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English back-formation in the 20th and the early 21st century
Stašková, Naděžda ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Kavka, Tomáš (referee) ; Pípalová, Renata (referee)
(Naděžda Stašková) The subject of the present study is a description and analysis of English back- formation in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. The work mainly focuses on the last part of the given period and aims at highlighting the most typical features of this morphological process today, resulting from its development over the whole century. Based on the analysis of the contemporary situation and on the results of the research of neologisms involved in the process of back-formation, prevailing tendencies for the nearest future have been drawn and possible subjects for further research have been suggested. Investigation of an overall sample of 768 back-formed units has resulted in the following conclusions: Productivity of back-formation remains on the same level as it was in the first half of the 20th century. The most productive process is formation of verbs from action nouns, which has grown significantly. Back-formation of verbs from agent nouns has decreased, formation of verbs from adjectives almost disappeared. Adjectives can be seen as a minor source of back- formed nouns, probably decreasing in productivity. There is a growth in involvement of compounds in this process. The most frequent subtracted suffixes are -ing, -ion/-ation and -er, all of them being involved in the...
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Structures of directive speech acts and strategies of politeness associated with them in the late medieval and early modern private epistolary English prose: a synchronic and diachronic perspective
Palivada, Katsiaryna ; Čermák, Jan (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
In this paper I have carried out a synchronic and diachronic analysis of the structural variations of directive speech acts in relation to politeness strategies involved in them. In my research I have employed both function-to-form and form-to-function methods of linguistic mapping, or, in other words, I combined a careful manual selection of samples from a limited study material (the collection of the Paston and Stonor family letters) and an automatic corpus-based research carried out on the material presented by the PCEEC. The work with the Paston and Stonor family letters was mainly devoted to the synchronic qualitative analysis of directives, whereas the corpus-based research was concerned with the quantitative presentation of the development of certain directive strategies throughout the 15th-17th centuries. In both synchronic and diachronic analysis I have tried to correlate different structural classes of directives with politeness strategies mentioned in the theory of politeness as postulated by Brown and Levinson (1987). When making judgements on the level of politeness of particular directive structures I also paid attention to the contextual and situational appropriateness of certain forms of directives in each particular case (Watts 2003), their conformity with the temporal variations in the...
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Lexical gaps in Czech as compared with English: their identification and characterization
Kolman, Martin ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
Lexical Gaps Abstract in English The general assumption among most language users is that every single concept in our world can be labeled by a proper lexical item, i.e. there is a name for all of the physical or abstract entities we live with and situations we experience. It has been suggested by several studies, and we will concentrate on these, that there are usually several conceptual structures in the studied languages which are in fact not lexicalized. This linguistic phenomenon is called a lexical gap, and there is more than one type of lexical gap observable in languages. Recent studies of the occurrence of a lexical gap show various approaches to the subject with various results. The study of lexical gaps can be approached from the point of view of lexical fields, as suggested by Alan Cruse and Adrienne Lehrer among others. In this approach different fields: taxonomies, hierarchies, clusters, grids, linear structures and matrixes help to organize the lexicon into conceptual structures where the missing structural part is then best observable and studied with relation to the other units in the field. Other approaches, Bentivogli and Pianta for example, favour contrastive lexicological studies where a lexical gap is identified as a missing translational equivalent in a target language to a lexical...
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Unintended impoliteness of Czech speakers in English. A Czech-English contrastive study
Vokurková, Iva ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
In the world of today, cross-cultural interaction takes place every day at many levels of our lives, be it a study stay abroad, work, migration or simply a holiday. The world is getting more and more interconnected, the term "global village" is today more true than ever and with globalisation and European Union integration people from various parts of the world and with various cultural backgrounds are brought together and interact in one way or another. However, communication, although having a number of universally applicable features, is culturally (as well as socially, etc.) determined and therefore it is of great importance to the interactants from culturally different backgrounds to keep this fact in mind and be constantly aware that in different cultures people can be accustomed to achieving the same ends by using different linguistic (and other) means. The field that studies the differences as well as similarities between linguistic means and communicative patterns of different languages is called cross-cultural pragmatics. Its outputs and conclusions help to detect the pragmatic sources of miscommunications as well as bring a new perspective on the languages and cultures in question. This knowledge proves useful not only in foreign language classrooms but in all sorts of situations to all kinds of...
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English verbal (pseudo-) compounds from a diachronic viewpoint
Vráblová, Zuzana ; Čermák, Jan (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
We attempted to analyze not only the diachronic development of pseudo-compound verbs (or rather tendencies in the historical development because we excluded the Early Modern English period from our research), but also the synchronic problems in the Old and Middle English periods. But a fully consistent and balanced analysis proved impossible due to a variety of objective reasons. First, even though a fairly large number of Old English texts (i.e. 3037) survived into Modern English, we have no evidence as to how much texts were actually compiled in that period. The number of Middle English texts in CME is extremely low (i.e. 146). (What might seem puzzling is that Old English records surpass the Middle English ones. But it is due to the fact that CME has not been finished yet.) This unbalance of available texts makes any comparison between pseudo-compound verbs in Old and Middle English highly inaccurate. Second, Old English literature is to a very large extent homogeneous, consisting almost entirely of religious texts. Middle English writers compiled also other types of texts (e.g. secular prose and secular poetry). Nevertheless, it is impossible to draw a definite conclusion about the use of pseudo-compound verbs in various kinds of literature unless all Middle English texts are incorporated into CME....
