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Existential construction there is/are and its Czech translation counterparts
Rumlová, Jana ; Brůhová, Gabriela (advisor) ; Novotná, Alena (referee)
The Diploma thesis analyses the existential construction there is/are and its Czech translation equivalents. The existential construction is used to present a new phenomenon and is thus one of the basic forms of the presentation scale. Even though it is a commonly used construction in English, there is no direct equivalent in Czech. It was, therefore, assumed that the most common means of translating the existential sentences to Czech would be the verb být, the Czech equivalent of the verb be (as in There is a long way ahead of us. = Je před námi dlouhá cesta.), mít, the Czech equivalent of the verb have (as in There is a long way ahead of us = Máme před sebou dlouhou cestu) or other lexical verbs explicitly expressing existence of the given phenomenon, such as existovat (=exist), objevit se (=appear) and others. The theoretical part summarizes literature and previous work on the problematics of the presentation scale, presentation sentences and the construction there is/are. It also provides information about the functional sentence perspective, which is essential to the discussed topic. The final part of the theoretical section briefly discusses the previous work on the Czech translation equivalents of the existential construction. The aim of the empirical part was to gather 200 English...
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Phonetic features of strong Czech accent in English
Rumlová, Jana ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Lewis, Suzanne (referee)
The main aim of this thesis is to analyse problematic phonetic features of Czech accent in English and to discover how they contribute to strong foreign accent. The theoretical part presents the concept of foreign accent and why it occurs. Individual segmental and supra-segmental features of language that are different in each language and can, therefore, cause problems while acquiring a foreign language are presented afterwards, along with the most influencing models of their acquisition. Social consequences of a non-native accent are also mentioned. The theoretical part also briefly compares the segmental and supra-segmental levels of Czech and English and then introduces research that has been performed so far on the topic of the Czech pronunciation of English. The empirical section presents the methodology of the research, the analysed features of the Czech English and the results of the study. The analysis of the ten speakers has shown which aspects are causing the biggest problems and which ones are individual. According to the results, the most problematic features are vowels /æ/, /ɒ/, /ə/ and consonants /ð/, /θ/ and /ŋ/ that tends to co-occur with the plosive /k/, and aspiration. On the prosodic level, linking, or glottalization, seems to cause the most significant problems, along with the...
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