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Evolution and function of hidden anti-predator signals
Ziková, Magdaléna ; Exnerová, Alice (advisor) ; Pipek, Pavel (referee)
Hidden anti-predator signals (HAS) are hidden colour patterns in an otherwise cryptic prey; they are revealed upon encountering a predator. HAS include deimatic signals (DS) and flash signals (FS). DS are used when at risk of predation, typically after being discovered by a predator. Their position in the predation sequence (PS) differs by species. DS are often linked with deimatic behaviour, that boosts their efficiency. The use of DS in later stages of the PS occurs more often in defended prey, which may thus speed up predators' avoidance learning. In undefended prey, DS may trigger startle or fear responses, confusion or sensory overload in the predator, thereby pausing or stopping the attack. FS are exposed during the prey's escape, usually early in the PS before a predator detects the prey. This can cause a predator to form a wrong impression of the prey's appearance, making it harder to find. FS can also attract the predator's attention during pursuit, thus decreasing its chance of noticing an evasive manoeuvre. Dynamic FS, in which different colours alternate during movement, can make it hard to estimate the prey's position. The presence of both types of HAS is often linked with prey body size. The efficiency of FS is affected by the flight initiation distance. The efficiency of DS is related to...
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Development of the Czech secondary preposition kvůli from a constructional perspective
Čermák, Jan ; Friedová, Mirjam (advisor) ; Králová Zíková, Magdalena (referee)
The aim of this thesis is to map the historical development of the modern Czech secondary preposition kvůli, which denotes causality and is complemented by a dative NP in standard language and by a genitive case in certain dialects of North Moravia. Its development can be traced back to the Old Czech benefactive prepositional phrase (PP) k vóli/k vuoli (literally 'to/toward will'), which was used as an adverbial of reason or goal of the event denoted by the predicate, with respective meanings 'according to sb's will', or 'to sb's satisfaction'. The beneficiary was either expressed by common possessive means inside the PP (e.g., by a genitive noun phrase (NP) or a possessive pronoun), or by an external dative NP, which was syntactically independent of the PP and functioned as a verbal argument. Adopting the approach of Construction Grammar (Fillmore, 1988, 1989; Fried & Östmann, 2004) and drawing on findings from grammaticalization research, historical material spanning the Old Czech, Middle Czech and Modern Czech period is analysed, paying attention to individual contextual features that enabled the changes leading to the modern prepositional use. Through a series of contextually conditioned and interdependent semantic, syntactic, morphosyntactic, and phonological shifts, the expression gradually...
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Evolution of discourse markers in Czech: case study of vždyť
Doischer, Tomáš ; Zíková, Magdalena (advisor) ; Beneš, Martin (referee)
The main goal of this paper is to analyze one specific Czech discourse marker, vždyť, both from the synchronic and diachronic position. In the context of this analysis, some questions of linguistic methodology are discussed. Most of this analysis focused on its semantic properties, which were described using the NSM methodology (Natural Semantic Metalanguage). NSM allows its users to describe the meaning of grammatical words in natural language, thanks to which a researcher can formulate the expression's function without having to use a complicated and obscure terminology. The resulting definition of vždyť is compared to the description found in Czech dictionaries, whose authors, unlike my approach, describe the meaning of vždyť in terms of multiple senses, polysemy. Apart from semantics, a small part of the chapter is dedicated to the description of other properties of vždyť, e. g. phonetics. In the diachronic analysis, a hypothesis is formulated about the emergence of vždyť from the originally temporal marker vždy, explaining it on the basis of conversational implicatures. That is illustrated by some examples of vždy from the earliest available linguistic data from Czech. I then describe the meaning of vždyť in Old Czech, while speculation about its further development is hindered by the lack of adequate...
