|
|
Pragmatic and stylistic aspects of expressions of futurality in professional economic text and their didactic consequences
Mikuláš, Martin ; Pípalová, Renata (advisor) ; Povolná, Renata (referee) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
The dissertation surveys the use of expressions of futurality in professional economic texts (the linguistic part). In addition, it investigates didactic aspects of futurality in the process of English as a second language acquisition, focusing on undergraduates in the study programme B 6208 - Economy and Management (the didactic part). The topic was chosen on the basis of the author's empirical experience and the results of pre-tests in the target group. The research is based on a corpus-based linguistic study. Seven representative monographs written by native speakers were selected as a source of relevant information about the use of futural constructions in a written economic text. All the sources were explored by means of corpus query software and instances of selected futural constructions (will, shall, be going to, be about to, be on the point of, be (due) to and the present tense) were excerpted. Functions of the futural constructions were elaborted on the basis of the numerous excerpts and confronted with English for specific (economic) purpose textbooks that are used widely at Czech economic universities. To prove or disaprove their mutual interdependence, the correlation of general language and specific language proficiencies of undergraduates from two universities was measured....
|
|
|
Interpersonal metadiscourse in English university lectures from Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences
Klapalová, Kateřina ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
(in English): The diploma thesis explores the means of expressing interpersonal function (metadiscourse) in English academic lectures. This function includes means mitigating the proposition of authors (hedges), expressions boosting its credibility (booster), instances reflecting attitude of the author (attitude markers) and means referring to both, the author himself (self-mentions) and the audience (engagement markers). For the purpose of the analysis, the integrative approach of Ken Hyland was chosen. It explores interpersonal resources as well as interactive resources in written academic discourse. Means organizing text into an intelligible and comprehensible unit will be also studied. The excerpted instances of metadiscourse were examined with respect to their function and realization form. In a case of realization forms, we expected to find means expressing modality (modal verbs, adverbs, adjectives), evaluative adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions and an array of personal pronouns referring to the participants of lectures. The findings showed surprising deviations in the categories of boosters, extended frame markers and attitude markers. Remaining categories, despite the different mode of the data (spoken academic language) corresponded with Hyland's findings from written academic discourse.
|
|
|
General extenders in the sitcom "Friends" dialogue
Novotný, Tomáš ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
The thesis explores an area of vague language, specifically a set of linguistic elements called 'general extenders' (e.g., or something (like that), and stuff (like that)). While early research claimed that these forms have primarily referential functions (category implication and list construction) and that they typically occur at clause- and utterance-final positions ('utterance final tags' (Aijmer 1985)), more recent studies stress that, above all, general extenders perform interpersonal functions in communication (e.g., marking an attitude towards a preceding utterance, politeness strategies, expressing different levels of certainty). Furthermore, due to the ongoing process of grammaticalisation (phonological reduction and decategorisation), general extenders acquire new discourse functions and occur more freely within a sentence. The thesis aims to investigate the behaviour of general extenders in terms of both syntax (sentence types and clause positions) and their communicative functions. To that end, the Research part is divided into two subchapters: quantitative and qualitative. Whereas syntactic behaviour can be objectively quantified, an analysis of communicative functions of every pragmatic marker is necessarily subject to a certain degree of subjective interpretation. The shared...
