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English existential and existential-locative constructions (there + be) and their Czech counterparts
Rubešová, Michaela ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (advisor)
The analysis of the syntactic structure of the notional subject NP confirmed the indefinite and zero articles to be the most frequent determiners. Being used to introduce the S on the scene, they occur mainly with the common nouns denoting concrete entities in the Exist and Exist-loc types. The newness of the S in Czech is implied by the word order, in which it typically occupies the end position indicating its rhematic function. The indefinite article is also the prevailing determiner of the singular count nouns in the Actional constructions, whose Czech counterparts may be subjectless verbal or nominal clauses. The Actional constructions containing notional subjects determined by a zero article are usually reflected in Czech sentences containing both the subject and predicate; the predicate reflects the subject action noun and the subject is added to the Czech structure to express the agent of the verbal action. There is a tendency for the adjectival premodifiers of the English notional subjects to become the adverbial premodifiers of the corresponding Czech predicates. Another determiner often appearing in the subject NP is the negative quantifier no. Interestingly, it has proved to be the most common means of forming negation in there constructions as opposed to the negative particle not. Again, Czech...
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The word-formation process of conversion in the language of internet PC games forums and reviews
Filipová, Anežka ; Klégr, Aleš (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (advisor)
The thesis treats grammatical conversion as a word formation process. Conversion is characteristic of the English language and on the basis of the frequency of its usage, in both the formal and the informal registers, it may be suggested that this process has no limitations. The colloquial language, however, is especially prone to make use of this word formation process. Moreover, due to its relatively recent occurrence in the word formation system, it may be proposed that conversion has the potential of even wider use in the future in creating new lexicon. The thesis attempts to show that this potential is already evident in the synchronous state of the language, not only in the high productivity of conversion, but also due to its versatility.
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Czech translation equivalents to English question tags of the opposite polarity
Chládková, Zuzana ; Malá, Markéta (referee) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor)
The aim of this thesis was to classify the question tags of the opposite polarity into pragmatic categories according to their function and to describe their Czech translation equivalents. As far as formal properties of the tag questions are concerned, the excerpted examples correspond to the situation in English described by Tottie and Hoffman in their article. 97% instances have a declarative anchor, 65% have a positive anchor and a negative tag, 35% a negative anchor and a positive tag. The most frequent tag is don't you?, the most frequent verb is do and the most frequent pronoun is you. The tag don't you occurs mostly in the confirmatory category - 13 times out of 19 occurrences (68%). The three most frequent pragmatic categories, confirmatory, attitudinal and facilitating, represent 92% of the excerpted question tags. No example belonging to the softening category was found and, on the other hand, there are three examples that did not fit into any of the categories. We have focused on the pragmatic categories and our goal was to find out how the pragmatic functions of question tags are reflected in their Czech translation equivalents. The hypothesis was that eliciting interjections would prevail in confirmatory and facilitating categories and affective interjections and adverbials would occur most...
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Pronouns "some and "any" in conditional clauses
Bartekova, Barbora ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (advisor)
The results of the research confirmed and further developed the theoretical foundation presented in Chapter 2 of this thesis. The primary focus of the research was based on an analysis of one hundred examples and thus its scope restrictions must be acknowledged. Nevertheless, the purpose of the thesis was to contribute to the limited resources on the interchangeablility of some* and any* in conditional constructions and the results seem to have managed that. The theoretical research showed that the assertive and non-assertive context is distinguished formally and defines contexts such as declarative and interrogative clauses respectively. However, it also indicates that the formal conditioning can be overruled semantically. It has been established that the speaker's assumption may change the polarity of certain contexts and thus influence the choice of either an assertive or non-assertive word. Our analysis showed that it is precisely the semantic implication, namely the positive assumption of the speaker that determines the occurrence of some* in a primarily non-assertive context.
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English counterparts of Czech aspectual pairs and groups of verbs
Filipová, Helena ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (advisor)
The notion of aspect is viewed differently in English and in Czech. In Czech, aspect is an obligatory lexical-grammatical category that refers to the wholeness and completion of the action expressed by the verb. Moreover, this category interferes with the category of tense and restrains some of its usages. On the other hand, in English the category of aspect is rather dubious, and there is not even general agreement on whether it exists in the language. The opinions range from the denial of its existence to ones in which the progressive and the perfect are considered aspectual categories. A notion inseparable from the aspect is the Aktionsart that expresses more subtle modifications of the action. The Aktionsart represents a broader concept of aspectuality. In Czech, there is an aspectual pair of two verbs that differ only in the opposition of imperfectivity and perfectivity. The pair can be a basis for a group of semantically related verbs that differ in the Aktionsart, i.e. in some modification of action. However, the verbs from the group still express the basic aspectual distinction and are parts of other aspect pairs. Due to the inflectional nature of the language, Czech verbs are modified mainly by affixation to express different states of the action. English being an analytic language, the English...
