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The genitive as a style marker
Nováková, Tereza ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
This thesis will focus on the supposed ongoing changes in the use of the s-genitive form. It will examine 200 genitive constructions found in on-line versions of quality newspapers, and describe them in terms of parameters that have been established as determining factors for the choice of genitive construction, for example possessor animacy, syntactic weight, final sibilant and semantic relationship holding between the constituents of the phrase, as well as those connected to the journalistic prose itself (e.g. language economy). Key words: Genitive, s-genitive, of-genitive, genitive variation, journalistic prose
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General extenders in English and in Czech
Novotný, Tomáš ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
Pervasive in spontaneous informal conversation, general extenders (GEs) are vague multiword expressions (e.g. or something (like that), and stuff (like that) vs. nebo něco (takovýho), a tak(ový věci)) that have been shown to fulfil a number of communicative functions, ranging from propositional to expressive. But while the English extenders have received a lot of meticulous attention in nearly four decades of research, the corresponding Czech constructions remain largely overlooked (perhaps with the exception of Tárnyiková 2009 and Novotný & Malá 2018). The current study aims to (1) present a wide range of English and Czech GE forms (collected using the method of collocational frames (Aijmer 2015) and then categorised according to structural similarities, thus suggesting possible GE patterns); and (2) examine their communicative functions in contemporary English and Czech as represented in comparable corpora of informal spoken discourse (Spoken BNC2014 and ORAL2013, respectively). Relying extensively on functional frameworks introduced in previous research (e.g. Overstreet 1999, 2014), this study confirms what has been known about English GEs and investigates the degree of applicability to the respective Czech constructions. A close qualitative analysis of some of the collected GE forms (in total,...
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Adjectival evaluative patterns in lifestyle magazines
Podsedníková, Andrea ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
The present thesis focuses on the classification, description and comparison of evaluative adjectives occurring in two lifestyle magazines, Cosmopolitan (for women) and Esquire (for men. The theoretical part presents general information on evaluation and evaluative language, local grammars, lifestyle magazines and differences between the use of language by women and men. The material for the analysis is drawn from online articles published by Cosmopolitan and Esquire which are part-of-speech tagged using the freeware Part-Of-Speech tagger TagAnt, the analysis is carried out using the corpus analysis software AntConc. The initial part of the analysis describes and compares the most frequently used evaluative adjectives in the two corpora. The final section uses the patterns presented in the theoretical part of the thesis as a starting point; the two corpora are searched to find their occurrences, potential variations and patterns that have not been described previously. Key words: Evaluation, lifestyle magazines, local grammars, evaluative patterns
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Textual Patterns and Idiolect: a Corpus-Assisted Study of Individual Textual Profiles of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump
Kvítková, Alena ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The present master thesis analyses the idiolects of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump against the background of the speeches of other candidates for the post of President of the United States in 2016. Using the 'corpus-assisted discourse analysis' (Partington et al., 2013), the thesis strives to uncover words, phrases and patterns that distinguish the speech of the two candidates in a political discourse from other presidential candidates. First, the thesis examines the keywords, collocations, negative keywords and clusters of the respective target corpora. While the main focal points of the study are lexical and grammatical indicators of style, proper nouns and lexical indicators of content ('aboutness keywords') are subjects to analysis as well. In the next step the results of the respective analyses are compared, i.e. the differences between the speeches of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are discussed.
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Meningococcal infection
Malá, Markéta ; Vejsová, Marcela (advisor) ; Konečná, Klára (referee)
7 2. ABSTRACT Title of Bachelor thesis: Meningococcal infections Student: Markéta Malá Supervisor: Mgr. Marcela Vejsová, Ph.D. Charles University, Faculty of Pharmacy in Hradec Králové Department of Biological and Medical Sciences Backround: The aim of this bachelor thesis was to summarize the findings about meningococcal infections and their originator - Neisseria meningitidis. Further this bachelor thesis should provide infomation about progression in meningococcal vaccines development, treatment and diagnostics. Main findings: N. meningitidis spreads into the human body from nasopharynx, through the epithelium it travels into the bloodstream. Severity of meningococcal infection depends on a strain of meningococcus and on strenght of immune system on the side of a host. Meningococcus has got efective tools for invading human body, they are called virulence factors. Quick recognition of clinical signs and rapid confirmation of infection originator are important when the infection breaks out. Nowadays we can prevent meningococcal infection by effective vaccination - combining meningococcal tetravalent conjugate vaccine and meningococcal serogroup B vaccine. Conclusions: Infections caused by N. meningitidis varies from ordinary nasopharyngitis to bacteremia and severe acute meningitis. N. meningitidis...
