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Prenominal possessive genitive in Czech
Kartáč, Ivan ; Křivan, Jan (advisor) ; Elšík, Viktor (referee)
This bachelor thesis explores prenominal possessive genitive from the perspective of functional and typologically oriented linguistics. Using statistical methods applied to material from corpora of spontaneous spoken Czech, effects of animacy, phrase weight, recursion and allomorphy on genitive position are examined. The results suggest that animacy is the most important factor predicting the use of prenominal genitive and this feature is further discussed in cross- linguistic context. The data also suggest that prenominal position may have certain advantages when using recursive possessive phrases. Effects of morphophonological alternations have been observed as well.
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Interferences in the gender conceptualization of inanimate referents in bilingual Hungarian speakers
Červenková, Michaela ; Elšík, Viktor (advisor) ; Křivan, Jan (referee)
This work deals with possible interferences in gender conceptualization of inanimate objects in bilingual speakers of Hungarian and Slovakian language. It closely pursues the grammatical category of gender (which is present in one of the examined languages, in Slovakian, and absent in the other one - Hungarian). The aim of the performed experiment, in which two groups of speakers participated (one was the previously mentioned group of bilingual speakers of Hungarian and Slovakian, and the second one was a control group of Hungarian monolingual speakers) was to verify if the presence of grammatical gender in one of the two languages, spoken by the bilingual group of speakers, will affect their conceptualization of gender of the inanimate referents. Another aspiration was to find out if bilingual speakers, as well as the monolingual speakers of Hungarian had accordant responses to some of the inanimate objects, and also if there was a congruence in the responses between the two participating groups of speakers. A secondary aim of this experiment was to examine a phenomenon, which appeared in the previous conducted research (Červenková, 2017), which was the effort of the respondents to make the first phoneme of their response identical with the first phoneme of the name of particular object in...
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Final schwa in Dutch
Kratochvíl, Tomáš ; Machač, Pavel (advisor) ; Elšík, Viktor (referee)
This thesis deals with final schwa in Dutch, especially in ending segments -e and -en, which are today in most of Dutch dialects homophonous because of the elision of final nasal. The first part of the research was designed as a study of the pronunciation of native Dutch speakers. The subject of this part of research was an analysis of recordings of text designed specially for the purpose of the analysis of final schwa with focus on the homophony of final -e and -en. This part used sentences which differed only in the grammatical number a substantive; in some cases verbs were also used. The second part of this research consisted of the perception test with short recordings of semantically ambiguous sentences, with purpose of finding out how native speakers of Dutch differentiate grammatical number in cases where singular and plural forms of words in sentences are homophonous. Keywords: Dutch - phonology - phonetics - homophony - schwa
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Tocharian loanwords in Chinese
Židek, Jan ; Kim, Ronald (advisor) ; Elšík, Viktor (referee)
This work was created to review the evidence for lexical borrowing from the Tocharian languages to the Chinese languages. The used methodology relies on lexical lists, previous etymological findings, linguistic typology and anthropological input. For preparatory data manipulation, a set of semi- automatic scripts has been created. Presented is a qualitative research based on previous findings assisted by raw data. The outcome of this work should be testable findings which could be extracted to a computer processable form.
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Eastern Uzh varieties of North Central Romani
Beníšek, Michael ; Elšík, Viktor (advisor) ; Adamou, Evangelia (referee) ; Tenser, Anton (referee)
The dissertation provides a grammatical description of a cluster of Romani varieties, called 'Eastern Uzh Romani', which are spoken in Transcarpathian Ukraine in an area adjacent to the Slovak border. These varieties are associated with five traditional locations, two of which are situated in the city of Uzhhorod, representing an eastern margin of a North Central Romani dialect continuum. The focus is not only on describing the common characteristics of the entire Eastern Uzh dialect, but also on highlighting its variation with respect to specific features of the individual varieties. The description is based on first-hand data collected during numerous fieldwork trips of the author between 2007 and 2016. The dissertation is organised into thirteen chapters. Alongside the proper grammatical description, it provides a detailed overview of the speakers' historical, ethnocultural and sociolinguistic background. The main attention is given to describing inflectional, derivational as well as functional patterns of word classes. In addition, it discusses issues of phonology, including historical phonology within the North Central Romani context, and also covers various syntactic structures.