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The noun phrase in the spoken and written academic monologue
Slówik, Ondřej ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (advisor)
Noun phrase is the most versatile type of phrase in English both in terms of its syntactic function and its complexity. Syntactically, it can serve as the realization form of any clause element except for the finite clause predicate. It can only perform the predicative function in verbless clauses (e.g. The door!), which are generally rare and stylistically marked. As far as its internal structure is concerned, the noun phrase may comprise a single word (e.g. London, I) but its complexity may increase considerably due to extensive modification (e.g. the second stunningly beautiful lady from London who arrived yesterday) The aim of this B.A. thesis is the analysis of the noun phrase structure in written and spoken academic monologue. Its task will be to prove the assumption that although the number of noun phrases in written and spoken academic monologues do not differ significantly, their structure and complexity is different. Spoken and written English differ in many aspects. Written language is usually prepared in advance whereas spoken language is always partially impromptu even if it is planned ahead of time. Generally, some kinds of linguistic structures, including complex phrasal structures, are difficult to produce in real-time circumstances. A speaker would also place himself in a complicated...
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Lexical bundles in academic lectures
Leško, Marek ; Klégr, Aleš (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (advisor)
Lexical Bundles in Academic Lectures (BA thesis abstract by Marek Leško) The work attempts to briefly outline the current state of knowledge on the subject of lexical bundles and investigate their functions and use in two sets of academic lectures, British and American. For this purpose, it uses lecture transcripts from BASE (British Academic Spoken English) and MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) corpora. In the theoretical part, lexical bundles are defined as recurrent expressions of three and more words that are identified by statistical means (at least 20 occurrences per million words, for instance) only with no regard for structural completeness or perceptual salience. The work presents general characteristics of lexical bundles as typically non-idiomatic, structurally incomplete units and sorts them into several structural categories typical of conversation or academic prose. Three main functions of lexical bundles are identified: stance expressions, discourse organizers and references. Finally, the study discusses lexical bundles in terms of cohesion, i.e. how these recurrent expressions are used as surface links within the discourse to signal mostly intrasentential relations that fulfill the role of linking adverbials. In the practical (research) part, the thesis presents data...
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Constancy of the position of the adverbial of place between English and Czech
Pokorná, Hana ; Dušková, Libuše (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (advisor)
Out of one hundred examples of English space adjuncts 90 % had an adverbial counterpart in the corresponding Czech sentence; the remaining 10 % had no separate counterpart in the Czech sentence structure. They were expressed within the morphosemantic structure of the verb into which they were incorporated; this confirms the results of prof. Dušková's research, where this type of correspondence ranked first among the divergent counterparts (29 instances out of 100 divergent syntactic counterparts). The divergence points out the typological differences between the two languages: the English adverbial particle is often parallelled by a Czech directional verbal prefix. It was confirmed that English space adjuncts tend to favour clause-final position: 82 percent were found in this position; only 18 percent appeared in initial position. No examples of space adjuncts placed in medial, initial medial or initial end positions were found in the first fifty excerpts from both novels. 9.6 percent of the adjuncts which appeared in the end position were part of the so called 'existential-locative' construction. There was one instance of the expression There ... BE with a personal pronoun as subject and the verb in the simple past. One of the initial adjuncts was a wh-word appearing at the beginning of a wh-question.
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Czech translation equivalents of English question tags of the same polarity
Vaňková, Lenka ; Malá, Markéta (referee) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor)
The present study deals with English question tags of the same polarity and their Czech translation equivalents. It focuses on question tags from the point of view of their structure, formation, polarity and intonation and describes their various discourse functions. Since English question tags do not have an analogous construction in Czech, they provide an interesting construction for comparison. The discourse functions of the question tags differ according to the type of the main clause to which they are appended, i.e. declarative, imperative, interrogative or incomplete. These functions, together with the focus on the means of their translation into Czech, are analysed in detail in the empirical part of the study. As the question tags of the same polarity are not very frequent linguistic phenomenon, seventeen texts and their translations were needed to gather 102 instances by means of ParaConc, a parallel concordance software, and The British National Corpus.
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