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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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A contrastive study of -ingly adverbials with special regard to disjuncts
Jarkovská, Martina ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Voráček, Jaroslav (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
The present study is concerned with -ing participle base adverbs as one realization form of this word class and their Czech equivalents. The focus of our study is on -ingly adverbials especially in their sentence modifying function. Sentence modification is present in both languages, English and Czech; however, based on morphological and syntactic differences between the two languages, the means of Czech and English sentence modification do not always correspond. Above all, this is caused by the fact that -ingly adverbials, a productive class of disjuncts evaluating the content of the clause from the speaker's point of view, structurally more or less do not have Czech corresponding counterparts. In English -ing participle base adverbials can be regarded as condensed forms of clausal realization (surprisingly ~ it is surprising). Although in Czech such adverbial forms are structurally possible, they are not in common usage (překvapující ~ *překvapujícně). This often results in applying different means of attitudinal evalution as counterparts of -ingly disjuncts. Therefore a primary interest of this work is a comparison of morphological, syntactic and stylistic differences in the sentence modification between English and Czech. Unlike in Czech where the word order is flexible, in English the position of a...
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Syntactic and FSP aspects of the existential construction in academic prose
Dubec, Pavel ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
Tato diplomová práce si klade za cíl zkoumat syntaktické a aktuálněčlenské aspekty existenciální konstrukce there is/are. Práce nejprve stručně nastiňuje vývoj teorie aktuálního členění větného a shrnuje dosavadní poznatky v této oblasti. Samotná analýza je založena na vzorku o 200 příkladů vybraných ze čtyř různých typů odborného textu. Příklady jsou rozděleny na dva základní typy: 'bare existential construction' (tzn. bez adverbiále) a 'existential construction with adverbial(s)'. Analýza prvního typu se zaměřuje především na strukturu a aktuálněčlenské funkce nocionálního podmětu. Zvláštní důraz je kladen na modifikaci nocionálního podmětu, jeho kontextovou zapojenost a aktuálněčlenské vzorce, které tento typ může realizovat. Analýza druhého typu zkoumá hlavně druhy adverbiálií, a to jak z hlediska jejich pozice ve větě, tak i z hlediska aktuálněčlenského. Cílem těchto analýz je zjistit jaké jsou primární a sekundární funkce existenciální konstrukce. Práce si také všímá aplikace teorie aktuálního členění na skutečný text. Její výsledky přinesou nové poznatky pro výklad existenciální konstrukce a bude jich možno využít v praxi pedagogické a překladatelské.
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Syntactic and FSP aspects of the existential construction in fiction
Drenková, Leona ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
The aim of this study is to examine the existential construction there is / there are from two viewpoints: syntactic and functional. Analytical tools devised in the framework of functional sentence perspective (FSP) are employed to explore information structure in two types of existential constructions, viz. bare existential constructions and existential constructions with adverbial(s). The study first comprehensively explains the core of the FSP theory and concepts employed in consequent FSP analyses. The analysis of bare existentials is concerned with two areas of examination. First, syntactic structure of the subject noun phrase is examined; attention is paid primarily to types of modification involved. Second, the FSP structure is identified; the main focus being placed on the structure of the notional subject. A special attention is paid to the FSP patterns the bare existential construction can implement. The problem of questions and focalizers is touched upon. The analysis of existentials with adverbial(s) focuses on the FSP role of adverbials in relation to their position in the sentence, semantics and contextual boundness. Finally the problem of potentiality is pointed out and the occurrence of other verbs than be is discussed. The outcome of the study is to identify communicative functions the...
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Multiple sentence as a style marker of academic prose: analysis of sentences composed of five and more finite clauses
Gregorová, Kateřina ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
The purpose of this study is to analyse the occurrence of multiple sentences in a technical text as a style marker. This work is supposed to be a continuation of a research previously done by Cerny (1998) and Pohickovci (2000), both of whom aimed at proving the appearance of complex and compound sentences as a style marker. We will focus on multiple sentences comprising at least five finite clauses (clauses containing at least five finite verb forms) in technical (academic) texts, and compare our findings with the results of the study by Polcickovci (2000). Polcickovci compared two types of texts - literary and technical. In our paper we will compare our results with those concerning the technical writings. In this paper we will be dealing with four samples of academic prose, and we will analyse the frequency, structure and characteristics of multiple sentences comprising at least five finite clauses found in each text. The reason for such a comparison is to prove that the frequency of multiple sentences comprising at least five clauses is supposed to be similar in all four texts, since they are all considered as technical texts. The work is divided into two parts. The first part contains theoretical preliminaries, the second the description of the research itself. The sample sentences (excerpts) with...
