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Evaluation in English news discourse
Peldová, Petra ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee) ; Tomášková, Renata (referee)
The thesis deals with evaluation in English newspaper discourse. The corpora analysed were newly created for the purposes of the sub-analyses; they comprise articles from three British online newspapers - three tabloids (the Sun, the Express, the Mirror) and broadsheets (the Telegraph, the Independent, the Guardian). The classification of the thesis' core dimensions of evaluation - opinion and emotion - draws on Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2005). The thesis pursues answers to two fundamental questions 1) What means do British online newspapers use to express evaluation? 2) What differences (if any) are there in construing evaluation between the tabloids and the broadsheets? In order to obtain the answers, at first, a small manual analysis of six 'positive' and six 'negative' articles (one from each newspaper) is conducted. Attention is paid to the key word analysis and the word classes expressing evaluation, namely adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Based on the findings, I decided to explore evaluation conveyed by adjectives, in the second part of the study, by employing evaluative adjective lexico- grammatical patterns described by Hunston and Sinclair (2000) and further amended by Bednarek (2007b, 2009). These patterns, which are associated with the dimensions of opinion and emotion, are...
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Rhythm sensitivity to speech and non-speech stimuli in musically trained and untrained population
Kaprál, Jakub ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The purpose of this diploma thesis is to analyse the ability of the human ear to hear slight rhythm deviations in speech and non-speech phrases. The first part contains theoretical background for the study of speech rhythm and summarizes the research that has been already conducted in this area. It focuses especially on the perceptual nature of rhythm, the concept of P-centers, and provides a comparative study of speech rhythm and musical rhythm and their common properties and functions. The theoretical part is concluded with the analysis of potential influences of linguistic and musical training on the production and perception of rhythm, and hypotheses and research questions are formulated. The practical part contains a perceptual experiment designed to examine the ability to identify rhythm manipulations in short speech and non-speech, i.e. percussive, phrases. Short English phrases are selected and their rhythmically altered counterparts are prepared. Participants are then presented with pairs of speech or non-speech phrases and a task to identify rhythmical discrepancies between them. The results highlighted several differences between the nature of speech and non-speech rhythm. While the presence of stressed syllables enhances perception of rhythm deviations in speech, this is not the case...
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Types and use of shortening on Twitter
Gižová, Veronika ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
The thesis works with the fact that communication on social network sites, particularly on Twitter, occurs in short text messages, tweets, which are restricted to the maximum of 140 characters. This leads to the tendency to shorten single and multiword expressions in order to save space and increase the content of sent information. The thesis examines the hypothesis that the number of shortenings on Twitter and their variation may function as a stylistic indicator of tweet genre. It is expected (i) that the number of shortenings in the Twitter sample will be higher compared to other genres and (ii) that the sample will contain more types of shortening, some of which will be characteristic for the tweet genre in general in comparison with the control sample. The research sample of 200 shortenings was collected from two Twitter trends, #Grenfell Tower and #Wimbledon. In the analysis part, the collected sample of shortenings is examined quantitatively, compared to the control sample and separately, interpreted qualitatively. The Appendix contains the complete table listing the meanings of all shortenings. Key words: Twitter, shortening, stylistics, internet linguistics, language of social media
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Phrasal compounds in fiction and their translation into Czech
Mitlenerová, Silvie ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
This diploma thesis analyses issues of translation of phrasal compounds from English to Czech language (in fiction). All examples observed have been chosen from the database of fiction texts that is incorporated in the project InterCorp (v. 7). In particular, the thesis deals with phrasal compounds in premodifying position. The corpus analysis of Czech translation shows that phrasal compounds can be categorized in various groups, and there can also be various approaches to translation. These two sets of categories do not always necessarily overlap. The diploma thesis is based on the categorization of the translations; in each category, several examples are selected and commented upon in more detail. In Conclusion, the findings of these subchapters are summed up and the level of translation work is evaluated in general terms. In the final section, few thoughts about general recommendations for translators are formulated as well - can there be any general recommendation? Or is there a "best approach" for each individual case as it was noticeable throughout the paper? Key words: phrasal compounds, translation, corpus analysis, premodifiers
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A comparison of political hedging in British and Australian political discourse
Nevrkla, Lukáš ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
The thesis analyses the pragmatic aspects of the language of political discourse in the particular context of the institute of parliamentary question time. The thesis examines and compares the use of hedging in the context of other communication management strategies (e.g., evasion, reformulation, dodging a footing shift) in the British House of Commons and in the Australian House of Representatives. In addition, the thesis seeks to test the methodological approaches and verify the conclusions reached in previous research, especially by Alan Partington (2003) and Bruce Fraser (2010). Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
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English (semi-)modal "need (to)" and its Czech counterparts
Polláková, Helena ; Popelíková, Jiřina (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The English verb need (to) belongs to the class of verbs which show characteristics of both modal and lexical verbs. The aim of the study is to provide a description of the verb with respect to its semantics, use and grammatical features. The first theoretical part summarizes theoretical findings about the verb need (to) and marginal modals and modality in general. Furthermore, it briefly touches upon the issue of expressing modality in Czech. The empirical part is then based on the analysis of selected examples extracted from the English-Czech part of the parallel corpus InterCorp. The analysis examines the proportion of the use of need and need to and the means of their translation in Czech - whether the corresponding Czech sentences include modal verbs, modal adverbs, verbal or verbo-nominal constructions meaning potřebovat or completely different means.
