This diploma thesis Analysis of the Czech translation of Yuri Vynnychuk's collection of short stories Chachacha is devoted to the analysis of translation solutions of selected linguistic features in two short stories - Chachacha and Kulparkiv, aneb Chachacha 2. The goal of this work is to assess translation methods of Rita Kindlerová, describe its possible positives and negatives. Introductory chapters deal with the biography of Yuri Vynnychuk, his classification in a literal context, general characteristics of his work and consequently the stylistic analysis of two excerpted texts. An integral part of the work is definition of theoretical base for translatological analysis. Main parts of the work are focused on the analysis of translation of specific linguistic features, which are the stylistic dominants of selected texts: stylization of speech, style differentiation, phraseme and selected culture- specific items with an emphasis on proper nouns.

Este trabalho analisa diacronicamente o parâmetro do sujeito nulo no português do Brasil, mediante a utilização de documentação jurídica - mais especificamente, os depoimentos prestados em processos e inquéritos policiais. Defendemos que esse tipo de documentação consiste em significativa representação da língua falada para épocas pretéritas. Após, verificamos o que os dados neles contidos poderiam informar a respeito do parâmetro do sujeito nulo no português do Brasil na época em que foram produzidos, ou seja, final do século XIX e meados do século XX. Limitamo-nos ao estudo do parâmetro em questão apenas em orações subordinadas, mais especificamente no que denominamos encadeamento de subordinadas, estrutura muito comum no tipo de documento por nós estudado até hoje. Tal estrutura consiste em um grande número de orações subordinadas ligadas a uma mesma oração principal por meio do conectivo que. Por exemplo, \"a testemunhai disse que não cvi sabe quanto a autora tinha no Banco Mauá, [...]; que o que ellai ouvio dizer pelo finado Cavalheiro [...]\" Inicialmente, comparamos tais dados com aqueles contidos em estudo diacrônico clássico sobre o assunto, da autoria de Duarte (1993). Também verificamos o que poderiam nos informar se submetidos às hipóteses formuladas por Barbosa, Duarte e Kato (2005). A análise dos dados permite concluir pela existência de um comportamento esperado para o período analisado, mas ao mesmo tempo contém nuances indicativas das transformações pelas quais viria a passar o estatuto do sujeito nulo no Brasil. / This work analyzes diachronically the pro-drop parameter in Brazilian Portuguese through statements given in a court of law or during police investigation. We believe that this kind of document shows past spoken language. After concluding that these statements can really be a source of spoken language, we extracted data to guide us through the situation of the pro -drop parameter in Brazilian Portuguese, at the time the statements were taken - end of 19th century/middle of 20th century. We only studied subordinate clauses, in a structure we call subordinate clause chain, which is very common in the type of document we chose until today. It consists in many subordinate clauses connected to the same matrix clause by que [that]. E. g., \"a testemunhai disse [the witness said] que não cvi sabe quanto a autora tinha no Banco Mauá, [...]; [that she doesn\'t know how much the complainant had in Mauá Bank,...] que o que ellai ouvio dizer pelo finado Cavalheiro [...]\" [that what she heard the dead Cavalheiro say...] We compared these data with those which supported a classical study in the subject by Duarte (1993). And we also checked what they could inform us if submitted to the hypotheses created by Barbosa, Duarte and Kato (2005). We concluded that the data extracted from the corpus behave just as it was expected for that period of time, but with slight indications of the changes that would occur ahead in time in Brazil.

