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The meaning and Czech equivalents of "should" in subordinate nominal content clauses after evaluative and directive expressions
Hráská, Michaela ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
This diploma thesis examines functions of the modal verb should in nominal content clauses introduced by the conjunction that. The Czech counterparts of the English sentences are considered as well. The research focuses on the so-called putative should which occurs after main clauses with directive, epistemic, attitudinal, evaluative and volitional expressions. Should expressing intrinsic (root) modality (expressing permission, obligation or ability) is left out of account. The work pays attention to the basic classification of nominal content clauses deriving from a verbal form alternating with putative should. Two kinds of putative should will be dealt with, namely should after directive and volitional expressions which could have its alternative form in the present subjunctive and should after epistemic, attitudinal and evaluative expressions which could possibly alternate with the indicative. The work examines these verbal forms in relation to the intentional modality of the sentence in an independent form (e.g. declarative, interrogative or imperative sentence). The work is divided into two parts: theoretical and practical. The theoretical part of the work describes the basic classification of all central modal verbs in English and putative should in terms of its relation towards 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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"Be/have", "have/be" as equivalents of Czech "být/mít"; and "být/mít", "mít/být" as equivalents of English "be/have" in parallel texts: a comparison of the semantic and information structure of divergents counterparts.
Procházková, Ilona ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
This diploma thesis examines translation counterparts of the English verbs be and have and the Czech verbs být and mít. It focuses on instances with a divergent translation counterpart, i.e. instances in which be corresponds to mít and have corresponds to být in the English-Czech direction, and instances of být being reflected as have and mít as be in the Czech - English direction. The aim of the paper is to determine to what extent divergent verb counterparts are used in the translation, whether the target language has available alternatives with a verb counterpart identical with the original, and what are the motivating factors that influence the choice of a divergent verb counterpart. Another objective is to examine the changes in the syntactic and semantic structure connected with the use of a divergent verb counterpart, and to assess their impact on the functional sentence perspective. The research used material from the parallel Intercorp. A total of 164 examples with a divergent verb counterpart was excerpted and the research was divided into four parts, according to the source language and the verb. The use of divergent verb counterparts was explained mostly by a lexical gap in the target language, or by semantic and stylistic factors and to a smaller extent also by the influence of the...
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Syntactic, semantic and FSP aspects of ditransitive complementation: a study of give, lend, send, offer and show
Brůhová, Gabriela ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Hajičová, Eva (referee) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
The subject of the present study is an analysis of five ditransitive verbs: give, lend, send, offer and show. The study focuses on the position of the two objects and on the factors that have an impact on the object ordering. An attempt is here made to provide a systematic overview of the position of the two objects with respect to their realization (i.e. substantival or pronominal). As regards the realization of the two objects, four types are distinguished: i. both Oi /Oprep and Od realized by nouns; ii. both Oi /Oprep and Od realized by pronouns; iii. Oi /Oprep realized by a noun and Od by a pronoun; iv. Oi /Oprep realized by a pronoun and Od by a noun. The position of the objects is assumed to be associated with the distribution of communicative dynamism or in other words with the principle of end-focus, i.e. that given information tends to precede new information. The second principle that operates in the ordering the two objects is the principle of end-weight. Of the three (or four, including intonation) factors whose interplay determines the FSP function of a clause element, in the case of ditransitive complementation the most important role is played by the contextual factor. Therefore, particular attention is paid to the context-dependence / independence of the two objects. The present...
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Rhematic subjects in written English: regular preverbal position vs. focusing by it-cleft
Kudrnová, Anna ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
The thesis aims to describe and compare the use of two English syntactic structures: sentences with a rhematic subject in the preverbal position and it-clefts with focused subject. It does so from the viewpoint of functional sentence perspective as conceived and elaborated by the members of the Prague Linguistic School and their Brno School followers. The main goal of the thesis is to determine whether the constructions are mutually exclusive or whether they can be under certain circumstances interchangeable. For the purposes of the analysis, 200 example sentences were collected from contemporary fiction, i.e. 100 for each construction. Subsequently, their relevant features were examined, especially those concerning dynamic semantic scales and realization form of the subjects; these aspects were expected to differ. The analysis has shown that each of the constructions has rather specific uses and they overlap only rarely, in sentences in which the two basic dynamic semantic scales, the Presentation Scale and the Quality Scale, intersect.
