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Negative intensification in spoken British English
Löblová, Alžběta ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The BA thesis examines means of intensification of negation in British spoken English. Since intensification is generally associated with adverbials, more precisely with adverbs of degree, another aim of the study is to prove there are other than lexical means of intensification. For it is focused on the spoken language, which is natural, unplanned, improvised, it includes constructions that are regarded as ungrammatical in Standard English, but occur widely in the material used, namely the demographically sampled sub-corpus of the British National Corpus. Drawing on Dušková et al. (1988) and Biber et al. (1999) the thesis defines negation and intensification, and their mutual interaction and relation. Based on the findings of Palacios- Martínez (1996), the thesis aims at suggesting a suitable classification of the means of negative intensification provided by the corpus-based study. keywords: intensification, intensifier, negation, speech, colloquial language
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Corpus based description of processes of lexical semantic change in the Early Modern English period
Hladíková, Lenka ; Tichý, Ondřej (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
This thesis deals with the processes of lexical semantic change in the Early Modern English period. The theoretical part summarises previous research in the area of lexical semantic change including the basic taxonomies from secondary literature and outlines the linguistic situation in Early Modern English. The aim of the practical part of the thesis is to analyse qualitatively the processes of semantic change in 5 selected words on the basis of examples extracted from the corpora (CED, PCEEC, PPCEME, PPCME2 and EEBO), i.e. to describe circumstances of the changes and factors influencing the individual instances of change. The results of the qualitative analysis are confronted with the theories of semantic change discussed in the first part of the thesis.
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Term creation in EU documents: From English to Russian, Czech and German
Klambotskaya, Darya ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Gráf, Tomáš (referee)
The present master's thesis investigates noun-based 'multi-word' terms in English and Russian (and to a smaller degree in Czech and German), analyses the most frequent term structures and translation procedures. It draws on relevent sources on terminology and linguistics, presents a comprehensive approach to the notion 'term' and 'neologism', describes procedures for translating lexical units with no standard target language equivalents available, develops a research framework for extracting terms, analyzes the term structure and the translation of terms, with a focus on newly emerging ones, and identifies the most frequent ways of term translation. The sample text is the Council Decision 2009/371/JHA of 6 April 2009 establishing the European Police Office (Europol). Key words: terminology, term creation, translation of EU documents, translation of neologisms, translation from English to Russian, Europol
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English non-prepositional counterparts of Czech "v/ve" and "z/ze" prepositional phrases
Čuchalová, Marie ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The present diploma thesis is concerned with English non-prepositional equivalents of the Czech v/ve and z/ze prepositional phrases. This type of equivalent is found in approximately 20% of cases (Klégr et al., 2011). The thesis shows that some of the divergent equivalents are conditioned lexically (different valency of the Czech and English verb), while others, being of systemic nature, are related to typological differences between Czech and English. Among the systemic counterparts are particularly English locative subjects in sentence-initial position correspoding to Czech adverbials, and English premodification by a noun translated into Czech as postmodification by a prepositional phrase. Material for the analytical part was extracted from the "Core" of the parallel corpus InterCorp, consisting of original Czech fiction texts and their English translations. A total of more than 200 divergent counterparts of both Czech prepositional phrases was collected.
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Forensic analysis of anonymization strategies in English
Volná, Veronika ; Popelíková, Jiřina (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The objective of this thesis is to identify those specific aspects of written style which native speakers of English modify when attempting to anonymize their texts. The conclusions are based on the analysis of 20 texts by 10 authors, all of whom are native speakers of English. Two texts dealing with the same topic were produced by each participant; one was written as an official letter of complaint, and the other was written as an anonymous letter. The bulk of the results are grounded on a qualitative stylistic analysis of the individual texts, with merely a brief survey of quantitative methods.The purpose of the introductory chapter is to familiarize the reader with the subject of forensic authorship analysis, to provide a brief summary of the current state of research, and to introduce a series of empirical studies. The practical part of the thesis presents the qualitative stylistic analysis, provides a shorter summary of the quantitative analysis, and finally ventures to draw meaningful conclusions from the results. The results showed that the majority of authors manipulated with the style/register of the texts and with the specific lexical choices, whereas none of the 10 authors made alterations to spelling and only 2 authors chose to change the punctuation in the anonymous text. However,...