A presente dissertação tem como objetivo categorizar as estratégias de comunicação (EC) encontradas no curta-metragem em língua italiana Le Avventure di Marco Polo, realizado em 2011 por alunos do 6º ano do ensino fundamental de um colégio particular na cidade de Atibaia, participantes do Projeto Filmes em Italiano (PFI). Apresentaremos o modelo de operação global para o ensino de línguas (MOGEL), proposto por Almeida Filho, buscando demonstrar como a interação de seus níveis principais ocorre no âmbito do PFI. Procuraremos justificar o PFI como projeto comunicativo, através do postulado de que a autonomia do aprendiz, como preconizado pelo ensino comunicativo de línguas, é potencializada por meio do engajamento em projetos (project work) e em tarefas (tasks). O trabalho por projetos e as tarefas colocam o aluno como centro das atividades didáticas e estão relacionados aos novos cenários comunicativos audiovisuais-multimídia, acessíveis através de ferramentas tecnológicas que já fazem parte do dia a dia das novas gerações. Durante a apresentação do PFI 2011, introduziremos o conceito de falas guiadas, termo que cunhamos para definir as produções orais resultantes dos diversos tipos de apoio que fornecemos aos alunos durante as filmagens, buscando auxiliá-los na produção em língua italiana diante de problemas comunicativos de diversas ordens, favorecendo, assim, o uso de EC. O corpus da análise é constituído pelas produções orais coletadas no curta-metragem e é dividido em duas partes, sendo que a primeira contempla as produções surgidas na filmagem das lacunas inseridas no script, idealizadas para propiciar momentos de interação espontânea entre os alunos, e a segunda contempla as produções orais relativas às falas do script, baseadas no texto escrito previamente ensaiado pelos estudantes. No tocante à literaturasobre EC, apresentamos as teorias de três teóricos: Tarone (1977), Faerch & Kasper (1983), e Poulisse (1993), discutindo suas contribuições e justificando nossa escolha pela taxonomia lexical de Poulisse para a categorização das duas partes do corpus. Nossos resultados parecem demonstrarque os discentesutilizam-se, igualmente, de EC nas falas do script e nos momentos de interação espontânea,o que ressalta a validade da problematização como um dos critérios principais para que haja uso de EC,e não a interação nos moldes tradicionais.Além disso, o corpus coletado parece-nos apontar a importância, muitas vezes desconsiderada, da transferência linguística na constituição da interlíngua (IL) do aprendizeno uso de EC. Também nos parece que o contato com mais de uma LE, como ocorre com os alunos do PFI, pode propiciar o desenvolvimento da competência estratégica deles, aumentando as possibilidades de transferência linguística e de fontes para a criação de itens lexicais, bem como seus recursos para sanar problemas comunicativos. / This dissertation aims to categorize the communication strategies (CS) found in the short film in Italian Le Avventure di Marco Polo, conducted in 2011 by students of the 6th grade of elementary education at a private school in the city of Atibaia, who participates of the project Movies in Italian (PFI). We will present the global operating model for teaching languages (MOGEL), proposed by Almeida Filho, to demonstrate how the interaction of its main levels occurs within the PFI. We will seek to justify PFI as a communicative project through the postulate that the learner autonomy, as recommended by the communicative language teaching is enhanced by the engagement projects (project work) and tasks (tasks). The work by projects and tasks put students at the center of educational activities and are related to new-media audiovisual communicative scenarios, accessible through technological tools that are already part of everyday life of the new generations. During the PFI 2011 presentation, we introduce the concept of guided speech, a term coined to define the oral productions resulting from various types of support we provide to students during filming, seeking to assist them to produce in Italian facing a variety of communicative problems, thus favoring the use of CS. The analysis corpus consists of utterances collected in the short film and is divided into two parts, the first of which includes productions filming in emerging gaps inserted into the script, devised to provide moments of spontaneous interaction among students, and the second includes oral production statements regarding the script, based on the previous written text rehearsed by students. Regarding the CS literature, we present three theorists: Tarone (1977), Faerch & Kasper (1983), and Poulisse (1993), discussing their contributions and justifying our choice of Poulisse lexical taxonomy to categorizing the two parts of corpus. Our results seem to demonstrate that learners use also the CS in the script speeches and in the moments of spontaneous interaction, underscoring the validity of questioning as one of the main criteria for use of the CS there, not in the traditional interaction. Moreover, the corpus collected seems to point out the importance often neglected, of the transfer language to constitute the learner interlanguage and in the usage of the CS. It also seems that the contact with more than one LE, as with students of PFI, can encourage the development of their strategic competence, increasing the possibilities of language transfer and sources for creating lexical items as well as their resources to solve communication problems.

