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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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A comparison of progressive forms in English and Albanian
Borshi, Orkida ; Malá, Markéta (referee) ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor)
On a very general level we can say that the results of the Project Research support the claims made by the authors of the surveyed literature in the Theoretical Overview, i.e., that the progressive forms in Albanian really exist. However, our research has qualified the observations on Albanian progressive constructions in the literature in one important respect: it has, perhaps surprisingly, shown that the po-constructions (in spite of their restriction to the present and imperfect) rather than the jam + duke forms are by far the more common of these two formal means of expressing progressiveness in Albanian. The prevalence of the po-constructions over the duke ones is surprising because the present/imperfect tense restrictions of the po-constructions are not the only ones. Other tenses are not allowed to combine with the po-constructions for diverse reasons (the preterite because of its terminative nature, the future tense because of the particles do te and the impossibility of po to combine with other particles before the verb). Another limitation that appeared in both parts ofthis study is the impossibility of the progressive po particle to accompany verbs denoting repetition or habit. If we were to speculate on the reasons for the prevalence of the po-constructions over the duke ones, we suppose that it...
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Non-projectivity in English and Czech
Čermáková, Kristýna ; Hajičová, Eva (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
This thesis analyzes non-projective constructions in English and Czech. It is based on the functional generative description of language and the analysis of material drawn from the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank, the Prague Dependency Treebank, and the British National Corpus. The theoretical part provides a brief characterization of phrase structure grammar and dependency grammar together with the definition of the fundamentals of the functional generative description, and the definition of non-projectivity. The analytical section presents a detailed comparative classification of non-projective structures in both languages. Individual types are studied from the perspective of differences between the surface structure and the underlying structure, demonstrating how the substitution of a non-projective clause for a projective one influences the topic-focus articulation and the meaning of the clause. The main objective is to define factors motivating non-projectivity in English and Czech, to compare them, and to determine whether it is marked or neutral type of discontinuity that prevails in each of the two languages.
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Syntactic constancy of the object between English and Czech in fiction and academic prose
Slunečková, Lenka ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee) ; Urbanová, Ludmila (referee)
The present study investigates the constancy of the syntactic function of the object between English and Czech. Syntactic constancy is understood as identical syntactic representation of lexical items in parallel texts taken from different languages. The analysis of instances of syntactic divergence is carried out in order to test the assumption that syntactic structure is hierarchically subordinate to the information structure, i.e. the universal validity of the principle of end focus. The two languages under study, English and Czech, provide typologically suitable subject matter in representing, respectively, an analytic and an inflectional language system which involve different hierarchies of the word order principles. 1 In contrast to previous research, the present treatment is based on a substantially larger corpus (1000 divergent instances) and includes two different stylistic varieties, fiction and academic prose. These two novel aspects are considered to be relevant not only for verifying or modifying the findings obtained from studies investigating other clause elements2 and/or based on fiction alone, but also, more importantly, for capturing and specifying other potential factors conducive to syntactic divergence both in different languages and in different styles.
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Syntactic constancy of the object between English and Czech in fiction and academic prose
Slunečková, Lenka ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee) ; Urbanová, Ludmila (referee)
The present study investigates the constancy of the syntactic function of the object between English and Czech. Syntactic constancy is understood as identical syntactic representation of lexical items in parallel texts taken from different languages. The analysis of instances of syntactic divergence is carried out in order to test the assumption that syntactic structure is hierarchically subordinate to the information structure, i.e. the universal validity of the principle of end focus. The two languages under study, English and Czech, provide typologically suitable subject matter in representing, respectively, an analytic and an inflectional language system which involve different hierarchies of the word order principles. 1 In contrast to previous research, the present treatment is based on a substantially larger corpus (1000 divergent instances) and includes two different stylistic varieties, fiction and academic prose. These two novel aspects are considered to be relevant not only for verifying or modifying the findings obtained from studies investigating other clause elements2 and/or based on fiction alone, but also, more importantly, for capturing and specifying other potential factors conducive to syntactic divergence both in different languages and in different styles.
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CLIL in theory and practice
Gablasová, Dana ; Malá, Markéta (referee) ; Mothejzíková, Jarmila (advisor)
With the natural globalisation processes underway, various forms of bilingual (or multilingual) education have enjoyed growing attention. In Europe, with the strengthening political and cultural integration, the innovations in language education are in focus of not only language professionals but also of political decision-makers. The practical need to enhance the 'plurilingualism' of the EU citizens, an intention formulated in the White Paper on Education and Training from 1995, can be seen as a clear impetus for the increased interest in the foreign language curriculum. The Paper proposed that, gradually, each European citizen should be able to use also two community languages other than his/her mother tongue (known as the "MT+2" plan) (White Paper on Education and Training, 1995). This aspiration also reflects the shift in understanding of knowledge of more than one language as a privilege of the elites (be it economical, intellectual or other elites) to be received at special schools or via special programmes. Instead, this education should extend to include ordinary citizens. However, it could be argued "that contemporary languages education has often failed to provide platforms for learning which suit a broad range of people, young and older" (Marsh, 2003: 3). As a result, the traditional approach to...
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Result/inference discourse connectives in academic texts
Tomešová, Klára ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
The present thesis compares the use of result/inference discourse connectives in two corpora compiled by the author. The student corpus consists of 43 literary essays by Czech university students of English and American studies and the reference corpus contains 34 journal articles written by native expert writers. The main objective of the thesis was to determine to what extent students resemble professional writers in their use of result/inference connectives with respect to the frequency, position and scope of the connectives. The thesis revealed a strong overall overuse of result/inference connectives by students as well as overuse and underuse of individual connectives. It was also found that both types of writers generally prefer initial to non-initial placement of result/inference connectives; however, students more frequently use the connectives with the immediate scope.
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However and therefore - their occurrence and use in official documents of the EU
Dóža, Boris ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
This thesis aims at discussing two connectives however and therefore. It focuses on their occurrence use in legal and official materials. The main reason why this topic was chosen is the frequent occurrence of these connectives in the language of law and political diplomacy and the fact that the use of these connectives does not always facilitate the reception of the texts and may be confusing at times. The materials used for the following analysis are taken from documents that the Council of the European Union has made available on its websites. These materials include treaties, agreements, legislation in force, preparatory acts, or case law. Treaties and agreement may include annexes and protocols, legislation in force may include acts of law as well as their amendments and addenda, and case law may include judgements, opinions, official speeches, statements, and so on. All these materials have to do with law, business, economy, and all represent a formal or very formal style. The aim of this thesis is to survey the occurrence and use of however and therefore in the particular register. In order to do so, the items under discussion are examined in respect of their formal characteristics and classifications, structure and syntactic description, position in the clause, punctuation, semantics; and functions....
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