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Word-level phonetic variability in public speaking
Kodytková, Carmen ; Machač, Pavel (advisor) ; Zíková, Magdalena (referee)
This thesis concentrates on phonetic variability of words in public speaking. In the first part of the thesis, the aim was to summarize the existing knowledge about the characteristics and principles of spontaneous speech, about phonetic features of Czech speech sounds and about factors that may influence type and degree of reduction. Then we summarize the results of older studies done on other languages (esp. on Dutch and German) and outline a possible application of results from word variability analyses. In the second part of this thesis we look at five Czech words - protože, prostě, myslím, samozřejmě and určitě. We set several groups of variants according to the degree of reduction for each word, we examine stability of their phonetic features and survey whether position (initial, medial, final and I = F) in intonation unit and/or speed of pronunciation of the chosen word has an influence on degree of reduction. Five to eight hierarchical groups of variants were set for each chosen word. Stability of phonetic features in four types of speech sounds (vowels, nasals, unvoiced plosives and unvoiced sibilants) is in line with the existing observations (e.g. Machač, 2004). Speed of pronunciation of the word had an influence on the degree of reduction in words protože, prostě, samozřejmě and určitě,...
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Grammaticalization potentiel of the anaphoric ten in spoken narative discourse
Zíková, Magdalena ; Friedová, Mirjam (advisor) ; Nedolužko, Anna (referee) ; Berger, Tilman (referee)
In my Ph.D. thesis, I examine the use of referential devices in spoken narrative discourse with predominant anaphoric reference. Special attention is paid to the relationship between two competing forms: lexical phrases containing the lexeme ten (ten-MARKED NPs) and lexical phrases not containing it (UNMARKED NPs) in repeated mentions. A primary aim of the work is (i) to identify factors favouring the use of ten-marked NPs at the expense of unmarked NPs and (ii) to explore the possibility of the lexeme ten grammaticalizing from its anaphoric use. Theoretically and methodologically I benefit mostly from the conception of discourse anaphora and the theory of grammaticalization. The referential devices are systematically explored in terms of their distribution into different classes according to a set of parameters and their values. These parameters reflect the conceptual (animacy), grammatical (syntactic function, type of clause etc.) as well as discourse characteristics of the forms and their referents (informational status of the NP in the clause, activation and persistence of the referent, etc.). The data consist of 45 short narratives produced by 15 speakers. The speakers' task was to retell three short silent-movie sketches which they had seen immediately before the recording. The design of the...
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The dynamic character of phonetic reductions at the sentence level in spontaneous spoken English
Dalešická, Lucie ; Machač, Pavel (advisor) ; Králová Zíková, Magdalena (referee)
(in English): This bachelor's thesis is concerned with the topic of phonetic reductions in spontaneous speech and its relationship with the recognition of speech units. Research was conducted on the English language using a method previously used as part of a research done on the Czech language. The aim of this research is to tackle questions pertaining to the topics of the existence of a) a unified pattern in the distribution of phonetic reductions in English sentences, b) a possible correlation between a calculated phonetic reduction rate of words and their recognizability, and c) the impact of the so-called 'chunking' on recognizability. The results of this thesis hint at a presence of a pattern in the distribution of phonetic reductions in English, a strong inverse relationship between the rate of phonetic reduction and recognizability, and a notable impact of chunking on perception. This thesis also mentions the influence of regional varieties of English on comprehensibility across those varieties.
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Formal distinction between comitative and instrumental in contemporary Swedish
Čermák, Jan ; Zíková, Magdalena (advisor) ; Láznička, Michal (referee)
The aim of this bachelor thesis is to identify the degree of differentiation between the comitative and instrumental constructions in collocation with specific verbs in contemporary Swedish. Swedish marks both meanings syn cretically using the preposition med ("with"). There is a tendency to reinforce the comitative reading by adding the adverb tillsammans mea-ning "together", resulting in the construction tillsammans med ("together with"). The method of Distinctive Collexeme Analysis will be applied to a set of 200 verbs that collocate with both variants of the prepositional phrase, having them either as their arguments or as adjuncts. For each combination of a verb and a preposition, 50 complements of the preposi-tion with the highest tf-idf score (term frequency-inverse document frequency) will be selected and marked for animacy. The data comes from 146 Swedish corpora of various genres within Språkbanken. Relevant factors will be both the semantics of the verb and the animacy of the no-minal complement of med. It is assumed that some verbs with particular semantic features tend to prefer one prepositional phrase over the other. Should the tendency for the comitative meaning to be reinforced by ad-ding tillsammans be strong, that would point to a proces of grammaticali-zation in progress. Powered by...
