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Aspect in French Light Verb Constructions
VENUŠOVÁ, Alena
The dissertation deals with aspect in light verb constructions in French (LVCs). Light verb predicates such as faire du doublage, faire une découverte, and donner un conseil, constitute a specific kind of verb-noun construction recognizable by two transformational tests i.e., the cancellation test and the argument co-reference test. From the aspectual point of view, there are three parameters to be recognized: the lexical aspect (states, processes, events), grammatical aspect (perfectivity, imperfectivity), and aktionsart (quantity, quality, and phase of action). Being the semantical root of LVCs, the predicative noun is a starting point for aspectual analysis, nevertheless this aspectual interpretation is drawn from the whole sentence and takes account of the whole LVC, as well as of other aspectually relevant components (aspect shifting and aspectual composition). The objective of the research is to clarify the aspectual properties of the predicative noun and examine whether and how the principle of lexical aspect shifting is applied in the context of LCVs with a focus on the role of semantics (creation, motion containing a goal destination), of the predicative noun's complement (its quantization and cumulativity), countability, and determination of the predicative noun. It is observed that countability marked by articles has a crucial effect on the interpretation of the lexical aspect and aktionsart (faire un saut - sauter une fois, faire un emballage - emballer un cadeau, *emballer une fois). The research is based upon a systematic use of real corpora contexts (InterCorp 2018, FrWac, araneum), French lexicon-grammar data (Maurice Gross and his colleagues), and native-speaker competence.
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Analysis of Behavioural Profiles of Iterative Verbs in Latin
Hrach, Petr ; Pultrová, Lucie (advisor) ; Friedová, Mirjam (referee)
This thesis deals with the group of Latin iterative verbs, i.e. the group that is formally marked with the iterative suffix -t. It deals with the question what was the actual meaning of the iterative suffix -t in classical Latin as reference literature says that in some cases the meaning of iterative verbs in classical Latin was the same as that of the base verb and there are iterative verbs whose base verbs are not attested at all. Also, only iterative verbs often passed into Romance languages. Another question this thesis deals with is the relationship of iterative verbs as a group set off on the basis of the category of aktionsart as it is understood in the Czech linguistic tradition and the categories that are generally referred to as aspect (grammatical aspect, lexical aspect). In this case, the selected method is a corpus-based quantitative method called the "behavioural profiles". In our case, the corpus is limited to selected prosaic works of the classical Latin period of approximately the 1st century b.C. to the 1st century AD. In its first part, the analysis is based on studying the occurrences of selected iterative verb - base verb pairs in the above mentioned corpus, especially focused on the frequency of occurrence, valence and classification of predicates into Vendler's classes,...
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