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General extenders in English and in Czech
Novotný, Tomáš ; Malá, Markéta (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
Pervasive in spontaneous informal conversation, general extenders (GEs) are vague multiword expressions (e.g. or something (like that), and stuff (like that) vs. nebo něco (takovýho), a tak(ový věci)) that have been shown to fulfil a number of communicative functions, ranging from propositional to expressive. But while the English extenders have received a lot of meticulous attention in nearly four decades of research, the corresponding Czech constructions remain largely overlooked (perhaps with the exception of Tárnyiková 2009 and Novotný & Malá 2018). The current study aims to (1) present a wide range of English and Czech GE forms (collected using the method of collocational frames (Aijmer 2015) and then categorised according to structural similarities, thus suggesting possible GE patterns); and (2) examine their communicative functions in contemporary English and Czech as represented in comparable corpora of informal spoken discourse (Spoken BNC2014 and ORAL2013, respectively). Relying extensively on functional frameworks introduced in previous research (e.g. Overstreet 1999, 2014), this study confirms what has been known about English GEs and investigates the degree of applicability to the respective Czech constructions. A close qualitative analysis of some of the collected GE forms (in total,...
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