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Existential quantifier "any" in determinative and pronominal function, and its translation equivalents in Czech
Pohořálková, Pavla ; Klégr, Aleš (referee) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor)
This thesis is concerned with the existential quantifier any in determinative and pronominal function, and its translation equivalents in Czech. Its pronominal compounds anybody, anyone and anything will also be included. In nonassertive contexts in the determinative function any is used for expressing the indefinite reference and is unstressed but it also has a weak quantifying function. Stressed any expresses not only quantity but also a certain quality. Nonassertive any also occurs in indirect questions, conditional sentences, restrictive clauses and in negative complex sentences including a nominal content clause. The appearance of any in assertive contexts will also be discussed. The aim of this thesis is to gather 130 examples of any and its compounds anybody, anyone and anything and their Czech translation equivalents. A contrastive linguistic analysis and description of them will be executed. The comparison with the Czech language will be interesting because in English any and its compounds have different functions and distribution than in Czech. The parallel texts that will be used as sources for the analysis are Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling, The Holy Thief by Ellis Peters, Life Before Man by Margaret Atwood, A Widow for One Year by John Irving, and Choke by Chuck...
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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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The development of sentence complexity in academic written English (1904-2005): a syntactic study
Malá, Marcela ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Ježková, Šárka (referee) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
This study focuses on concrete evidence of changes in the syntactic structure of sentences and sentence complexity over a period of about a century. It analyses academic texts from the fields of psychology and economics. The analysis is based on explicitly expressed primary (finite) and secondary (non-finite) predications which are categorised as main clauses and finite and non-finite subordinate clauses. According to the syntactic functions of subordinate clauses in sentences four syntactic categories are considered: 1) clauses substituting for a noun phrase slot, 2) clauses substituting for an adverbial element slot, 3) clauses contributing to the complexity of noun phrases in the form of premodification or postmodification and 4) comment clauses. The findings indicate that current academic prose is less complex and more impersonal than a hundred years ago and shows a tendency towards a non-finite mode of expression. Finite clauses substituting for clause elements normally expressed by noun phrases are the only syntactic function of finite clauses in which the percentage of clauses in the modern texts increased. Non-finite clauses are used not only instead of hypotactically but also paratactically linked clauses and contribute to the structural compactness of an English sentence. The study lists the most...
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Czenglish: a basic outline of an EFL variety
Králová, Kateřina ; Sparling, Don (referee) ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor)
Czenglish, an interlanguage developed by Czech learners of English, is a specific English variety which has not been comprehensively studied yet. Not surprisingly, English differs from Czech in varying degree at all levels, starting with the pronunciation of individual sounds and writing conventions, morphology and syntax up to the textual level, pragmatics etc. These differences are due to the different character of the two languages and the different conventions. Learners transfer their linguistic habits from their mother tongue into the language they learn and as a result a modified variety of language comes into being which is neither Czech nor completely English. This is not to say that every mistake made by a Czech speaker of English IS automatically Czenglish. It seems appropriate to apply this term only to an English that systematically and repeatedly exhibits not only features that can be attributed to the influence of Czech, but also errors that rather than being due to negative transfer are common to all learners of English regardless of other nationalities, which shows them to be developmental errors typical of an interlanguage found in language acquisition. Describing such a variety is a long process and it is impossible to cover all the facts in this thesis. However, it might provide a useful...
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Digitization of Old and Middle English dictionaries
Tichý, Ondřej ; Klégr, Aleš (referee) ; Čermák, Jan (advisor)
The aim of the paper is both to outline the methodology of digitizing Old and Middle English dictionaries as well as to describe its successful implementation. It is argued that the digitization of old dictionaries is generally desirable, because it increases accessibility of valuable resources, which may be the only way of presenting their data to a wider audience. The paper first briefly and comprehensively surveys the field of Old & Middle English lexicographical resources, comparing in greater detail the most promising candidates for digitization. Possible and desirable features of a digitized dictionary are then explored and on that basis An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary of J. Bosworth & T. N. Toller is chosen for the digitization project itself. All the phases of the digitization are then described: scanning, character recognition, hand-corrections, data preparation and application development. The current state of the Bosworth-Toller digitization project is explained and presented, while two major suggestions are made for its future development: the re-tagging of its data and the development of a morphological analyser of Old English.