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
The weak obligation expressed by "should", "shall" and "be supposed to" and their Czech translational counterparts
Tomšová, Karolina ; Brůhová, Gabriela (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
The MA thesis focuses upon the meaning of weak obligation expressed by the modal verbs should, shall and be supposed to and their translation counterparts. The aim of the thesis is to describe the range of translation counterparts of the verbs should, shall and be supposed to and to specify the differences between these verbs in this particular use of weak obligation. The present thesis applies the method of bidirectional corpus-supported approach (Malá, 2013) which helps to determine the differences in meaning between the respective verbs. The most typical Czech counterpart, the verb mít, is further analysed according to its English correspondences. With the help of both directions, the differences in meaning of should, shall and be supposed to are defined. The empirical part of the MA thesis is based on the sample of 250 examples, comprising 50 examples of each modal verb as well as 100 examples of their typical Czech counterpart, the verb mít. The examples are drawn from the Parallel corpora InterCorp. Keywords: modality, weak obligation, should, shall, be supposed to
|
|
|
Media representation of the Greek debt crisis: a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the "Guardian" online news
Pavlíčková, Tereza ; Čermáková, Anna (advisor) ; Malá, Markéta (referee)
The thesis deals with discourse surrounding the topic of the Greek debt crisis (GDC) in the online version of the British daily newspaper the Guardian (www.theguardian.com). The study builds on a bilateral division of the EU public discourse on the economic crisis, distinguishing between two opposing perspectives: "the Northern diagnosis" (DeGrauwe 2011: 5) prevailing in Germany and other creditor states, and 'the Southern opinion' on the situation held mainly by the debtor countries. The thesis examines the position of the Guardian in relation to this bilateral discourse framework. The Guardian represents a liberal, socially aware and traditionally EU-supportive newspaper that is published in a country which counts among the Europe's leading economic and political powers, a country that is also characterized by strong Eurosceptic tendencies. These aspects form a complex background with regard to the EEC/GDC discourse framework. There are factors supporting both "the Northern diagnosis" of the GDC and those suggesting inclination to 'the Southern opinion'. The analysis, dealing with a self-collected corpus (altogether 349 texts, 277 973 words) consisting of the Guardian online news on the GDC is situated - both theoretically and methodologically - in the field of Corpus- assisted discourse studies...
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
The presentation of speech, writing and thought in British newspapers.
Čermáková, Barbora ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
The thesis compares forms of speech presentation (and marginally writing presentation) in British newspapers through a theory of Speech, Writing and Thought presentation as introduced by E. Semino and M. Short (2004). On a specialised corpus of 6 newspaper articles, the work compares qualitive and quantitative tendencies of individual speech presentation categories, focusing on the diagnosis of differences and common points in two journalistic sub-genres, the tabloid and the broadsheet. The speech presentation categorization is applied as a clinal model with permeable borders between individual categories. The focus is on detecting and analysing the fucntions of individual categories of speech presentation in terms of information, style, pragmatics and form. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)
|
|
|
English counterparts of Czech diminutive nouns
Salovaara, Marie ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
The present thesis studies English translation counterparts of Czech diminutives with a base noun form. Czech, in which diminutives are known to occur abundantly, serves as an auxiliary language in this work. The aim is to analyse English counterparts, classify them according to the non/presence of the diminutive marker as well as to outline the means of expressing diminutive meaning in English (affixes, adjectives). The thesis consists of two main parts: the theoretical background clarifies the specific features typical of diminutives and diminutive formation in both languages. The empirical part describes material and methods used in the research and analyses examples from fiction texts obtained from the parallel corpus InterCorp, which is available through the Czech National Corpus website. The corpus queries involved Czech first-grade suffixes -ek, -ík, -ka, -ko, and second-grade suffixes -eček, -íček, -ička/-ečka, -ečko/-íčko. In the case of English, the suffixes identified by Quirk et. al. (1985) were used: -ie, -ette, -ling, -let. The analysis consists of four studies, each examining English diminutive expressions from a different angle. The findings acquired in the study are subsequently summarized in the conclusion.
|
|
|
The adverbs "absolutely", "completely" and "totally" in contemporary American soap operas
Gižová, Veronika ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Popelíková, Jiřina (referee)
This thesis is concerned with the functions of adverbs absolutely, completely and totally. These adverbs are generally employed as adverbials denoting degree or intensifiers with gradable adjectives and adverbs. Their use is most frequent in informal spoken language due to their ability to occur as an emphatic agreement in the form of ellipsis. The distribution of the selected adverbs differs in inspected functions - the secondary sources claim the adverb totally has been used increasingly as an elliptical agreement. The results furthermore demonstrate their varying collocations and constructions in which they occur. The adverbs are examined on the corpus of contemporary American soap opera Friends whose language closely resembles informal dialogue. A combination of corpus analysis methods are employed in order to determine the status of the syntactic constructions containing absolutely, completely and totally. The analysis of 120 examples has proven that while absolutely and completely both occur primarily in one function, different for each adverb,, totally may be used in a variety of detected functions resulting in semantic blends.
|
guest ::
RSS feed.