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Adjective Positions in Old English and Middle English Homilies and Sermons
ILIĆOVÁ, Alexandra
The thesis is focused on the variability of adjectival position in noun phrases in the Old English and Middle English periods, which is analyzed on the textual samples of six Old English and Middle English homilies and sermons. It describes these texts with regards to their general characteristics and focuses on the grammatical changes that occurred in the Old English and Middle English periods, especially with regards to leveling of inflectional endings and the gradual loss of strong and weak inflection. Subsequently, it focuses on the interplay of the factors of adjective position, strong or weak inflection (particularly in Old English), definiteness or indefiniteness of the noun phrase, and meaning. It also explores the connection of adjective position and information structure of the texts. It devotes brief attention to two cases of similarity between adjective placement nowadays, and in the past.
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The noun phrase in written and spoken academic discourse
Sládečka, Dušan ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
The diploma thesis is concerned with exploring the differences between the noun phrases in written and spoken academic monologue, focussing on the length of the phrase, its internal complexity and syntactic functions. In the theoretical part of the study, the noun phrase, its constituents, structure and usage are introduced. The noun phrase is introduced as one of the means of complex condensation. The basic characteristics of written and spoken academic language are introduced as well. The practical part of the study is a detailed analysis of 210 noun phrases. The written sample is collected from selected academic articles, whereas the sample of spoken lecture is collected from the lecture database of the BASE corpus. Since the study focuses on two different forms of language, the material is analysed for each of them separately and the results are subsequently compared in the final part of each subsection. The hypothesis of the thesis is that the written sample contains noun phrases with more complex modification, whereas the spoken sample contains more simple noun phrases and more clausal modification. The hypothesis was, for the most part, confirmed.
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