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Chivalry in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales"
Malá Štěpánková, Jana ; Znojemská, Helena (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
1 Thesis abstract The thesis is concerned with the reflection of chivalry and chivalric culture in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and with the relation of his testimony to the social reality of the late Middle Ages. Chapter 1 introduces the chosen topic in relation to the specific character of the Tales, of the context of the period, and of Chaucer's life. It specifies the aim of the thesis, deals with its limitations, and outlines the criteria and the structure of the analysis. Chapter 2 presents the origin and the development of the knight along with the formation of the code of chivalric virtues and the literary constituent of the phenomenon of chivalry until the end of the fourteenth century and identifies two fundamental chivalric archetypes in the characters of the Knight and the Squire from "The Prologue". Chapter 3 pursues manifestations of chivalry throughout the Tales across genres except romances and analyses their reflection with respect to the narrators of the tales. The analysis first focuses on the chivalrousness of the knightly characters (The Franklin's Tale, The Physician's Tale, The Manciple's Tale, The Monk's Tale, The Clerk's Tale, The Man of Law's Tale, The Merchant's Tale) and then on the signs of the influence of chivalric virtues and culture on the non-knightly characters (The Miller's...
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The Motives of Separation and Solitude in Old English Lyrical Poetry
Klasnová, Lenka ; Znojemská, Helena (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
This thesis is concerned with four Old English lyrical poems of the so-called elegiac group, i.e. The Wife's Lament, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wanderer and The Seafarer and their shared themes of separation and solitude. After a brief account of the few facts known about the poems, the appropriateness of the elegiac genre imposed upon them by scholarly tradition is addressed in the introduction. The first chapter gives a brief overview of the history of critical opinion on each of the poems. Since their simple unambiguous translation is impossible, given the cryptic nature of the narratives and numerous grammatically, syntactically, semantically or otherwise problematic points, the chapter also attempts the notoriously difficult task of their interpretation. While some solutions to the problematic aspects may be preferred in the course of the interpretation, a variety of potential possibilities is discussed in most cases. The resulting interpretations strive to present each poem as a unified and logical narrative. The second chapter addresses the themes of loneliness, alienation, isolation and separation in each of the four poems, their given reasons, manifestations, progress and the common elegiac imagery used to express them. The mood evoked by specific word meanings and employed rhetorical devices...
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The Tikkanen - Kihlman debate. Prelude. Works - reception - polemics
Dlask, Jan ; Parente Čapková, Viola (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee) ; Gáborová, Margita (referee)
Henrik Tikkanen (1924 - 1984) and Christer Kih1man (bom 1930) are so called Fin1and-Swedish writers: they belong to the Swedish minority in Fin1and and they both write in Swedish. In genera1 they are viewed as authors who describe - and often go into rather intimate detail s - the "Fin1and-Swedish decadent upper c1ass". In the autumn 1975 Tikkanen pub1ished his autobiographica1 text Brandovagen 8 Brando Tel. 35 and Kih1man brought out his novel called Dyre prins. Both of the books are reviewed in the main Fin1and-Swedish newspapers and subsequently they provoke some discussions, whi1st the 1argest po1emics is risen in the beginning of 1976 by the te1evision appearence ofboth writers. This thesis called "The Tikkanen - Kihlman Debate. Prelude. Works - Reception - Polemics" seeks to exp1ain the events of the autumn 1975 and of the fi.rst ha1f of the year 1976, conceming the reception of the both works and the interconnected 1iterary debates. On the methodo10gica11eve1 the thesis hand1es the materia1 thematically by the standard method "adfontes" (supporting too11 - question WHAT), whi1e the interpretation in the first p1ace as a generation revolt is perfonned by means of the theory of literary field, based on so called Pierre Bourdieu's French Socio10gica1 Schoo1 (supporting too12 - question WHY). A starting...
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Attitudes to language in the prescriptive grammars in the Age of Reason
Grosser, David ; Tichý, Ondřej (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
This thesis concerns itself with the formation of the attitudes to language in the course of the standardization of the English language in the eighteenth century. It is the aim of this thesis to show that the rise of the prescriptive grammars was caused by certain ideological presumptions about the nature of language and by certain social processes and that the understanding of the ideological and historical background is crucial for the interpretation of these grammars. The first chapter discusses the proposals for the English academy. It is shown that these proposals presented and propagated the ideas that formed the basis of the prescriptive attitude to language and that they, therefore, represent the essential prelude for the flowering of the prescriptive ideology in the later decades of the eighteenth century. The second chapter deals with the consequences of the effort of the strong rising middle classes for the social selfidentification. It is shown that language played an important role in this process and that the desire of reaching the standard of the upper classes caused an unprecedented demand after the language codification and influenced its shape. In the last chapter, the nature of the norm of the prescriptive grammars is examined and it is argued that it was based on the usage of the upper...