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Discourse connectives in texts written by non-native speakers of English
Kubánková, Eliška ; Rysová, Magdaléna (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
The thesis discusses the topic of discourse connectives as means of textual cohesion in formal texts written by non-native speakers of English. The material used for the analysis is a corpus of 161 application emails written by students whose language proficiency corresponds to the level B2 in the Common European Framework of Reference. The aim of the thesis was to determine the frequency and kinds of connectives used by B2 speakers, and to help specify the level B2 in terms of writing. The analyzed aspects were frequency, types of connectives (one- word/multi-word, primary/secondary), their morphological and syntactic classes, scope (inter- /intra-sentential), position in the sentence; further the types of discourse arguments and semantic types of relations expressed. It was found that most connectives were one-word, primary expressions realized by conjunctions and adverbials. The most frequently occurring connective was and, followed by because and the adverbs so and also. The most frequent semantic type of relation expressed was expansion, followed by contingency (cause), which can be attributed to the text type. Some secondary structures were also found, including different modifications of the clauses The reason is and That is why. The preferred position of connectives was initial, and their...
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Intensifiers of adjectives in present-day spoken British English
Švedová, Zuzana ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The objective of the present thesis is to provide an overview of the usage of adjectival intensifiers in present-day spoken British English. For this purpose the corpus Spoken BNC 2014 was selected as the most suitable studying material. In the theoretical part of the thesis the available information on intensifiers is summarised, both from grammar books and more recent studies. The variation in the usage of intensifiers with respect to different socio-linguistic variables is described and finally, some more detailed characteristics of a few specific intensifiers are mentioned. The practical section of the thesis follows a similar structure to that of the theoretical part. It first includes a list of the 105 most frequently used intensifiers of adjectives in the Spoken BNC 2014. Furthermore, two specific intensifiers, namely quite and pretty, were selected for closer analysis and comparison. The analysed features of the intensifiers are their syntactic environment, collocational patterns and socio-linguistic characteristics of the speakers. key words: intensification, intensifiers of adjectives, spoken British English, syntactic environment, semantic preferences, socio-linguistic characteristics
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Question tags "right" and "isn't it": a sociolinguistic study
Maratová, Magdalena ; Brůhová, Gabriela (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
This thesis examines question tags right and isn't it from pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives. English question tags have most frequently been analyzed from the sociolinguistic angle while at the same time completely avoiding the pragmatic aspects that represent a key factor in the sociolinguistic background. The theoretical part of the thesis introduces sociolinguistic aspects and approaches to question tags, as well as their formal aspects. This thesis is a corpus based study (British National Corpus chosen as the primary source of material) where 200 examples were extracted from the corpus and further studied (100 examples on the question tag right and 100 examples on the question tag isn't it). The study analyzes the question tags from the sociolinguistic perspective, focusing on the type of conversation (cross-gender or same-sex conversations) and relating the pragmatic functions of question tags to speakers' gender and speakers' age. Further, the analysis also inquires into what sentence types precede the two question tags. The paper also offers a revised classification of pragmatic functions of the two question tags. Key words: question tags, pragmatic functions of question tags, immediate and postponed response, speaker's gender
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Evaluation in English news discourse
Peldová, Petra ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee) ; Tomášková, Renata (referee)
The thesis deals with evaluation in English newspaper discourse. The corpora analysed were newly created for the purposes of the sub-analyses; they comprise articles from three British online newspapers - three tabloids (the Sun, the Express, the Mirror) and broadsheets (the Telegraph, the Independent, the Guardian). The classification of the thesis' core dimensions of evaluation - opinion and emotion - draws on Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2005). The thesis pursues answers to two fundamental questions 1) What means do British online newspapers use to express evaluation? 2) What differences (if any) are there in construing evaluation between the tabloids and the broadsheets? In order to obtain the answers, at first, a small manual analysis of six 'positive' and six 'negative' articles (one from each newspaper) is conducted. Attention is paid to the key word analysis and the word classes expressing evaluation, namely adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Based on the findings, I decided to explore evaluation conveyed by adjectives, in the second part of the study, by employing evaluative adjective lexico- grammatical patterns described by Hunston and Sinclair (2000) and further amended by Bednarek (2007b, 2009). These patterns, which are associated with the dimensions of opinion and emotion, are...
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Components of the third syntactical plan in Czech and in English: Czech expressions with the postfix "-pak" and their English translation counterparts
Šebestová, Denisa ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
The present diploma thesis examines the English translation equivalents of Czech expressions containing the postfix -pak. This postfix occurs in pronouns, pronominal adverbs, particles and interjections. It is employed as an element of the 'third syntactical plan' (Poldauf, 1963), i.e. the repertory of linguistic means which relate an utterance to the individual, expressing his concern with the content of an utterance, his stance towards its content or form. The thesis identifies and describes the English means equivalent to the postfix and uses them as markers of individual discourse functions fulfilled by the -pak expressions, thereby specifying the description of these Czech expressions. Attention is also given to the conversion of -pak expressions as well as their occurrence in idiomatic constructions. The major functions include expressing epistemic modality, voicing appeal, establishing/maintaining contact, and emotional expressivity.
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