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Theoretical tools for categorization and functional explanations of relations in language
Křivan, Jan ; Elšík, Viktor (advisor) ; Stekauer, Pavel (referee) ; Skarabela, Barbora (referee)
1 Abstract The dissertation Theoretical tools for categorization and functional explanations of relations in language is focused on linguistic categorization from the perspective of empirical gram- matical research. The primary aim is to present the theoretical and practical potential for the investigation of grammatical categories, stressing functional explanations of why cer- tain language structures are the way they are. The text is divided into two parts. (i) The first two chapters are devoted to the theoretical and methodological foundations of empirical linguistic research (including issues of metalanguage, language comparison, discreteness and gradience). Particular emphasis is placed on functional-evolutionary approaches, which describe grammar in interconnection with language use, and more specifically on func- tional explanations by means of frequency. (ii) In the following three chapters, the potential of corpus-based research is demonstrated in accordance with the principles adopted in (i). It is applied to the linguistic categories of possession and adjective comparison in Czech. Possession in Czech is described with regard to hypotheses based on statistical tendencies in language use. The main results of the research revealed the relationship between frequency of use and the animacy hierarchy,...
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Vend Romani: Grammatical Description and Sociolinguistic Situation of the so-called Vend dialects of Romani
Bodnárová, Zuzana ; Elšík, Viktor (advisor) ; Halwachs, Dieter W (referee) ; Adamou, Evangelia (referee)
The thesis provides a detailed grammatical and lexical description of Vend Romani, an under- described dialect of Romani spoken in the Transdanubian region of Hungary, and describes its current sociolinguistic situation. The linguistic data are based on recordings of spontaneous narratives, semi-structured interviews, and linguistic elicitation by means of standardized dialectological questionnaires acquired during linguistic field research. The thesis is structured into six main chapters: The first chapter deals with the sources of data and methods. The second chapter examines the factors that influence the sociolinguistic vitality of the dialect. The following three chapters are devoted to the grammatical description. The sixth chapter analyses the layers of borrowings in Vend Romani. The thesis also includes the basic vocabulary of Vend Romani translated to English.
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Formal Expression of Definiteness in Albanian: A Description Based on Comparison with English
Backus Borshi, Orkida ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee) ; Elšík, Viktor (referee)
This thesis describes the means of expressing the category of definiteness in Albanian. Inasmuch as this category has not been comprehensively analyzed in this language so far, the starting point of the thesis is the description of this category in English which, by contrast, has been subject to a detailed analysis by many authors from different aspects both theoretical and practical. Keywords: Albanian, English, definite article, definite form, reference, contrastive description
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The mutual influence of Romani, Spanish and the other languages of the Iberian Peninsula.
Krinková, Zuzana ; Čermák, Petr (advisor) ; Elšík, Viktor (referee) ; Buzek, Ivo (referee)
The language contact of the inflectional Romani and Spanish, Catalan and other languages of the Iberian Peninsula began in the first half of the 15th century. A long- term and immediate contact between Romani and a language of the majority in several places of Europe resulted in emergence of so called Para-Romani varieties, mixed languages which predominantly make use of the grammar of the surrounding language, whereas the Romani-derived vocabulary is at least partly retained. In the Iberian Peninsula several Para-Romani varieties emerged. The process of their phonological, morphological and lexical evolution from the inflectional Iberian Romani is described in the first part of this thesis. The original form of the Iberian Romani of the 15th century was - according to our opinion - similar to so called early Romani of the Byzantine period that is supposed to end by the 14th century when the Romani language started to disperse throughout Europe. The influence of Spanish (and other languages of the Iberian Peninsula) is evident not only in the morphology and syntax, but also in phonology and semantics of the Iberian Para-Romani varieties. On the other hand, the Romani elements conserved in these varieties show archaic features as well as specific innovations and many of them can hardly be assigned...
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Verbal suppletion in Indo-European languages
Frantíková, Dita ; Bičovský, Jan (advisor) ; Elšík, Viktor (referee)
(in English): Typology of verbal suppletion on the ground of Indo-European languages is the focus of the thesis Verbal suppletion in Indo-European languages. The diachronic approach is of special interest. Description of verbal suppletion in the oldest stages of the IE languages and reconstruction of their Proto-Indo-European forms is thus aimed for (for each of the ten well-described IE language branches, one sample language is chosen, and its verbal system and suppletive verbal paradigms are described). Besides the descriptive data from individual language branches, the outcome of the thesis comprises the evaluation of the data by typological means from diachronic and synchronic view-point and its assessment in relation to frequency, semantic fields and Semantic relevance hierarchy. The thesis delivers a review of Proto-Indo-European roots in suppletive paradigms and their mutual relationships.
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