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Gender-neutral and gender-marked language
Zahradníková, Šárka ; Šaldová, Pavlína (advisor) ; Tichý, Ondřej (referee)
The present thesis deals with the issue of gender-neutral language. The initial part centres around the origin and development of this issue, which has caused a series of language changes in lexis and grammar. An object of long-term criticism is the natural inclination of the English language towards the default use of the masculine gender, which is reflected especially in areas such as traditional occupations, proverbs and collocations. The theoretical part also focuses on the classification and detailed description of grammatical and lexical means of expressing gender and explains the key terms. The practical part is carried out on the basis of the data from the corpus COCA, in which the distribution of premodifying gender markers with specific dual gender nouns was examined. The project primarily maps these linguistic means in contemporary American English.
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The Indefinite Article as a Signal of the Countable Use of Uncountable Nouns
Hradecká, Markéta ; Brůhová, Gabriela (advisor) ; Dušková, Libuše (referee)
The Indefinite Article as a Signal of Countable Use of Uncountable Nouns The present thesis deals with the role of premodification in the countability of nouns. More specifically, it concentrates on the dual class nouns, i.e. nous that are used both countably and uncountably. The aim of the thesis is to determine whether the presence of premodification results in the countable use of dual class nouns. Also, the semantics of the premodifiers is taken into account. The theoretical part of the thesis summarizes information from grammar books and describes the category of countability. All of the types of nouns, i.e. countable, uncountable and dual class, are characterized. Semantic classification of adjectives is included, too, as adjectives are the most frequent noun class in terms of premodification. The empirical part of the thesis concentrates on the analysis of specific examples and aims to decide the impact of the presence of premodification on the dual class nouns. For these purposes, three nouns were chosen (difference, interest, language) and fifty instances of each noun were excerpted from the British national corpus. Each of the instances was assessed in terms of countability, in the case of difference the semantics of premodifiers was determined (this step was eliminated in the case of the...
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