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Lexical and word-formation differences between the New Testament translation by John Purvey (1388) and the translators of the Douay-Rheims Bible (1582) against the background of the historical development of the English language
Hauck, Nikol ; Čermák, Jan (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
The main objective of the present thesis is to characterize lexical and word-formation differences in the New Testament translation by John Purvey (also known as the second version of the Wycliffite Bible, 1388) and the translators of the Douay-Rheims Bible (1582), with the focus on the differences which are believed to be influenced by the objective changes in the language. For this reason, the very analysis is preceded by two chapters, the first one identifying the subjective strategies of the translators and the second one describing the objective changes that occurred in the language during the two hundred years that separate the two Bibles. The comparison of the Wycliffite and Douay-Rheims Bible, which is also a contribution to a word-formation and lexical-semantic development from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, is based on four books of the New Testament, namely the Gospel of Mark, Acts of the Apostles, the Second Epistle to the Corinthians and the Book of Revelation. The thesis also aims to assess the attitude of the translators towards their common source, the Latin Vulgate, but leaves aside the circumstances of religious controversy and its impact on the motivation and strategy of the translators. Another objective is to assess both translations as certain milestones in the...
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Prepositional phrases denoting time and space in British and American English
Klambotskaya, Darya ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
This bachelor thesis deals with the difference in the use of time and space prepositional phrases in British and American English. The theoretical background rests on the semantic classification of time and space prepositional phrases in Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al., 1985). The practical part of the thesis focuses on the analysis of three problematic areas: a) prepositions which differ only in form in the two varieties, b) the difference in the presence vs. absence of a preposition in the two varieties, e.g.: I'll do it on Monday. (BrE)/I'll do it Monday. (AmE), c) different prepositions used for expressing the same meaning in British and American English. The material was drawn from two large corpora, namely the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus. Key words: time and space prepositional phrases, British and American English, corpus-based and corpus-driven methods.
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A comparative study of the Czech lexeme "aby" and its English translations in parallel Czech-English texts
Vašková, Petra ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
The present study focuses on functions and English translation counterparts of the Czech lexeme aby. It is a relatively frequent word in the Czech language which is described as a subordinating conjunction expressing purpose, effect, manner, and also as a particle with a number of discourse functions. The current description, however, does not seem complete and this study therefore aims to analyse its use in more detail. Lexicographic and grammatical sources served as a basis for the classification of aby as a conjunction and as a particle. After an analysis of 200 examples it soon became evident that this listing is not complete and the use of aby is more complex than originally expected. The present paper thus treats all the functions of aby and also exemplifies each of them using extracted corpus data. In the study, aby in its conjunction and particle use is firstly treated separately to analyse each of them in more depth. This analysis, consequently, provides basis to point out their common features as well as their differences. The English translational counterparts are another point of interest in the study, in particular, their adequacy, regularity, and lexicalization.
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Characteristics of the context differentiating homonyms of the same word class (e.g. "bank"," palm") in written language
Šefčík, Dominik ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
Homonyms present considerable difficulties not only for the theoretician of language but also for any lexicographer who aims to adequately represent the state of lexical relations within a language. Mapping the principal causes of fuzziness in understanding homonymy, the present thesis first seeks to systematize the usage of the concept by discussing the two poles that characterize each homonymic pair: the notion of sameness on the one hand and the notion of difference on the other. The theoretical part of the thesis concludes with a brief disputation over the usual practice of subsuming homonymy under the heading of ambiguity. The research project uses ambiguity as a springboard for a detailed three-tier analysis of the homonyms bank and palm. Since the point of convergence of almost any treatment of homonymy is the disambiguating role attributed to context, the principal points that are analysed are all to do with context albeit on various levels of abstraction. The first tier looks at the structure of the noun phrases that contain the analysed homonyms. The second tier expands the understanding of context in order to embrace the whole clause with a view to discovering systemic variation in the type of clause element the examined homonyms tend to occur in. Finally, the third tier analyses the...
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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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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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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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