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Secondary prepositions in English and Czech contemporary journalistic texts
Melíšková, Petra ; Klégr, Aleš (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (advisor)
Secondary prepositions constitute an interesting field of study, making it possible for the class of prepositions to expand. In the present thesis we shall try to address several questions which pose themselves in connection with this sub-class. The class appears to be heterogeneous with respect to the origin, semantic characteristics, and the degree to which the prepositions can be considered well-established or of a more ad hoc, occasional nature. This may also be influenced by the style of the text in which they are used. We shall focus on secondary prepositions in contemporary British newspapers, comparing their occurrence in the quality papers and in tabloids. We shall compare our findings with the situation in contemporary Czech newspapers, using Mladá fronta DNES and Blesk as sources of excerption. In the Czech language secondary prepositions seem to be a typical feature of technical style where the phenomenona examined has to be expressed absolutely precisely. Secondary prepositions have been penetrating from the scientific functional style into other styles, mainly to journalistic texts. Hence, the main goal of our dissertation will be collection of language material (secondary prepositions) from English newspaper and its further analysis observing the criteria stated in further sections of this...
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Epistemic and root possibility meanings of can and may in written English
Remešová, Petra ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Hornová, Magdalena (referee) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The study is concerned with the English modal auxiliaries CAN and MAY and their morphologically past tense forms COULD and MIGHT.1 It is essentially a small-scale corpus-based investigation into possibility meanings of these modal auxiliaries in contemporary written British English, taking account of stylistic variation. The investigation focuses on assigning appropriate readings to contextualized occurrences of modal auxiliaries and is thus primarily based on discussions of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. The study attempts to present a general account of possibility senses of CAN/COULD and MAY/MIGHT and reviews the issues relating to their use and distribution on the basis of a semantic and quantitative analysis. However, frequency of occurrence is meant to provide merely a supplementary view of the qualitative analysis, focusing on the role of context in interpreting modal meanings. Among the modal-specific questions that the treatise addresses are those concerning modal semantics, syntactic co-occurrence patterns, stylistic variation, and pragmatic inferencing. It is important to note that the study does not attempt to provide an exhaustive and systematic semantic description of CAN/COULD and MAY/MIGHT. Based on interpreting particular contextualized occurrences, it primarily investigates...
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The epistemic use of "I (don't) think" and its translational equivalents in Czech and Swedish
Vaculčiaková, Jana ; Hartlová, Dagmar (referee) ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor)
Our conversations invariably involve exchange of ideas, attitudes. Nevertheless, each one of us possesses an emotional and social sense referred to as 'face', which we expect everyone else to recognize. Whenever we share our point of view on something, we constantly put our face in danger of being exposed to a possible threat. Thus we seek ways, on the one hand, to express ourselves, but on the other hand, we at the same time strive to lessen the risk of a possible threat to our expectations as much as possible. The expression I think represents a very helpful tool in this process. Consequently, speakers make an extensive use of this particular expression for various reasons, either on purpose or unconsciously. The present paper digs deeper into the complex use of I think and attempts to analyze the diverse shades of meaning of I think cross-linguistically. Technically, the following thesis consists of two main sections: the theoretical and the research part. This paper picks up the threads of the previous studies of the epistemic I think on a cross-linguistic level. Before launching my study, I want to take stock of the key concepts and terminology that appeared in the two previous studies and that will likewise be used in the present one. Consequently, in the theoretical part I will address certain...
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Epistemic and root possibility meanings of can and may in written English
Huschová, Petra ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Hornová, Magdalena (referee) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The study is concerned with the English modal auxiliaries CAN and MAY and their morphologically past tense forms COULD and MIGHT.1 It is essentially a small-scale corpus-based investigation into possibility meanings of these modal auxiliaries in contemporary written British English, taking account of stylistic variation. The investigation focuses on assigning appropriate readings to contextualized occurrences of modal auxiliaries and is thus primarily based on discussions of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. The study attempts to present a general account of possibility senses of CAN/COULD and MAY/MIGHT and reviews the issues relating to their use and distribution on the basis of a semantic and quantitative analysis. However, frequency of occurrence is meant to provide merely a supplementary view of the qualitative analysis, focusing on the role of context in interpreting modal meanings. Among the modal-specific questions that the treatise addresses are those concerning modal semantics, syntactic co-occurrence patterns, stylistic variation, and pragmatic inferencing. It is important to note that the study does not attempt to provide an exhaustive and systematic semantic description of CAN/COULD and MAY/MIGHT. Based on interpreting particular contextualized occurrences, it primarily investigates...
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English translation equivalents of Czech prepositions "s" and "na" (in parallel electronic texts)
Pokorná, Petra ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The aim of this study is to analyze and describe the English translation equivalents of two Czech prepositions 'na' and 's' (including its vocalized form 'se') in texts of contemporary Czech fiction and their English translations. The study is divided into three major parts: a theoretical overview, an analysis and a conclusion. The theoretical survey consists of two parts, in which the syntactic and semantic characteristics of prepositions in general are dealt with and the status of prepositions in Czech and English is compared. The first, syntactic part provides an overview of the syntactic functions of the prepositional phrases. The semantic part describes the treatment of prepositional meanings in Czech and English grammars and focuses on the meanings attributed to 'na' and 's' in Czech grammars and monolingual and bilingual Czech-English dictionaries. The analytical part of the present paper will be preceded by a brief specification of the data on which the analysis was based. The analysis itself is divided into two parts, each of which comprises two subsections. The first analytical part compares the syntactic functions of the Czech prepositional phrases and their English counterparts, the first subsection providing an analysis of the preposition 'na', the other examining the preposition 's/se'. In the...
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