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English present perfect in translation from Czech
Kuznetsova, Anna ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
This BA thesis deals with the tense which has no direct counterpart in the Czech language, i.e. the present perfect tense. There is only one past tense in Czech in contrast to the three in English: perfect, preterite, pluperfect (simple and progressive forms). Those tenses differ in the time zone they refer to. It is also important to mention that the temporal meaning of a verb can be influenced by context, e.g. presence of an adverbial. The thesis summarizes the theoretical background of the present perfect and the present perfect progressive. In the analytical part 137 authentic examples excerpted with the ParaConc software are sorted according to the meaning of the present perfect and consequently analysed according to their morphological structure, semantics and pragmatics (comparing the Czech sources and the English translations). The conditions which lead to the use of the perfect tense when translated from Czech are then deduced.
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Adversative discourse connectives "however" and "instead" in academic texts
Valdajeva, Božena ; Brůhová, Gabriela (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
The present study aims at discussing two connectives however and instead in academic texts. As the conjuncts are known to be rather free in their position, this study analyzes the interconnection of the possible position and other characteristics of the conjuncts i.e. the punctuation and co-occurrences. This thesis is a corpus based study. The corpus chosen for the analysis is the British National Corpus. The analysis itself is carried out on 100 examples, i.e. 50 examples of sentences containing however and 50 examples of sentences containing instead. The objective of this thesis is to examine the use of however and instead in the academic texts. In other words, it describes the usage of the two connectives as well as the possible tendencies that can be observed i.e. punctuation, co-occurrences. Individual sections of the analysis are based on the position of the conjuncts. Therefore a significant part of the analysis is dedicated to determining the position of the conjuncts based on the previously established position formulas. Further, punctuation and co-occurrences of conjuncts are analyzed as a follow-up to the position results. Key words: adversative conjuncts, however, instead, position, punctuation, co-occurrences
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Grammatical concord in existential there-clauses
Novotná, Alena ; Popelíková, Jiřina (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
This thesis is concerned with the issue of non-concord between the notional subject and the verb in existential there-constructions. The grammatical subject in these sentences is the existential there but it is the agreement with the notional subject that is generally considered grammatically correct. This study focuses on the cases in which there is a discrepancy between the plural form of the notional subject and the singular form of the verb to be. The phrase there + sg. to be and especially the contracted form there's has apparently evolved into a presentative formula due to the process of grammaticalization. The thesis approaches this issue from the perspective of today's language as well as diachronically. Specifically, this study aims to identify the contexts in which this type of non-concord was possible in Early Modern English. To this aim 100 instances of existential there-constructions displaying a lack of agreement have been selected from three corpora of Early Modern English (CED, EEBO and PCEEC), which will then be examined in the analytical part of this thesis. The analysis itself is firstly concerned with the verb, its tense and whether or not it is contracted. It also considers the structure of the notional subject, most notably modification, the presence of quantifiers and...
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Colour Adjectives in British and American English
Tomoriová, Emma ; Vašků, Kateřina (advisor) ; Luef, Eva Maria (referee)
The present thesis studies the gradability, i.e. essentially the ability of colour adjectives to take inflection and classify them in sense of syntax and semantics. This contrastive study aims to determine whether it is possible to describe the differences between British and American English in the possibility of gradation of these adjectives, the type of inflection of the particular six colour adjectives and analyze the frequency of inflected adjectives in comparison with semantic and syntactic features. The analysis is based on data from the British National Corpus and Corpus of Contemporary American English. The colour adjectives are examined in comparative synthetic and analytic constructions, as well as with premodifiers very and really. Next, the inflected adjectives are analyzed quantitatively concerning British and American varieties and subsequently from the syntactic as well as semantic points of view such as the meaning of the inflected colour adjectives, or the position of such adjectives in relation to a noun phrase. The thesis consists of two parts: the theoretical part which introduces form, function, position, syntax and semantics of adjectives, and the empirical part consisting of the quantitative part that selects six colours and analyzes their use in a comparative and the...
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Lexical devices of British and American English in the language of Czech EFL learners
Kubánek, Vojtěch ; Vašků, Kateřina (advisor) ; Lewis, Suzanne (referee)
The thesis aims to provide new information on lexical dialectal variation amongst EFL students. The theoretical part focuses on the description of lexical dialectal variation alongside with the scrutiny of British and American English and their "language power" throughout the last century. The globalised world favours the use of American English whilst academic institutions still support the use of British English. The practical part consists of three questionnaires whose answers will shed light on the non-natives' use of English and their dialectal preference of English - the basis of the "Euro-English" dialect - through lexeme choice. The questionnaires also consist of sociological part which will be used to find the motives behind both the general level of lexical dialectal preference (the total number of lexemes of each dialect) and the specific level (the number of lexemes of each dialect in each individual sentence). The results have shown that there are three notions that have impact on students' lexical dialectal choices. Subjects who get most of their English input from school tend to prefer BrE lexical dialectal variants whilst subjects who rank internet and social media as the most impactful resource for their English tend to use more AmE lexical dialectal variants. The third notion that...
