in English A corpus analysis of the semantic interpretation factors of the French gérondif The aim of this work is to analyse factors influencing the interpretation of the implicit meaning of the French gérondif (Ger), and to explain, on the basis of this research, the semantic functioning of this non-finite verbal form (in connection with its equivalents in Czech). Our departing point is that the Ger form functions as an interpretation instruction, which defines the means of the integration of the action of the Ger into the action of the main proposition. This interpretation instruction defines the semantic invariant of the Ger, and thus its basic meaning; other meanings are derived on the basis of complex interactions of syntactic, lexical and pragmatic factors. The method used to examine these factors is based on a computer analysis of wide data acquired from monolingual and parallel corpora (FRANTEXT and InterCorp). Part I presents a summary of the results of the latest research of Ger and defines the specific factors: morphological which determine the essential interpretation instruction of the Ger (I.1.1) and basic relationships of aspect and time between the Ger and the main proposition (I.1.2); syntactic which define the Ger as a predication (I.2.1), its syntactic function in the context of...

This diploma thesis focuses on semantic diversity of reporting verbs in French and English fiction. Among these verbs there are not only neutral or semantically marked transitive speech verbs but also intransitive ones or those that do not belong to the category of speech verbs but express different circumstances of a speech act. The objective of the thesis is to provide a contrastive analysis of reporting verbs in original and translated English and French fiction texts, their classification and evaluation of different factors that potentially affect their selection. The topic will be studied on the basis of the data from the parallel corpus Intercorp. The thesis attempts to contribute to a better understanding of reporting clauses. The outlined findings may be helpful especially to translators and fiction writers.

This diploma thesis is focused on the analysis of German language equivalents of Czech proverbs in the dictionary of František Čermák Dictionary of Czech Phraseology and Idiomatics 4 (DCPI 4). The introductory part of the thesis characterizes proverbs as a phraseological unit and reflects the current state of Czech and German paremiography on the basis of selected dictionaries. Another theoretical starting point is the issue of equivalence, which in contrastive phraseology or, more precisely, paremiology plays an important role. The analytical part contains of multi-level analysis of German language equivalents of the Czech paremiological minimum in DPCI 4. Equivalents were verified using Hugo Siebenschein's Great Czech-German Dictionary, Duden 11, Hans Schemann's German Idiomatics, the corpuses InterCorp and DeReKo and the Google full-text search engine. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the current state of German-language equivalents in DCPI 4 and offer possible suggestions for improvement. The chosen approach is therefore not only contemplative, but also constructive. Keywords lexikology, phraseology, paremiology, lexicography, phraseography, Corpus Linguistics, equivalence

The present thesis is based on lexicographic processing of pronouns for the Large German- Czech Academic Dictionary (VNČAS). Its aim is to identify processing problems in selected dictionaries in the area of pronouns. Based on the dictionary entries proposed for VNČAS will be demonstrated a possible solution to these problems. The identified problems relate to the following areas: grammar in the dictionary, selection of example sentences, dictionary criminality, and user-friendliness of the dictionary. Key Words: lexicography, pronouns, contemporary German, corpus linguistics, grammar

Applied linguistics has lately been seen in studies of formulaicity of language operating through recurrent word combinations. The present study deals with one type of word combinations, namely lexical bundles (LBs), which are defined as a sequence of three or more words that frequently co-occur in a particular register (Biber et al., 1999). The present study is a corpus-based analysis of four-word lexical bundles extracted from Music research articles (RAs). The Corpus of Music Research Articles (CMRA) of one million words was created in order to perform structural classification of the retrieved lexical bundles and an analysis of their functions. The CMRA includes 110 articles collected from international music journals from various music subdisciplines. In order to find which lexical bundles were characteristic of music research specifically, the findings were compared to previous research based on other academic disciplines. The list of 218 lexical bundles was compared to the one of three different subject areas (Jalilifar et al., 2016) with the purpose of identification of discipline-specific LBs (n=102) which included 20 topic-specific bundles; and general lexical bundles (n=116) which included 56 core bundles shared among Music and three subject areas (Art and Humanities, Sciences and Social sciences). Structurally and functionally, the analysis of the extracted lexical bundles demonstrated that native English expert writers predominantly used preposition-based phrases (50%), with respect to structure; and research-oriented bundles (74%), with respect to function. The findings have pedagogical applications and could be used in courses in English for Specific Purposes.

