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Grammatical concord in existential there-clauses
Novotná, Alena ; Popelíková, Jiřina (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
This thesis is concerned with the issue of non-concord between the notional subject and the verb in existential there-constructions. The grammatical subject in these sentences is the existential there but it is the agreement with the notional subject that is generally considered grammatically correct. This study focuses on the cases in which there is a discrepancy between the plural form of the notional subject and the singular form of the verb to be. The phrase there + sg. to be and especially the contracted form there's has apparently evolved into a presentative formula due to the process of grammaticalization. The thesis approaches this issue from the perspective of today's language as well as diachronically. Specifically, this study aims to identify the contexts in which this type of non-concord was possible in Early Modern English. To this aim 100 instances of existential there-constructions displaying a lack of agreement have been selected from three corpora of Early Modern English (CED, EEBO and PCEEC), which will then be examined in the analytical part of this thesis. The analysis itself is firstly concerned with the verb, its tense and whether or not it is contracted. It also considers the structure of the notional subject, most notably modification, the presence of quantifiers and...
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LANGUAGE CHANGE IN TERMS OF GENDER IN THE ERA OF EARLY MODERN ENGLISH
JEŽKOVÁ, Lucie
Language and gender has always been a major subject for sociolinguistic discussion. Moreover, the same applies to language change, which is still by some considered to be rather a decay in language than its progress. This thesis aims to investigate the relation between these two areas. Furthermore, it tries to establish the leaders of language changes with regard to gender. Based on the analysis of many sociolinguistic studies, this paper comes up with the hypothesis that women are the leaders of language changes. The process of verifying the hypothesis comprises few selected examples of language changes in the period of Early Modern English, on which is analysed their spread and their initiators. The background for this thesis are the personal letters from the period of Early Modern English.
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Grammatical concord in existential there-clauses
Novotná, Alena ; Popelíková, Jiřina (advisor) ; Vašků, Kateřina (referee)
This thesis is concerned with the issue of non-concord between the notional subject and the verb in existential there-constructions. The grammatical subject in these sentences is the existential there but it is the agreement with the notional subject that is generally considered grammatically correct. This study focuses on the cases in which there is a discrepancy between the plural form of the notional subject and the singular form of the verb to be. The phrase there + sg. to be and especially the contracted form there's has apparently evolved into a presentative formula due to the process of grammaticalization. The thesis approaches this issue from the perspective of today's language as well as diachronically. Specifically, this study aims to identify the contexts in which this type of non-concord was possible in Early Modern English. To this aim 100 instances of existential there-constructions displaying a lack of agreement have been selected from three corpora of Early Modern English (CED, EEBO and PCEEC), which will then be examined in the analytical part of this thesis. The analysis itself is firstly concerned with the verb, its tense and whether or not it is contracted. It also considers the structure of the notional subject, most notably modification, the presence of quantifiers and...
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Corpus based description of processes of lexical semantic change in the Early Modern English period
Hladíková, Lenka ; Tichý, Ondřej (advisor) ; Klégr, Aleš (referee)
This thesis deals with the processes of lexical semantic change in the Early Modern English period. The theoretical part summarises previous research in the area of lexical semantic change including the basic taxonomies from secondary literature and outlines the linguistic situation in Early Modern English. The aim of the practical part of the thesis is to analyse qualitatively the processes of semantic change in 5 selected words on the basis of examples extracted from the corpora (CED, PCEEC, PPCEME, PPCME2 and EEBO), i.e. to describe circumstances of the changes and factors influencing the individual instances of change. The results of the qualitative analysis are confronted with the theories of semantic change discussed in the first part of the thesis.
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The relations between syntactic structure and functional sentence perspective as reflected in a parallel Early New and Modern English text: a study of developmental tendencies
Popelíková, Jiřina ; Dušková, Libuše (advisor) ; Čermák, Jan (referee)
The aim of this paper is to describe the different ways in which syntactic means may be employed to serve as indicators of information structure and to trace the historical development these means underwent from the Early Modern English period up to the present. The research is based on a comparative approach to textual analysis, using two different English translations of Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, one published in the early 17th century, the other near the end of the 20th . Both versions are analyzed in terms of the ways in which they express the same semantic content through different syntactic means, a special focus being placed on the sphere of individual clauses. Formal disparities between parallel syntactic units are investigated both from the grammatical and communicative perspective, mapping the effect of the differences in syntactic choices on the level of the functional sentence perspective. The study thus attempts to identify the extent to which the standardization of syntactic structures may be viewed as having exercised an influence over the communicative aspects of the language in the period between the grammatical systematization of the 16th and 17th centuries and the Present-day English standards.
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