The goal of this thesis is to map a theme, which has not been systematically explored enough by Czech linguists so far. It deals with the material of the Prague Spoken Corpus (PSC), which contains a series of records of authentic spoken language. The thesis presents primarily a comprehensive description of particles, which can be found in the PSC, their semantic classes based on their real occurrence in the natural speech context. It further describes their collocability and syntagmatic relations, including their valency, thus more adequately explains their function in the commonly spoken language. Attention is also paid to their frequency and preferred use within the scope of particular combinations of sociolinguistic parameters, i.e. four variables (sex, age, education and type of discourse) which determined the selection of speakers on recordings to make their combinations as balanced as possible. Some particles are homonymous with other parts of speech - the extent of homonymy and its context dependency just as the processes of particulization are described in the contextual usage of particles and adverbs. The results in terms of the frequency of usage were compared with the frequency of occurrence in the written corpus SYN2005. The presentation of particles in dictionaries of Czech language was...

The diploma thesis deals with culture of spoken language among pupils at second stage of elementary school. The theoretical part is focused on rhetoric, phonetics, syntax or stylistics. The thesis also includes a part about division of vocabulary. The last two chapters of the theoretical part deals with nonverbal communication and it also includes some specific features of spoken language. The research part contains analyses of speeches that were done by six pupils of ninth grade of elementary school. Prepared an unprepared speeches were analysed from phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactic point of view. Nonverbal communication was also evaluated.

The present thesis is concerned with the topic of fluency in learner language, more precisely of two types of fluency - perceived and productive. Little is known about L2 fluency, especially about the fluency of Czech learners of English. The main aim of the thesis is to establish whether there is a correlation between productive fluency, represented by speech rate, and perceived fluency, represented by native speakers' evaluations. In addition, it aims at better understanding the process of evaluation of perceived fluency by native speakers of English. The material for the analysis were samples of recordings from the LINDSEI corpus, for which speech rate in WPM was calculated, evaluations of fluency of these samples by native speakers of English on a 7-point scale and the raters' commentaries on the evaluation process. The analysis tries to prove or disprove the hypothesis that speech rate is one of the features which influence perceived fluency. The results show medium correlations for two raters, low or no correlations for the rest of the raters, showing together with the commentaries, that there is a relation between perceived fluency and speech rate, but it is not as strong as previous research suggests. The results show that fluency is a complicated, highly subjective phenomenon, and further...

Ce travail s’inscrit dans une démarche d'enseignement du portugais langue étrangère centrée sur l’enseignement de la langue à des apprenants non natifs ayant des besoins communicatifs pour agir en situation professionnelle. A partir d’un corpus de données orales sur le portugais parlé par des réceptionnistes d’hôtel au Portugal, nous avons mené un travail de description linguistique de ce genre discursif, en nous focalisant sur les aspects pragmatiques et discursifs : les actes de langage, la modalisation et les formes d’adresse. Cette analyse a débouché sur un travail de conceptualisation didactique pour l’enseignement du portugais de l’hôtellerie. Elle envisage les compétences générales et communicatives (discursives, stratégiques, interculturelles et linguistiques) que les apprenants non lusophones doivent acquérir au niveau B1 du CECR. Notre travail se termine par la présentation de pistes didactiques utiles pour l’enseignant du portugais de l’hôtellerie : l’enseignement par le genre et par la tâche et une perspective actionnelle centrée sur l’unité didactique. / This work focuses on the teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language by taking into account the teaching of Portuguese to non-native learners who require the language for professional purposes. It draws upon a spoken corpus of European Portuguese used by hotel receptionists in order to explore the pragmatic and discursive phenomena present in this discursive genre. The phenomena analysed include speech acts, modalisation and the address system. Following this linguistic analysis, teaching conceptualisation work was undertaken with regard to the teaching of Portuguese in the hotel industry. This conceptualisation includes the general and communicative (discursive, strategic, intercultural and linguistic) competencies required at the B1 level of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The research is concluded by a presentation of teaching proposals related to teaching Portuguese in the hotel industry such as discursive genre and task teaching or an action-oriented approach focussed on the didactic unit.