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English translation equivalents of "určitě" and "jistě": a contrastive study
Macháčková, Anežka ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee) ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor)
English adverbs as translation counterparts of the Czech adverbs určitě and jistě are of lower freguency. Jistě is translated as an adverb in 77.5% of all cases and určitě in 51% of all cases. It must be noted, with respect to this figure, that the percentage is gained only from the translated English counterparts, which decreases the number of the analyzed examples from 60 to 57 in the case of jistě and from 48 to 41 in the case of určitě. Consequently, 5% of all examples of jistě and 15% of určitě are not translated at all. However, there is a phenomenon to compensate for this left-out translation in the case of určitě by means completely different from what was the focus of this analysis. This compensation could be observed in 43% of not translated examples of určitě. The second most frequent means of translating určitě and jistě is the category Verb involved. This category, however, is strongly conditioned by the grammatical function of the English translation counterpart. Only the grammatical function of disjunct can be realized by the category Verb involved. This can be observed in 12% of all translated examples of jistě and in 37% of určitě. However, this does not mean that all disjuncts must be translated by the category Verb involved. The most frequent means of translation within the disjunct...
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Impersonal verbs in a diachronic and typological perspective
Popelíková, Jiřina ; Dušková, Libuše (referee) ; Čermák, Jan (advisor)
The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive typological description of Old and Middle English verbs attested to have been capable of participating in impersonal constructions and to outline their historical development up to the point of their disappearance in the course of Early Modern English. It categorizes the verbs both on the basis of their grammatical and semantic features and attempts to establish a link between the impersonal and personal usage of each individual case. In this process it utilizes the information gained through an extensive study of bibliographical materials in combination with examples from original literary sources made available through Old and Middle English dictionary entries. Following the results obtained through a comparative analysis of the verbs of both historical periods it attempts to map the gradual cession of the impersonal constructions, which it sees as concomitant of morpho-syntactic changes that took place during the Middle English period and which resulted in the language transforming from its original, highly inflectional form into an analytical grammatical system of the Present Day English.
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Constancy of the position of the adverbial of place between English and Czech
Pokorná, Hana ; Dušková, Libuše (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (advisor)
Out of one hundred examples of English space adjuncts 90 % had an adverbial counterpart in the corresponding Czech sentence; the remaining 10 % had no separate counterpart in the Czech sentence structure. They were expressed within the morphosemantic structure of the verb into which they were incorporated; this confirms the results of prof. Dušková's research, where this type of correspondence ranked first among the divergent counterparts (29 instances out of 100 divergent syntactic counterparts). The divergence points out the typological differences between the two languages: the English adverbial particle is often parallelled by a Czech directional verbal prefix. It was confirmed that English space adjuncts tend to favour clause-final position: 82 percent were found in this position; only 18 percent appeared in initial position. No examples of space adjuncts placed in medial, initial medial or initial end positions were found in the first fifty excerpts from both novels. 9.6 percent of the adjuncts which appeared in the end position were part of the so called 'existential-locative' construction. There was one instance of the expression There ... BE with a personal pronoun as subject and the verb in the simple past. One of the initial adjuncts was a wh-word appearing at the beginning of a wh-question.
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The positions of finite and non-finite subject clauses
Smolka, Vladislav ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee) ; Urbanová, Ludmila (referee)
Owing to its typological characteristics, English displays limited positional mobility of clause constituents, their position within the clause being an important signal of their syntactic function. At the same time, clause constituents may move out of their usual position if prompted by factors such as emphasis, structural complexity, information status, etc. What is true of clause constituents also applies to some extent to whole clauses. Unlike coordinate clauses in a compound sentence, subordinate clauses, particularly adverbial, may vary in their position, either preceding, following or even being inserted into their superordinate clause, with the resulting linear arrangement reflecting the relative weight of information which they convey, with the informationally heavier element placed finally. The position of nominal clauses and nominal relative clauses is determined largely by the usual position of the syntactic element they represent (i.e. the object clauses following the matrix clause predicate, etc.). Subject clauses, which represent the focus of this dissertation, are basically limited to two positions in relation to their matrix clauses: they either occupy the canonical initial position (i.e. before the matrix clause predicate) or are extraposed towards the end of the sentence, following the...
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