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Subject - Verb Concord and pronominal reference after collective nouns in British and American English
Outratová, Tereza ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Popelíková, Jiřina (referee)
This thesis is concerned with subject-verb agreement with collective nouns in British and American English. The thesis deals with verbal as well as with pronominal agreement. The first part of the thesis gives theoretical background of concord with collective nouns with respect to differences between the two major varieties of English. The second part of the thesis describes the sampling method by which 4 samples have been excerpted from British National Corpus (representing British English) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (representing American English). Sample 1.containing 25 instances of the collective noun FAMILY and sample 2. containing 25 instances of the collective noun STAFF have been excerpted from BNC. Following the same method, two samples have been excerpted from COCA - sample 3. containing 25 instances of the collective noun FAMILY and sample 4. containing 25 instances of the collective noun STAFF. The analytical part includes description and analysis of individual samples. The samples of British English have shown that the collective noun FAMILY is used in the singular or in the plural depending on whether individual members or the whole group is regarded. On the contrary, the collective noun STAFF occurred more frequently in plural constructions. In American English 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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American and British Dialectal Synonyms in Selected Lexical Fields
Kožíšek, David ; Matuchová, Klára (advisor) ; Ženíšek, Jakub (referee)
The bachelor thesis deals with lexical differences between contemporary American and British English. The thesis presents an outline of historical and sociolinguistic factors which affected the development of American English. It includes a thematic mini-dictionary of 224 commonly used British and American dialectal synonyms. With regard to the words' etymological origin, the thesis attempts to characterize the structure of selected lexical fields. The practical part presents an experiment which reflects on how Czech students of the English language incorporate individual dialectal synonyms into their active vocabulary.
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The choice of "have you got", "do you have" and "have you" in present-day English
JOSKOVÁ, Pavlína
This BA thesis concentrates on alternative possibilities of expressing a question with the lexical verb have in today´s English. The traditional form of have you employing simple S-V inversion has been considered to be disappearing to the point that it was largely ignored in simplified grammars and textbooks. However, this is in contrast with current authentic English texts, where questions of this type do occur. The aim of this thesis therefore is to find out which factors affect the final choice of a particular alternative. The theoretical part draws on relevant linguistic literature, the main source of examples used in the practical part is the British National Corpus. The factors considered include the semantics of the verb, the structure of the noun phrases complementing the verb, and also the semantics of the head noun. Both written and spoken texts were used as sources of the structures examined in this thesis.
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