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Teaching Future Tenses to University Students of English Philology
Šteflová, Hanna ; Malá, Marcela (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee) ; Betáková, Lucie (referee)
1 Abstract This thesis deals with teaching the following seven future forms: the Future Simple, Be going to, the Present Simple and the Present Continuous with a future reference, the Future Continuous, the Future Perfect Simple and the Future Perfect Continuous to students of English Philology. The deductive and inductive approaches to teaching grammar were employed to teach these future forms. The quantitative part of the study had two main objectives. The first objective was to revise and improve the students' knowledge of the seven future forms taught by the study. The results revealed that out of all the seven future forms, the students' knowledge of the Future Continuous, the Future Perfect Simple and the Future Perfect Continuous was the least satisfactory, and these tenses required further explanation and practice. The participants' knowledge of the rules of use for all seven future forms was rather low in general and required significant improvement. The second objective was to investigate which approach to teaching grammar, the deductive or inductive approach, was more effective for teaching future tenses. The deductive approach proved to be more effective for teaching all seven future forms. The difference between the results of the pre-test and the post-test for the Future Continuous, the Future...
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Accuracy and fluency in the speech of the advanced learner of English
Gráf, Tomáš ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Šebesta, Karel (referee) ; Betáková, Lucie (referee)
The thesis analyses the accuracy and fluency exhibited in the spoken advanced-learner English of Czech students of English philology. It draws its data from a learner corpus comprising fifty 15-minute interviews with these learners and from a parallel native-speaker corpus of forty-nine 15-minute interviews. As regards accuracy, the learner data is analysed using techniques of error analysis. Salient features of advanced learner English are identified and the subsequent quantitative analyses reveal that throughout the entire group of students (which is characterized by what revealed itself to be a wide proficiency span) two groups of error types are found to be much more frequent than any other, namely errors in the use of articles and tenses. For the fluency measurements a small selection of variables has been chosen to describe speed fluency (speech rate) and breakdown fluency (the frequency of unfilled and filled pauses), and the results are compared with those for the parallel native-speaker corpus. The analysed native speakers are found to produce speech at a generally much higher rate than the majority of the learners. There does not appear - at least in the light of the given sample - to be any direct correlation between fluency and the frequency of errors. Moreover, the learners are found...
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English synonyms from the syntagmatic perspective in intrasentential context
Šefčík, Dominik ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
Sense relations, traditionally regarded as primarily paradigmatic, have been shown to carry syntagmatic implications. The present thesis explores intrasentential synonym co-occurrence in order to identify characteristic patterns of such co-occurrence and to explain it with reference to the functions it performs in discourse. The theoretical part provides an overview of both general treatments of synonymy and the studies that deal with co-occurring synonyms. The analysis itself is based on two hundred and thirty sentences retrieved from the British national corpus that contain pairs of co-occurring adjectival synonyms such as confident-sure, faithful-loyal or brave-courageous. The findings suggest that adjectival synonyms co-occurring in the same sentence are typically coordinated (60% of analysed sentences) in order to signal semantic inclusiveness (e.g. a covetous and grasping man). Minor patterns of synonym co-occurrence, which accounted for 2% of the analysed sentences, include the scalar pattern (e.g. smooth, nearly urbane) and the negated pattern (e.g. cruel, not savage). The remaining sentences featured synonyms which did not form distinct patterns and were, accordingly, classified as instances of variation as their co-occurrence is likely to have been influenced by a desire to avoid...
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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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