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Usage of demonstratives se, tämä and tuo in spoken Finnish narratives
Střítezská, Johanna Antonie ; Zíková, Magdalena (advisor) ; Friedová, Mirjam (referee)
This paper focuses on the use of Finnish demonstrative pronouns tämä ("this"), tuo ("that") and se ("it") in spoken narratives. Special attention is paid to their adnominal use in comparison to the use of the bare nominal phrase in anaphoric reference. The source of inspiration for this paper are thoughts on the on-going grammaticalization of Finnish demonstrative se into the definite article in spoken Finnish, which was previously studied by Laury (1997) and Juvonen (2000). The grammaticalization is said to be reflected in a strikingly high frequency of its use and in the fact that the form is allegedly spreading into new functional contexts. The goal of this paper is to describe the distribution of Finnish demonstratives in spoken narratives and to identify factors which possibly influence the choice of means of reference. In order to do this the recordings were transcribed according to the orthographic rules of Finnish, segmented into clauses within which all nominal and pronominal phrases were identified. These phrases were afterwards coded for a set of parameters based on the work of Zíková (2017) concerning the potential grammaticalization of Czech lexeme ten (it). Material used in this paper consists of retelling stories of three short videos by five native speakers of Finnish. The final...
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Use of Ingressive Speech Forms in Conversational Norwegian
Vaňková, Markéta ; Zíková, Magdalena (advisor) ; Friedová, Mirjam (referee)
The subject of this bachelor thesis is ingressive pulmonic speech (IPS) in conversational Norwegian. This applies particularly to verbal forms of agreement (ja, jo, okay etc.) and disagreement (nei etc.). In contrast to previous studies, the goal of this thesis is a complex and quantifiable analysis of IPS. The data consists of 60 items of IPS from a Norwegian talk show called Lindmo. In this talk show the presenter and some of her guests use these forms rather frequently. Each item is classified according to a set of parameters, including phonetic (strength, presence of F0 and intonation) and discourse features (the (macro)theme (character of the conversational topic), the position in the (macro)thematic unit, the signalization of turn-taking, pauses before/after IPS, overlaps, discourse function and the type of an utterance before IPS). All occurrences are evaluated one by one using each of the parameters. The following findings emerged from the analysis: (i) IPS are used in the media by professional speakers (the presenter), in contrast to the expectations of previous studies; (ii) most of IPS (65 %) occurs in the middle of the thematic unit, i.e. in its centre, in contrast to the claim of previous studies that one of the main functions of IPS is the closure of the thematic unit (which is only...
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Grammaticalization potentiel of the anaphoric ten in spoken narative discourse
Zíková, Magdalena ; Friedová, Mirjam (advisor) ; Nedolužko, Anna (referee) ; Berger, Tilman (referee)
In my Ph.D. thesis, I examine the use of referential devices in spoken narrative discourse with predominant anaphoric reference. Special attention is paid to the relationship between two competing forms: lexical phrases containing the lexeme ten (ten-MARKED NPs) and lexical phrases not containing it (UNMARKED NPs) in repeated mentions. A primary aim of the work is (i) to identify factors favouring the use of ten-marked NPs at the expense of unmarked NPs and (ii) to explore the possibility of the lexeme ten grammaticalizing from its anaphoric use. Theoretically and methodologically I benefit mostly from the conception of discourse anaphora and the theory of grammaticalization. The referential devices are systematically explored in terms of their distribution into different classes according to a set of parameters and their values. These parameters reflect the conceptual (animacy), grammatical (syntactic function, type of clause etc.) as well as discourse characteristics of the forms and their referents (informational status of the NP in the clause, activation and persistence of the referent, etc.). The data consist of 45 short narratives produced by 15 speakers. The speakers' task was to retell three short silent-movie sketches which they had seen immediately before the recording. The design of the...
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