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English book titles in gerundial form
Blaheta, Radek ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
The category of gerund is a symptomatic component of the grammatical system of present-day English. Numerous studies have dealt with its nature and functions as well as with its delimitation as opposed to related forms of present participle or verbal noun. No matter whether the term gerund is used or not and whether it is theoretically sustainable to differentiate between the related -ing forms, it is obvious that the -ing form that in many contexts clearly displays both nominal and verbal features plays a crucial role within both written and spoken discourse. Nonetheless, apart from the gerund operating within continuous texts, it is revealing to explore its behaviour and functions in the text-frame components, particularly the title, i.e. a text-frame component with a crucial role in the printed publication of a book type. In this context, it is necessary to present 3 basic starting points of the present study: 1. the notion of gerund as a grammatical category is retained in this study (see 2.1.3); 2. a new term - gerund title 1 - is introduced in order to capture the analyzed structures (see the detailed characterization in 2.3); 3. the analysis is largely based on the functional approach. Based on the assumptions presented above, the aim of the present study is an overall analysis of the gerund title,...
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Cleft-sentences in Academic Prose: Diachronic Development of their Frequency and Functions in Natural Sciences and Humanities
Beták, Kryštof ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
This diploma thesis maps the diachronic tendencies in the frequency and functions of it-cleft sentences in two sub-registers of academic prose, humanities and natural sciences, from 1800 to 2019. Biber and Gray (2016) showed changes in grammatical complexity in academic writing, namely the shift between phrasal and clausal grammatical complexity and explicitness, which motivated the hypothesis of this thesis, i.e. that the frequency of it-clefts is expected to decrease in the course of 20th century in both sub-registers with the development being faster and more salient in natural sciences. General description presents the syntactic and semantic properties of it-clefts together with discussion about FSP and the distinction between new and given information, as the objective of the thesis is also to study the development of the functional types of clefts. The empirical part analyses a corpus of 170 academic texts, covering the time period under study. It is divided into sections based on time periods displaying similar features concerning the frequency of it-clefts in natural sciences and humanities. The analysis confirms that the expected decrease in the frequency of it-clefts is clearly notable in the case of natural sciences, while in humanities the frequency of it-clefts in individual texts...
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English adverbial participial constructions and their Czech and French translation counterparts
Chmelařová, Jitka ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
Participial constructions are usually studied as means of complex condensation, the degree of which is directly related with the typology of the given language. The present thesis focuses rather on the functions of these constructions in English and their reflection in Czech and French translation counterparts. Previous research suggests that syntactic congruence will be rare. Translation counterparts should include instances of coordination and subordination, the latter of which is associated with explicitation of the implied semantic relations. Excerpts for the analysis are drawn from the parallel corpus InterCorp. The 100 excerpts of English adverbial participial constructions were excerpted only from original English texts, along with their Czech and French translation counterparts. The present BA thesis focuses only on -ing participial constructions. The excerpts are analysed in terms of the English construction (syntactic structure, degree of integration, position, presence of subordinators, semantic relation to the superordinate clause) and in terms of the type of translation correspondence in both languages (congruent/ divergent counterpart, its syntactic structure and function).
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English present perfect in translation from Czech
Kuznetsova, Anna ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
This BA thesis deals with the tense which has no direct counterpart in the Czech language, i.e. the present perfect tense. There is only one past tense in Czech in contrast to the three in English: perfect, preterite, pluperfect (simple and progressive forms). Those tenses differ in the time zone they refer to. It is also important to mention that the temporal meaning of a verb can be influenced by context, e.g. presence of an adverbial. The thesis summarizes the theoretical background of the present perfect and the present perfect progressive. In the analytical part 137 authentic examples excerpted with the ParaConc software are sorted according to the meaning of the present perfect and consequently analysed according to their morphological structure, semantics and pragmatics (comparing the Czech sources and the English translations). The conditions which lead to the use of the perfect tense when translated from Czech are then deduced.