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The influence of English and Czech on the overuse of the Slovak preposition 'pre' in official discussion
Kobzová, Dorothea ; Šebestová, Denisa (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
This bachelor thesis is aimed at the study of the influence of English and Czech on the overuse of the preposition pre in Slovak language. The theoretical part characterizes prepositions as a whole and their relationship with language contact. It further describes the Slovak prepositions pre and na and their direct dictionary equivalents in Czech and in English, comparing the semantic characteristics of prepositions across these languages. The analytical part is based on a corpus study which consists of 150 samples of the use of pre, including translations from English and Czech as well as uses in original transcripts. The samples are taken from the Europarl subcorpus, which is a part of the InterCorp v13. The analytical part deals with the categorization of the uses and their frequencies compared to the frequency of the non-standard use of pre, observing the influence of the direct language contact during interpretation on the overuse of the preposition pre. This bachelor thesis is trying to contribute to the study of the overuse of the preposition pre as well as the question of this preposition within the Slovak language as well as in the context of language contact. Keywords: prepositions, overuse, corpus study, language contact
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Progressive forms of the verb have in present-day spoken British English
Pokorná, Eliška ; Vašků, Kateřina (advisor) ; Šebestová, Denisa (referee)
This bachelor's thesis focuses on the progressive forms of the verb have and their function in present-day spoken British English. The theoretical part deals with the grammatical description of the verb have and of the progressive aspect including their functions and frequency of use. The practical part takes form of a corpus study exploring mainly semantic aspects of the particular instances of use in connection with the grammatical ones. The spoken component of the British National Corpus 2014 version was used to retrieve 100 results, which were analysed with regard to the theoretical part of the thesis. The focus of the analysis is on the dynamic and stative use of the verb have, its semantic function, tense form, time reference, negation, intentional modality, and the links between these aspects. Key words: the verb have, progressive aspect, corpus study, dynamic and stative use, semantic function, tense form, time reference, negation, intentional modality
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English causative construction make someone do something and its Czech counterparts
Švedová, Zuzana ; Vašků, Kateřina (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
The present paper is concerned with the English analytical causative construction make someone do something, its semantic subtypes and its Czech translation counterparts. In the theoretical part we outline the general aspects of causation, the English means of expressing it, the participants of a causative event and different types of causation, before moving on to the description of analytical causative constructions in English and, more specifically, the constructions with the causative auxiliary make. The practical part is based on the analysis of 200 random concordances from the parallel corpus InterCorp, English originals and its Czech translation counterpart. The translation equivalents are furthermore divided into six categories and each of them is analysed separately. The analysis is meant to corroborate or disprove the hypothesis that there exists a correlation between the specific semantic subtype of the English causative construction and the means used to translate it into Czech. This was not supported by the research material as no clear correlation could be determined and the analysis uncovered merely some general tendencies of some of the categories. Keywords: causation, analytical causative constructions, translation counterparts
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The use of phrasal verbs in spoken academic English
Dobeš, Štěpán ; Vašků, Kateřina (advisor) ; Šebestová, Denisa (referee)
The thesis aims to provide new information about phrasal verbs and their use across various registers. The theoretical background part of the thesis describes the structure of the phrasal verb and its different types. The chapter also includes information about the adverbial particle, a vital component in phrasal verbs. In order to be able to see differences in the use of the phrasal verbs, mode and register are chosen as key markers. Material and method chapter describes the query to extract phrasal verbs from a corpus as well as it provides an overview of how the data was processed and structured. The sources this thesis draws from are Spoken British National Corpus 2014 (Spoken BNC2014), British Academic Spoken English corpus (BASE), and most importantly British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE).The analytic part begins with a quantitative research of how frequently the phrasal verbs occur in various registers. Afterwards, the thesis compares the twenty most common phrasal verbs of each corpus based on their relative frequencies and semantic domains. Lastly, several phrasal verbs are chosen for a more detailed semantic analysis.
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Measuring lexical complexity in L2 speech with word frequency lists
Rálišová, Diana ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
and Key Words The linguistic concept of complexity as a component of the CAF triad is used to describe the complexity of texts, either spoken (transcribed) or written, and to describe speaker advancedness not only in L1, but also in L2 research. On the most basic level, lexical complexity and syntactic complexity can be distinguished, however, complexity is a multidimensional concept and many different descriptions and operationalisations exist; there is an even wider gap in terms of measuring lexical complexity of L2 oral speech with lexical frequency wordlists as studies on lexical sophistication have yielded inconsistent and sometimes inconclusive results; the majority of studies on lexical sophistication, one of the subdivisions of lexical complexity, have been carried out on written learner production. For this reason, this thesis focuses on measuring lexical complexity in L2 speech with word frequency lists; more specifically, it presumes that C1 speakers would produce more of complex vocabulary (low-frequency vocabulary) than B2 speakers in our sample; this thesis also attempts to correlate word frequency list results with English Vocabulary Profile results and compare the individual speakers. For this analysis 10 B2 and 10 C1 Czech speakers of English were selected from the LINDSEI spoken...
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