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Language and content integration models in ELT
Synková, Blanka ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The thesis focuses on the topic of language and content integration in ELT in a broad sense, i.e. it discusses not only CLIL but also other models of content-based teaching, viz. ESP (English for Specific Purposes), EAP (English for Academic Purposes), and EMI (English-medium Instruction). In the theoretical part of the thesis, these models are described as regards their history, typical features, teachers, learners, as well as benefits and negatives. The empirical part of the thesis explores the current practice of language and content integration at Czech general secondary schools ("grammar schools"). The research is based on case studies of five teachers who teach various courses belonging to this category. The preliminary research investigated what courses are currently being offered at grammar schools in Prague; they are mostly elective courses. Our research findings suggest that language and content integration in the form of elective courses is a rather common practice, although often unconscious. Teachers tend to act on the basis of their intuition rather than their knowledge of theory and practice of language and content integration. Generally, it seems that more emphasis is put on content than language in these lessons. Content-based English lessons may be beneficial for learners for...
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Teaching bilingual adolescents for whom English is a heritage language or who have lived in an Anglophone country, and who are studying in Czech secondary school English classrooms: the students' perspective
Jirásková, Anna ; Gráf, Tomáš (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
(in English) The present thesis explores the issue of teaching heritage language learners and returnee students in English as a foreign language (EFL) classes in Czech secondary schools. The aim of the thesis is to examine the experiences of heritage language learners and returnees in the EFL classroom, their strengths and weaknesses in English, their attitude towards English language learning in terms of potential anxiety and motivation, as well as heritage language learners' wishes in relation to language instruction. These issues are investigated from the perspective of the students themselves. The theoretical part reviews the relevant literature on heritage language acquisition and teaching, and on the effects of experience abroad on language acquisition. Moreover, it is complemented by discussions of differentiated instruction and language education for the gifted, two areas which can prove helpful in terms of finding suitable solutions to the problems encountered by the target population in foreign language classes. The empirical part is qualitative and consists of the analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews with three participants, gymnázium students from Prague. Insights are provided about the interconnectedness of the students' life experiences, their general beliefs about language...
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On adverbial English - French faux amis: a contrastive view of actually and actuellement
Čapková, Andrea ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The subject of the present thesis is a contrastive analysis of two formally similar adverbs, the English actually and the French actuellement, which despite their com- mon etymological origins nowadays render different meaning. The theoretical chapter deals with classification of the two adverbs; in particular their semantic roles and syntactic functions. The latter section of this chapter is concerned with the historical development of the semantic meaning and concentrates on the common etymological origins as well as on the possible interchangeability of the adverbs. The research part focuses on the detailed analysis of the two adverbs based on the examples excerpted from the synchronic monolingual corpora (British National Corpus for English and Lextutor-Parlé for French) and describes their semantic roles as well as syntactic functions. The second part of this chapter is an analysis of the translation equivalents of actually and actuellement. The material for this section was excerpted from the parallel corpus InterCorp (fiction Core and the subcorpus Europarl). This thesis aims to identify possible discourse functions developed in the French actuellement and explore the translation correspondences of the two adverbs. Key words: actually, actuellement, discourse functions, faux-amis
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Utilization of general rhythm metrics for differentiation of Slovak English from Slovak and English
Kaprál, Jakub ; Volín, Jan (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
The purpose of the present thesis is to analyze Slovak English from the perspective of speech rhythm in relation to its native (Slovak) and target (English) language. The first part contains theoretical background for the study of language rhythm, history of its research, and describes rhythmically relevant features of English and Slovak phonetic systems. It is concluded by summary of rhythmical differences between the two languages and hypotheses are proposed. The experimental part uses rhythm metrics for determination of phonetic properties of rhythm in Slovak English. It is based on recordings of one English and two Slovak representative radio reporters along with six recordings of Slovak students of English studies. The rhythm metrcis results for Slovak English closely approximate the results for native English but due to inconsistency of the results the question of aplicability of rhythm metrics to L1, let alone L2, remains open. Keywords: Slovak English, speech rhythm, rhythm metrics, prosody, second language acquisition
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A contrastive study of the Czech translation equivalents of the pragmatic markers now and well in electronic parallel texts
Houra, Aleš ; Klégr, Aleš (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
This thesis presents a contrastive analysis of the English pragmatic markers now and well and their Czech translation equivalents. The overall material is based on 200+12 occurrences that were excerpted from the electronic parallel corpus InterCorp, with all the instances appearing in fictional dialogues. The contrastive study focuses on the role of translation as a means to understand better the nature of the two pragmatic markers. It analyzes specific marker-collocate sequences and the respective Czech translation equivalents. It demonstrates that certain marker-collocate sequences have a tendency to be translated by specific Czech translation equivalents and that the role of other factors, such as position in discourse structure, prosody, and broader context, play in this respect an important role as well. All this and the finding that both now and well share certain Czech translation equivalents add to the multifunctionality of both now and well and prove that a combination of other factors is needed to comprehend the use of the two pragmatic markers in English. The comparison of the Czech translation equivalents in this thesis to the Czech translation equivalents in the Czech-English dictionary Lingea attempted to provide an example of how a contrastive analysis can be useful in Lexicography.
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