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Cleft sentences in English and Norwegian
Mojžíšová, Kateřina ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
The subject of this thesis is the use of the cleft construction in English and Norwegian. These languages employ a formally similar construction to focus a sentence element, but the use of the construction is not always identical. The analysis is carried out on English and Norwegian translations of Czech texts. The main aim of this thesis is to identify and analyse possible types of motivation for the use of the cleft construction. The studied types of motivation are the FSP, textual and syntactic motivation. The analysis of the FSP motivation is based on the theory of the FSP as described by Jan Firbas (Firbas 1992). The list of textual functions is based on the work of Jan Firbas (Firbas 1995) and Hilde Hasselgrd (Hasselgrd 2004). Some types of the syntactic motivation are proposed by Libuše Dušková (Dušková 1999: 319), but the types described in this thesis result from the present analysis. In addition to the motivation for the use of the construction, the thesis deals with Norwegian and English counterparts of the analysed cleft sentences. These counterparts are divided into three groups: the cleft or pseudo-cleft construction, the underlying non-cleft construction and a different construction (cf. chapter 4.4.). The purpose of the analysis is to find where the use of the cleft construction differs in...
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Functional and translation correspondence of English demonstrative determiners in translation from English
Ledvinka, Miroslav ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to analyse Czech translation counterparts of English demonstrative determiners and determine the degree of correspondence in the use of demonstratives in both languages. The first half of the theoretical chapter defines the English demonstrative determiners on the morpho-syntactic level. Demonstrative determiners in English carry either situational or textual reference, which can be further divided into anaphora, cataphora and the non-phoric reference. Demonstratives also distinguish between singular forms (this/that) and plural forms (these/those), as well as between proximal (this/these) and distal forms (that/those). The choice of either a proximal or a distal form is not always influenced by solely spatial relationships. Less frequent instances of a co- occurrence of a demonstrative and a proper name (Vantage Theory), and of demonstratives with prominent cohesive features (Gradient focus theory), are also discussed. The second half of the theoretical introduction is focused on a morpho-syntactic classification of Czech demonstratives. The inflectional character of Czech, together with the absence of the category of definiteness results in different realisations of certain grammatical structures. The quantitatively larger set of Czech demonstratives is classified...
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Czech relative clauses in translation to English
Švecová, Martina ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
This thesis deals with relative clauses in Czech, particularly with those which have the relative word in the nominative case, and their translation counterparts in English. Czech does not have the possibility of juxtaposition of the relative word and the finite verb; it uses more explicit formulations. Therefore, the translator has to choose either a literal translation, ie more explicit, or a nonfinite clause, or eventually a prepositional phrase. Another possibility is to translate the relative clause by other means, e.g. a coordination. The first part is concerned with the theoretical definition of the Czech and English relative clauses with the help of the respective books of grammar. The second part comprises the analysis of 123 examples of Czech relative clauses and their English translation counterparts. The examples were chosen from three novels by Czech authors with the help of the software ParaConc which enables parallel work with multilingual corpora. The examples were sorted according to the above mentioned criteria, ie from more explicit to less explicit and other means of translation other than a relative clause.
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The "be/have" variation with Intransitive (mutative) verbs: the development of the construction in PDE
Křenková, Zuzana ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
So far the perfective construction of intransitive verbs, which apart from the dominant auxiliary verb have occurred in the past also the auxiliary be, has been analysed especially from the diachronic point of view focusing on the period between the 17th and 19th centuries, when the majority of verbs ceased to be used with the be marker. The present study deals with the occurrence of the be perfective construction in the contemporary English, i.e. the 20th century English. Drawing on grammars and previous studies, the theoretical part of the thesis provides an overview of the present approaches to the issue, presents the conclusions drawn from the analyses of the diachronic material as well as overview of important terms. The research project consists of two parts: drawing from the corpora search the first part assembled the evidence for a group of intransitive verbs and also attested under what conditions a labile verb might acquire the perfective reading. As the be perfective might be considered a fairly rare construction, not only the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English were used but also the web corpus of a considerably larger size. The collected database was used for further analysis related to genre categories, co-occurrence patterns and language variety.
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English counterparts of Czech finite subjectless clauses
Pospíšil, Jan ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
The thesis focuses on the English counterparts of a Czech clause type which does not exist in English - finite subjectless clauses. These Czech clauses with a verbal or verbo-nominal predicate correspond to English clauses with a subject and a predicate. The thesis describes the repertoire of means used as subjects of the English constructions, also examining the factors which influence the choice of a particular subject and predicate, and the structure of the English sentence. The most influential factors are linked with the semantic class of the clause, i.e. whether it refers to the states of the surrounding environment or physical and psychical states, whether a general human agent is implied, or whether the meaning of the clause is associated with modality. The material is extracted from the Czech-English parallel corpus InterCorp. One hundred examples of Czech finite subjectless clauses were obtained from Czech original texts (the "core" texts). The clauses extracted comprise predicates which include the third person singular of an active past participle, i.e. Setmělo se. Došlo k nedorozumění.
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