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Relationship between the strength of Czech accent and the duration of vowels before obstruents
Fejlová, Dita ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
This bachelor thesis aims to inspect the presence or absence of a feature called pre- fortis shortening in English spoken by Czechs. The term denotes the shortening of a vowel preceding a voiceless obstruent. This feature is known to appear in various languages like Russian, French, Italian; indeed, Matthew Chen even suggests it is language-universal. In English the feature is very prominent and because it affects speech perception, it is even considered a primary indicator of the voicing of the following obstruent. A study included in this thesis examines the extent to which 12 female speakers of Czech English, sorted into 3 categories according to their proficiency in pronunciation, mark the distinction between words like "bet" and "bed" by vowel shortening. The study does not exploit minimal pairs like these, but vowel-obstruent sequences taken from long read passages of BBC news. The the fortis/lenis character of the final obstruent contained in these sequences is a discerning parameter which always separates the data into two groups, the vowel durations of which are then compared. Statistical analysis of the data showed that contrary to the expectations, speakers with native-like pronunciation were not the ones who displayed the most massive usage of pre-fortis shortening. Possible reasons for...
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The "be/have" variation with Intransitive (mutative) verbs: the development of the construction in PDE
Křenková, Zuzana ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
So far the perfective construction of intransitive verbs, which apart from the dominant auxiliary verb have occurred in the past also the auxiliary be, has been analysed especially from the diachronic point of view focusing on the period between the 17th and 19th centuries, when the majority of verbs ceased to be used with the be marker. The present study deals with the occurrence of the be perfective construction in the contemporary English, i.e. the 20th century English. Drawing on grammars and previous studies, the theoretical part of the thesis provides an overview of the present approaches to the issue, presents the conclusions drawn from the analyses of the diachronic material as well as overview of important terms. The research project consists of two parts: drawing from the corpora search the first part assembled the evidence for a group of intransitive verbs and also attested under what conditions a labile verb might acquire the perfective reading. As the be perfective might be considered a fairly rare construction, not only the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English were used but also the web corpus of a considerably larger size. The collected database was used for further analysis related to genre categories, co-occurrence patterns and language variety.
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N-grams in the speech of Czech and native speakers of English
Zvěřinová, Simona ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
The diploma thesis is concerned with the analysis of recurrent word-combinations in the speech of advanced Czech speakers of English and native speakers of English. The data used for the analysis is extracted from two corpora, learner corpus LINDSEI and native speaker corpus LOCNEC. The aim of the thesis is to compare the two groups of speakers, determine differences in their use of recurrent word-combinations and compare the findings to previous studies involving speakers of different languages. The quantitative analysis is performed on a sample of 50 speakers from each corpus and the frequency data is used to compare the two groups as to the number of types of word-combinations they use and how frequently they do so. The qualitative analysis is performed on a sample of 15 speakers from each corpus to determine functional differences. Four categories of word-combinations are determined in the analysis. In the conclusion, the quantitative and qualitative findings are compared to previous research involving speakers of different languages. Keywords: spoken language, learner language, n-grams, n-gram analysis, recurrent word- combinations, lexical bundles, learner corpus
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English counterparts of Czech diminutive nouns
Salovaara, Marie ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
The present thesis studies English translation counterparts of Czech diminutives with a base noun form. Czech, in which diminutives are known to occur abundantly, serves as an auxiliary language in this work. The aim is to analyse English counterparts, classify them according to the non/presence of the diminutive marker as well as to outline the means of expressing diminutive meaning in English (affixes, adjectives). The thesis consists of two main parts: the theoretical background clarifies the specific features typical of diminutives and diminutive formation in both languages. The empirical part describes material and methods used in the research and analyses examples from fiction texts obtained from the parallel corpus InterCorp, which is available through the Czech National Corpus website. The corpus queries involved Czech first-grade suffixes -ek, -ík, -ka, -ko, and second-grade suffixes -eček, -íček, -ička/-ečka, -ečko/-íčko. In the case of English, the suffixes identified by Quirk et. al. (1985) were used: -ie, -ette, -ling, -let. The analysis consists of four studies, each examining English diminutive expressions from a different angle. The findings acquired in the study are subsequently summarized in the conclusion.