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The position of scene-setting adverbials in English and Czech. A comparison on the basis of parallel texts
Kunstová, Adéla ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
The subject of the presented paper is the analysis of the position of scene-setting adverbials based on parallel texts. The aim of the study is to find out the most typical position for placing of such adverbials realized by verbless construction and to determine the factors influencing the position in both languages with respect to differences between the Czech and English word order. The theory is based on the functional approach described in Brno linguistic school and is applied to 200 examples from the corpus Intercorp. Out of the given number of examples, exactly one hundred tokens belong to the translation direction from En to Cz and the second half to the opposite direction of translation. With respect to the English word order, which takes over some of the grammatical functions resulting in relative rigidity, scene-setting adverbials are usually placed in the final position. However, it is assumed that most languages have a tendency to place the most important information to the end of the sentence. It follows that one of the goals of this work is to describe the factors allowing these adverbials to be placed in this position with no effect on the communicative dynamism of the adverbials themselves as well as on other sentence elements. The term 'scene-setting' suggests that these adverbials...
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Czech "copak" and its English translation equivalents in parallel texts
Petrová, Zuzana ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
This diploma thesis examines the Czech expression copak and its translation counterparts. It focuses on the individual functions and meanings of copak and the ways these are expressed in the English translation. The aim of the present paper is to determine to what extent the discourse meanings of copak as a particle are maintained in the translations and what means English uses to do so. Regarding the pronominal function of copak, the main issue is to examine whether the postfix -pak is reflected in the English translations or not and what equivalents are used in comparison to the forms without the postfix. Another objective is to analyse the English counterparts according to their formal representation and define their discourse functions in respect to the discourse meanings of the Czech originals containing copak. The research carried out in the present thesis was based on material drawn from the parallel corpus InterCorp. A total of 240 examples with the expression copak was excerpted with the English translations aligned to them. The analysis was divided into five parts, according to the particular word class of copak. Particles proved to be the most productive word class, as they provided 187 examples and 25 different translation counterparts, negative question being the most frequent one. The...
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Constancy of the position of the adverbial of place between English and Czech
Pokorná, Hana ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
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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Noun phrase complexity in academic written English
Kratochvílová, Pavla ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
The diploma thesis analyses written academic text. Academic prose is frequently characterized as a highly complex style which is structurally elaborated, contains a large number of subordinate clauses and expresses meaning relations explicitly. However, new research (e.g. Biber & Gray, 2010) shows that complexity of academic writing occurs on the level of noun phrases which often contain extensive premodification and/or postmodification. The thesis studies noun phrase structure in research articles from two disciplines: medicine and sociology. Two articles from each discipline were selected, each yielding 50 complex noun phrases. These 200 examples were analysed with respect to their modification, its form and levels of embedding. The results were compared for both disciplines. The aim of the thesis was to describe complex noun phrase structure and identify its relation to the type of academic discipline. Key words: noun phrase, modification, academic text, sociology, medicine
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Complementation of the ditransitive verbs envy and forgive
Hlaváčková, Veronika ; Brůhová, Gabriela (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
The subject of the present thesis is an analysis of the ditransitive verbs envy and forgive in the ditransitive/double-object constructions, i.e., either the S-V-Oi-Od or S-V-O-Oprep argument structure, in which both objects are explicitly expressed. Envy and forgive represents marginal ditransitive verbs, whose accounts in major grammars and various studies are far from uniform. Occasionally considered idiosyncratic, the ditransitive use (i.e., the indirect pattern) of the two verbs is expected to decrease in frequency. Thus, the research aims to investigate the postverbal complementation preference of envy and forgive, and the way the preference changes over time. However, it is not the relative frequency of the S-V-Oi-Od pattern with respect to all remaining constructions that is of interest here, but its ratio to the frequency of the other available double object construction, the prepositional S-V-O-Oprep pattern. Additionally, the thesis provides a systematic overview of syntactic and semantic differences between envy and forgive as well as an account of their shared features and aspects. Particular attention is paid to the Oi/O realisation (e.g., the substantival or pronominal realisation) and the Od/Oprep realisation (namely, the substantival realisation, the pronominal realisation, the...
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