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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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Theory and practice of Czech bilingual specialized dictionaries
Tihelková, Alice ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee) ; Peprník, Jaroslav (referee)
The thesis deals with the theory and practice of bilingual specialized lexicography, with special focus on the production of bilingual specialized dictionaries intended for Czech users. The main objective is to propose an original methodology for the compilation of Czech-English and EnglishCzech LSP dictionaries (with possible application to other foreign languages). The methodology aims at the introduction of the latest trends in pedagogical lexicography, as presented in the leading ESL dictionaries, into specialized lexicography. The thesis is complete with an original lexicographic project illustrating the individual points made. The initial part of the thesis discusses of the main aspects and principles of the discipline of specialized lexicography, clarifying the basic concepts and comparing the state of research in the Western countries with the situation in the Czech Republic. This critical overview is followed by an analysis of the character of Czech bilingual specialized dictionaries based on a sample of 25 recently published dictionaries of a wide variety of subject fields. The main features of these dictionaries are established and their overall quality assessed, resulting in the presentation of a typology of their major shortcomings. The analysis is accompanied by the results of a preliminary...
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Theory and practice of Czech bilingual specialized dictionaries
Brabcová, Alice ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee) ; Peprník, Jaroslav (referee)
The thesis deals with the theory and practice of bilingual specialized lexicography, with special focus on the production of bilingual specialized dictionaries intended for Czech users. The main objective is to propose an original methodology for the compilation of Czech-English and EnglishCzech LSP dictionaries (with possible application to other foreign languages). The methodology aims at the introduction of the latest trends in pedagogical lexicography, as presented in the leading ESL dictionaries, into specialized lexicography. The thesis is complete with an original lexicographic project illustrating the individual points made. The initial part of the thesis discusses of the main aspects and principles of the discipline of specialized lexicography, clarifying the basic concepts and comparing the state of research in the Western countries with the situation in the Czech Republic. This critical overview is followed by an analysis of the character of Czech bilingual specialized dictionaries based on a sample of 25 recently published dictionaries of a wide variety of subject fields. The main features of these dictionaries are established and their overall quality assessed, resulting in the presentation of a typology of their major shortcomings. The analysis is accompanied by the results of a preliminary...
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Clipping from the word-formation, word-class, stylistic/register, semantic and translational perspectives
Skala, Richard ; Čermák, Jan (referee) ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor)
The analysis confirms the general findings of the authors dealing with the process of clippings. The trends which the thesis confirms are: Back-clipping is the most frequent type of clipping, the other types are rare. Clippings are mostly created from nouns. Plain clippings are mostly mono- or disyllabic and they mostly respect the syllable divisions in the base. This means that plain clippings are mostly created from the first syllable of the base. Clippings are mostly colloquial/informal. What the thesis adds is the precise expression of the proportions of the individual features and also the identification of the different motivation behind the creation of embellished clippings. In other words, the analysis shows that embellished clippings differ from plain clippings not only on formal grounds, i.e. the presence of the suffix, but also in other features: embellished clippings have more often an adjectival base, they are more often stylistically marked, more often slang, more often regionally specific and less often specific for a subject field. This shows that embellished clippings are trendy, created to attract attention, part of the substandard language and that the ingroup status is even intensified in embellished clippings. Medial clipping, as a minor type of clipping is established alongside...
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Comparing English and Czech idioms from an onomasiological perspective
Koucká, Anna ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
The present master's thesis deals with the theme anger in English and Czech phrasemes. The theoretical part describes the basic relevant concepts and terminology of phraseology: the definition of phraseology and phraseological units, the theoretical structural (formal and functional) classification of phrasemes on the lexical, collocational and propositional level, the lexicographical presentation of phrasemes/ idioms in dictionaries (semasiological and onomasiological) and the semantic classification of phrasemes (including metaphors, metonymy, synecdoche and personification). The research and analysis consist of the description of data collection, which are excerpted from two English and one Czech phraseological dictionaries (Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms, Oxford Dictionary of Idioms and Slovník české frazeologie a idiomatiky I-IV), structural and semantic classification of the phrasemes of both languages from the point of view of their quantitative representation and the final comparison of the samples of the two languages that demonstrates which aspects of the given theme are phraseologically expressed in English and in Czech, how frequently and in what way.
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