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Sociophonetic study of substitutional glottalization in native English speakers
Klánová, Aneta ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
The glottal stop, previously labelled as a heavily stigmatized feature of British English pronunciation, has become widely spread across all social classes and the majority of British dialects. Young females are believed to be instrumental in leading the spread and causing the social re-evaluation of the feature. The aim of the present study is to analyze the occurrence of T-glottaling in the speech of British English speakers in relation to sociolinguistic factors, primarily age, gender and speaking style. The theoretical part provides a description of the linguistic and social aspects of T-glottaling. Particular attention is paid to the role of social factors in the process of language change. In addition, a brief overview of previous research is presented. The material for the empirical part of this study consists of 32 recordings of British English speakers. The analysis of the results reveals that gender, age and speaking style play a significant role in the frequency of occurrence of the glottal stop. Young females are shown to be the leaders of the spread of T-glottaling, which leads to the assumption that the language change is still in progress.
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Phonological changes between Old and Middle English (an algorithmic approach)
Marek, Daniel ; Tichý, Ondřej (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
The purpose of this thesis was to create an automatic analyzer of phonetic changes in the historical development of English, namely between Old and Middle English. The analyzer gets an OE and ME form of a word at the input and produces a suggestion of an explanatory sequence of changes connecting these two forms as the output. As sound changes operate mainly on the spoken language, three main subtasks emerge: to create a grapheme-to-phoneme convertor for Old English, the same (although structurally more complicated) for Middle English and a core algorithm that searches for possible sequences that would explain the development of the word between its OE and ME spoken forms. There is a certain regularity in the diachronic phonetic changes, and therefore these can be translated into a set of rules. A general framework is proposed and implemented that works with these rules in a certain formalized fashion that allows their integration within standard algorithms. The form of the rules is largely adopted from regular expressions, with some alterations and additions, the most important being the possibility of using wildcards that are based on phonetic properties. A database of phoneme representations and phonetic properties is taken from Kirshenbaum's 1992 proposal for ASCII representation of IPA symbols. In the...
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Phrasal compounds in fiction and their translation into Czech
Mitlenerová, Silvie ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
This diploma thesis analyses issues of translation of phrasal compounds from English to Czech language (in fiction). All examples observed have been chosen from the database of fiction texts that is incorporated in the project InterCorp (v. 7). In particular, the thesis deals with phrasal compounds in premodifying position. The corpus analysis of Czech translation shows that phrasal compounds can be categorized in various groups, and there can also be various approaches to translation. These two sets of categories do not always necessarily overlap. The diploma thesis is based on the categorization of the translations; in each category, several examples are selected and commented upon in more detail. In Conclusion, the findings of these subchapters are summed up and the level of translation work is evaluated in general terms. In the final section, few thoughts about general recommendations for translators are formulated as well - can there be any general recommendation? Or is there a "best approach" for each individual case as it was noticeable throughout the paper? Key words: phrasal compounds, translation, corpus analysis, premodifiers
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Tagging a spoken learner corpus
Gillová, Lucie ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
The aim of the thesis is to propose a tagging system for a learner corpus of spoken English which would, apart from tagging errors, focus also on the features specific for spoken language. Theoretical part, therefore, introduces basic concepts including learner language, the development of learner corpora in the last 20 years and both classical and computer-aided error analysis. Features typical of spoken language are described in the theoretical part as well since these are the focus of the research part of the thesis. The Louvain tagging system used for error-tagging of a leaner corpus of written language is used as the basis for the tagging system proposed in this thesis. Based on the analysis of 20 transcriptions taken from the Czech part of spoken learner corpus LINDSEI, modifications of the categories taken from the Louvain error-tagging system are proposed and new categories necessary for a better description of spoken language are introduced. The tagging system proposed in this thesis should make further analysis of the tagged corpus easier.
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