive word class, as they provided 187 examples and 25 different translation counterparts, negative question being the most frequent one. The...
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Formal Expression of Definiteness in Albanian: A Description Based on Comparison with English
Backus Borshi, Orkida ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee) ; Elšík, Viktor (referee)
This thesis describes the means of expressing the category of definiteness in Albanian. Inasmuch as this category has not been comprehensively analyzed in this language so far, the starting point of the thesis is the description of this category in English which, by contrast, has been subject to a detailed analysis by many authors from different aspects both theoretical and practical. Keywords: Albanian, English, definite article, definite form, reference, contrastive description
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Finding America: Issues of Acculturation and Assimilation in the Works of Anzia Yezierska
Jegerová, Dagmar ; Ulmanová, Hana (advisor) ; Veselá, Pavla (referee)
This BA thesis deals with the acculturation and assimilation of East European Jewish immigrant women in the pre-WWI United States, as represented in the selected works of Anzia Yezierska ("Wings," "Hunger," "The Free Vacation House," "The Fat of the Land," "How I Found America," and Bread Givers). The source of the conflict in the texts is the discrepancy between the immigrant ideals of America as the land of their dreams, and the Americanizers' demand for Anglo-conformity. Operating with definitions of assimilation by Robert Park and Arnold Rose, and Milton Gordon's concept of intrinsic and extrinsic cultural traits, this interdisciplinary analysis approaches the conflict on two levels. Firstly, as the clash of the Jewish and American traits, identified in the representatives of each culture. Secondly, as the confrontation of the first and second generation immigrants, whose differing visions of America influenced their attitude towards acculturation and assimilation, determining its efficiency. The thesis debates whether formalized Americanization, as represented in the primary texts, enables complete assimilation on both the intrinsic and extrinsic levels. Since the texts frequently place the Jewish and American traits in polar opposition, the thesis explores whether assimilation, as the...
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