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The language of war in "Sir Gawain and the Green knight" and "Beowulf"
Hajniková, Kristína ; Čermák, Jan (advisor) ; Znojemská, Helena (referee)
It is said that in times of war, the muses are silent. Yet extraordinary poetic voices can be heard from the past if we listen close enough; they tell the tales of glorious victories, woeful defeats, terrible monsters and heroes of old. Two such tales are the poems Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Both poems are separated by an abyss of time, yet there is something in the tone and manner of the yarn that unites the two. It may be the character of the hero, his adventures, his enemies or his ultimate downfall; but the tales are told in a language that has great dignity, capacity for expression and a slow sonority seems to echo the roar of the ancient battlefields. The language of war, then, is the topic of the present work. The ways of characterizing a man as a warrior in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight will be subject to analysis that should reveal the cornerstones of poetic diction in both poems. In order to achieve this, we shall look at the lexical fields that denote 'warrior' in the poems. These lexical items will be subject to analysis from three points of view: (1) First, we shall investigate the structure of the lexical fields denoting 'warrior.' The items will be looked at from a morpho-semantic point of view. The description will contain morphological characterization of the...
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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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Local Bird Names and Their Standard Name Equivalents
Kos, Petr ; Čermák, Jan (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee) ; Peprník, Jaroslav (referee)
Resumé Práce si klade za cíl provést podrobnou, především synchronní, analýzu pojmenování ptáků v angličtině. Korpus pro analýzu tvoří současná pojmenování ptáků ze tří stylistických a funkčních rovin: standardní pojmenování, užívaná pro oficiální a odbornou komunikaci, lidová pojmenování mající pouze regionální valenci, a žargonová pojmenování užívaná těmi, pro něž se pozorování ptáků stalo zálibou. Zdrojem pro standardní pojmenování je oficiální seznam ptáků The British List kompletovaný Britskou ornitologickou unií. Pro lidová pojmenování je zdrojem publikace The Oxford Dictionary of British Bird Names od W. B. Lockwooda (1993), a pro žargonová pojmenování jsou to internetová fóra určená zájemcům o ornitologii. Korpus pro hlavní analýzu celkem tvoří 884 pojmenování ptáků, z toho je 205 standardních pojmenování, 595 lidových pojmenování a 84 žargonových pojmenování. Těžiště práce leží ve dvou hlavních kapitolách, Motivation a Analysis. V kapitole Motivation rozlišuji tři typy motivace - morfologickou, sémantickou a fonetickou. V rámci těchto motivací se zabývám procesy, které se na vzniku pojmenování ptáků podílejí. V morfologické motivaci se především jedná o kompozici a sufixaci a dále procesy, pro něž je charakteristické krácení slovního tvaru. Mezi procesy sémantické motivace řadím metaforu a...
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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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Contextualizing the Vikings in Anglo-Saxon History and Literature
Gigov, Jana ; Znojemská, Helena (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
"Contextualizing the Vikings in Anglo-Saxon History and Literature" examines the Scandinavian impact of Viking presence in Anglo-Saxon England during the so-called First and Second Viking Age, concentrating on the portrayals of the Viking activity in Anglo-Saxon chronicles and annals, as well as Scandinavian (chiefly Icelandic and Danish) sources. It aims to identify the patterns of representation in those portrayals and their development relative to the historical events of the period, the political situation in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the state and progress of the Church, and contemporary literary tendencies, including the influence of heroic literature and the development of the Anglo-Saxon kingship. Three distinct accounts that came into existence as a result of the Viking invasion of England in 866 are examined. Three main traditions can be discerned - the Scandinavian tradition, reflecting the battle of York, the slaying of king Ella and king Edmund, the East Anglian tradition, reflecting the slaying of king Edmund, and the Wessex tradition, reflecting king Alfred's struggle with the Danes. The thesis proposes to trace the historical origins and development of these traditions, attempting to discern their historical and fictional elements by comparing them with the record of the historical...
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The geographical aspects of pricing in the field of freight road transport
Čermák, Jan ; Marada, Miroslav (advisor) ; Kraft, Stanislav (referee)
The aim of this paper is to show what relation is between the distance and the transport price and which factors can contribute to the expected irregularity. Based on the real freight transport prices the paper is looking for and finding significant differences in the relative transport prices between chosen regions. It seems that the quality of the transport price is influenced by factors like the location of the target region within Europe and towards Czechia, within transportation routes and networks, its economic power and structure and possibly also by the mutual relations that the source and target regions have within the global supply chains. The quality of the transport connection between the regions is further compared with the connection that these regions have within the global city network. As was found out, these two kinds of connection do not have to necessarily be the same. A short questionnaire was taken among chosen transport experts to get the basis for a better interpretation of the paper's conclusions and also to get their opinion on the sense of the geographical research in the field of international transport and logistics. Keywords: international freight road transport, transport pricing, transport price, logistics, supply chains, geographical aspects of pricing
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