|
|
General extenders in the sitcom "Friends" dialogue
Novotný, Tomáš ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
The thesis explores an area of vague language, specifically a set of linguistic elements called 'general extenders' (e.g., or something (like that), and stuff (like that)). While early research claimed that these forms have primarily referential functions (category implication and list construction) and that they typically occur at clause- and utterance-final positions ('utterance final tags' (Aijmer 1985)), more recent studies stress that, above all, general extenders perform interpersonal functions in communication (e.g., marking an attitude towards a preceding utterance, politeness strategies, expressing different levels of certainty). Furthermore, due to the ongoing process of grammaticalisation (phonological reduction and decategorisation), general extenders acquire new discourse functions and occur more freely within a sentence. The thesis aims to investigate the behaviour of general extenders in terms of both syntax (sentence types and clause positions) and their communicative functions. To that end, the Research part is divided into two subchapters: quantitative and qualitative. Whereas syntactic behaviour can be objectively quantified, an analysis of communicative functions of every pragmatic marker is necessarily subject to a certain degree of subjective interpretation. The shared...
|
|
|
Interpersonal metadiscourse in English university lectures from Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences
Klapalová, Kateřina ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
(in English): The diploma thesis explores the means of expressing interpersonal function (metadiscourse) in English academic lectures. This function includes means mitigating the proposition of authors (hedges), expressions boosting its credibility (booster), instances reflecting attitude of the author (attitude markers) and means referring to both, the author himself (self-mentions) and the audience (engagement markers). For the purpose of the analysis, the integrative approach of Ken Hyland was chosen. It explores interpersonal resources as well as interactive resources in written academic discourse. Means organizing text into an intelligible and comprehensible unit will be also studied. The excerpted instances of metadiscourse were examined with respect to their function and realization form. In a case of realization forms, we expected to find means expressing modality (modal verbs, adverbs, adjectives), evaluative adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions and an array of personal pronouns referring to the participants of lectures. The findings showed surprising deviations in the categories of boosters, extended frame markers and attitude markers. Remaining categories, despite the different mode of the data (spoken academic language) corresponded with Hyland's findings from written academic discourse.
|
|
|
General extenders in the sitcom "Friends" dialogue
Novotný, Tomáš ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Brůhová, Gabriela (referee)
The thesis explores an area of vague language, specifically a set of linguistic elements called 'general extenders' (e.g., or something (like that), and stuff (like that)). While early research claimed that these forms have primarily referential functions (category implication and list construction) and that they typically occur at clause- and utterance-final positions ('utterance final tags' (Aijmer 1985)), more recent studies stress that, above all, general extenders perform interpersonal functions in communication (e.g., marking an attitude towards a preceding utterance, politeness strategies, expressing different levels of certainty). Furthermore, due to the ongoing process of grammaticalisation (phonological reduction and decategorisation), general extenders acquire new discourse functions and occur more freely within a sentence. The thesis aims to investigate the behaviour of general extenders in terms of both syntax (sentence types and clause positions) and their communicative functions. To that end, the Research part is divided into two subchapters: quantitative and qualitative. Whereas syntactic behaviour can be objectively quantified, an analysis of communicative functions of every pragmatic marker is necessarily subject to a certain degree of subjective interpretation. The shared...
|
|
|
The expression of interpersonal metadiscourse in English and Czech academic texts
Sudková, Marcela ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Šaldová, Pavlína (referee)
This MA thesis explores the means of expressing interpersonal function in Czech and English academic texts. These expressions are found at various levels (e.g. lexical, grammatical and lexico-grammatical) and our classification takes into account both formal and functional point of view. From the various approaches to meadiscourse we have chosen the integrative approach subsuming both interpersonal and textual features of metadiscouse. However, this thesis focuses mainly on the interpersonal features. In the first part of the thesis, a detailed analysis of four academic texts was performed in order to get a range of expressions for the controlling search. The aim of the controlling search was to verify the findings from the detailed analysis and to find out to what extent the selected expressions were represented in a larger set of data. For this search we gathered twenty academic articles dealing with linguistics, ten per each language. Despite the different language types, Czech and English use similar means to express interpersonal features of metadiscourse. The greatest difference was found in the category of relational markers and self-mentions, other categories displayed relatively similar frequencies. Key words: metadiscourse, interpersonal function, Czech, English, academic register,...
|
guest ::
