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Conversion in English and Czech: a corpus study of semantic relations between nouns and verbs
Hledíková, Hana ; Ševčíková, Magda (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
The aim of this MA thesis is to carry out a corpus-based contrastive study of the semantic relations between verbs and nouns in conversion pairs in English and Czech. Pairs of verbs and nouns like run.v - run.n, salt.n - salt.v in English and běžet/běhat 'run.v' - běh 'run.n', sůl 'salt.n' - solit 'salt.v' in Czech are taken to be the result of a word-formation process called conversion, in which a new word belonging to a different word class is created without the addition of any derivational affixes. Using a sample of 300 such pairs in both languages, extracted from the British National Corpus for English and from the SYN2015 corpus for Czech, we analyse and classify the different semantic relations existing between the nouns and verbs. We adopt a cognitive approach and classify the semantic relations based on conceptual event schemata and their elements. Because the nouns and/or verbs are often polysemous, the semantic classification also accounts for the possibility of multiple semantic relations existing between the verb and the noun in one conversion pair. In the analysis, we examine and compare the frequencies with which the different semantic relations appear in the conversion pairs in English and Czech, as well as the patterns of multiple semantic relations that appear together in a single...
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Prosodic Phrasing in Good Speakers in English and Czech
Hledíková, Hana ; Skarnitzl, Radek (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
The aim of this BA thesis was to compare prosodic phrasing in good public speakers of English and Czech. Naive observations of English and Czech spoken in everyday communication suggest that Czech intonation is more flat and that Czech speakers divide the flow of speech into longer prosodic phrases than English speakers. We focused on the speech of good public speakers to see whether there are differences in the temporal and melodic characteristics between the two languages in this stylistic domain. We analysed segments from speeches by 10 TEDTalk speakers in Czech and American English and measured the length of prosodic phrases, speaking rate, standard deviation of the fundamental frequency in each prosodic phrase and in the nuclear part of the phrase (measure of pitch span), and Cumulative Slope Index in each prosodic phrase (measure of melodic variability). The number of syllables per prosodic phrase was found to be higher in Czech than in English, although phrases were generally very short in both languages. Speaking rate was found to be faster in Czech than in English. Pitch span in both the whole prosodic phrase and the nuclear part of the phrase was found to be wider in English than in Czech. Melodic variability was found to be higher in English than Czech. These results show that there are...
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