Different from Generative Grammar which sees grammar as a formal system of how words are put together to form sentences, Construction Grammar suggests that grammar is more than just rules and surface forms; instead, grammar includes many form-and-meaning pairings which are called constructions. For years, Construction Grammarians have been investigating constructions with various approaches, including corpus-linguistics, pedagogical, second language acquisition and so on, yet there is still room for exploration. The present paper aims to further investigate the [V the Ntaboo-word out of]-construction (Hoeksema & Napoli, 2008; Haïk, 2012; Perek, 2016; Hoffmann, 2020) (e.g., I kick the hell out of him.) and propose a new umbrella construction, “X the Y out of Z” (XTYOFZ) construction, for it. Another aim is to examine the usage and comprehension of the XTYOFZ construction by English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as Native Language (ENL) speakers. The usage context, syntactic and semantic characteristics of the XTYOFZ construction were examined through corpus linguistic methodology. Furthermore, processing and understanding of the construction by ESL and ENL speakers were tested via an online timed Lexical Decision Task as well as an online follow-up survey consisting of questions on English acquisition and usage, and a short comprehension task on the XTYOFZ construction. Corpus data shows that in general, the combination of non-motion action verbs (e.g., scare, beat) as X and taboo terms (e.g., shit, hell) as Y was the most common. Also, it was found that the construction occurs mostly in non-academic contexts such as websites and TV/movies. On the other hand, results from the Lexical Decision Task show that ESL speakers access constructional meaning slightly more slowly than ENL speakers. The follow-up survey also reflects that ESL speakers seem to have a harder time to produce and comprehend the construction compared to ENL speakers. By investigating the features of a relatively less-discussed construction and its usage by ESL speakers, this study hopes to increase the knowledge base of Construction Grammar and ESL construction comprehension and usage, particularly on the constructions that are mainly used in more casual settings.

The present thesis is concerned with the issues of phraseology against the background of lexicographical processing with the use of corpus based research. Using a comprehensive set of idiomatic expressions containing the names of animals, discrepancies and particularities of contemporary phraseographical descriptions are studied. The idiomatic expressions are subjected to the analyses within the German Corpus DeReKo and their Czech equivalents in the Czech Corpus ČNK. This is followed by critical evaluation of the existing lexicographical work in the selected dictionaries. The thesis aims to give a new insight into the issues of idiomatic expressions processing in the bilingual dictionary under the influence of new data gained from corpora based studies.

This study compares the frequency and types of hedging devices used in the presidential debate of 2020 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Many studies have investigated hedging in political discourse, which has been shown to function as a rhetorical strategy in contexts such as political press interviews and political debates. The current study applied corpus linguistic methodology by creating a corpus of transcripts of the two presidential debates of 2020. To establish what types of hedges were used, a theoretical framework from Fraser (2010a) was used to classify the hedges into two main categories: Propositional hedges and Illocutionary hedges. A manual search showed that hedges did occur in the presidential debate and were used by both candidates to some extent. Based on the results, it could be argued that the hedging appearing in the debates was mainly used to create vagueness, express caution, evade taking responsibility for the validity of a statement, and show a lack of commitment to an utterance. The results further showed that Trump used hedges more frequently than Biden did. However, the scope of this study is not suited to make any reliable assumptions regarding whether frequent use of hedging is negative or positive.

During 2019, it became increasingly popular for countries to declare a climate emergency – often on demand of their citizens. As such, the term ‘climate emergency’ had a significant increase in usage and got dubbed the Word of the Year 2019. In an effort to investigate discourses around ‘climate emergency’, I used a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis with framing theory, as used in ecolinguistics, and compared with ‘climate change’; the UK parliamentary climate emergency declaration was used as the point of comparison. I compiled a corpus of almost 100,000 words (consisting of news articles) for each term in the time period Jan-Aug 2019 (four months before and after the declaration). The results showed that there were three overlapping frames (politics, problem, threat) – as well as three unique frames for ‘climate change’ (war, cause, predicament). There were no differences in what frames occurred before and after the climate emergency declaration, but there were differences in the words included in the frames – both in terms of frequency and what words were used.

Title: Authorship Attribution of Poetic Texts Author: Mgr. Petr Plecháč, Ph.D. Department: Institute of Czech National Corpus Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Václav Cvrček, Ph.D. ABSTRACT Contemporary stylometry offers a number of methods for authorship recognition of po- etic texts based on a variety of textual features (e.g. word frequencies, frequencies of character n-grams). However, it seems that one important aspect of these texts has been rather left aside - this aspect is versification. The thesis uses four corpora of poetic texts (Czech, German, Spanish, and English) in order to analyze to what extent versification features - such as frequencies of rhythmic patterns or frequencies of various types of rhymes - may be used as an indicator of authorship. We show that (1) versification-based models significantly outperform the random baseline, (2) in some cases versification- based models even outperform the traditionally used lexical models, (3) in most of the cases combination of both types of models outperforms the given models alone. Versifi- cation features are consequently employed for the purpose of attribution of two texts of doubted authorship: (1) the versified play The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eigth which was originally published under the name of William Shakespeare, but where...