Brown (1973) a proposé la « longueur moyenne des énoncés » (LME) comme indice standard du développement langagier. La LME se calcule selon le nombre moyen de morphèmes dans 100 énoncés de parole spontanée. L’hypothèse sous-jacente à cet indice est que la complexité syntaxique croît avec le nombre de morphèmes dans les énoncés. Selon Brown, l’indice permet d’estimer le développement d’une « compétence grammaticale » jusqu’à environ quatre morphèmes. Certains auteurs ont toutefois critiqué le manque de fiabilité de la LME et la limite de quatre morphèmes. Des rapports démontrent des variations de la LME avec l’âge, ce qui suggère que des facteurs comme la croissance des capacités respiratoires peuvent influencer l’indice de Brown. La présente étude fait état de ces problèmes et examine comment la LME et certaines mesures de diversité lexicale varient selon le développement des capacités respiratoires. On a calculé la LME et la diversité lexicale dans la parole spontanée de 50 locuteurs mâles âgés de 5 à 27 ans. On a également mesuré, au moyen d’un pneumotachographe, la capacité vitale (CV) des locuteurs. Les résultats démontrent que la LME et des mesures de diversité lexicale corrèlent fortement avec la croissance de la CV. Ainsi, la croissance des fonctions respiratoires contraint le développement morphosyntaxique et lexical. Notre discussion fait valoir la nécessité de réévaluer l’indice de la LME et la conception « linguistique » du développement langagier comme une compétence mentale qui émerge séparément de la croissance des structures de performance. / Brown (1973) proposed the « mean length of utterance » (MLU) as a standard index of language development. MLU is calculated by counting the mean number of morphemes in 100 utterances of spontaneous speech. The underlying hypothesis of this index is that syntactic complexity rises with the number of morphemes in utterances. According to Brown, MLU indexes the development of a « grammatical competence » up to about four morphemes. However, authors have criticized the lack of reliability of the MLU and the limit of four morphemes. Reported variations in MLU with age also suggest that factors such as the growth of respiratory capacities can influence Brown’s index. The present study reviews those problems and examines how the MLU and certain measures of lexical diversity vary according to the development of respiratory capacities. We calculated the MLU and the lexical diversity in the spontaneous speech of 50 male speakers aged 5 to 27 years. We also measured, with a pneumotachograph, the vital capacity (VC) of the speakers. The results show that MLU and measures of lexical diversity strongly correlate with the growth of VC. Thus, the growth of respiratory functions constrains morphosyntactic and lexical development. Our discussion focuses on the necessity to revaluate the MLU index and a « linguistic » conception of language development as a mental competence emerging separately from the growth of performance structures.

As building transcribed speech corpora for under–resourced languages plays a pivotal role in developing automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies for such languages, a key step in developing these technologies is the effective collection of ASR data, consisting of transcribed audio and associated meta data. The problem is that no suitable tool currently exists for effectively collecting ASR data for such languages. The specific context and requirements for effectively collecting ASR data for underresourced languages, render all currently known solutions unsuitable for such a task. Such requirements include portability, Internet independence and an open–source code–base. This work documents the development of such a tool, called Woefzela, from the determination of the requirements necessary for effective data collection in this context, to the verification and validation of its functionality. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of using smartphones without any Internet connectivity for ASR data collection for under–resourced languages. It introduces a semireal– time quality control philosophy which increases the amount of usable ASR data collected from speakers. Woefzela was developed for the Android Operating System, and is freely available for use on Android smartphones, with its source code also being made available. A total of more than 790 hours of ASR data for the eleven official languages of South Africa have been successfully collected with Woefzela. As part of this study a benchmark for the performance of a new National Centre for Human Language Technology (NCHLT) English corpus was established. / Thesis (M.Ing. (Electrical Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

As building transcribed speech corpora for under–resourced languages plays a pivotal role in developing automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies for such languages, a key step in developing these technologies is the effective collection of ASR data, consisting of transcribed audio and associated meta data. The problem is that no suitable tool currently exists for effectively collecting ASR data for such languages. The specific context and requirements for effectively collecting ASR data for underresourced languages, render all currently known solutions unsuitable for such a task. Such requirements include portability, Internet independence and an open–source code–base. This work documents the development of such a tool, called Woefzela, from the determination of the requirements necessary for effective data collection in this context, to the verification and validation of its functionality. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of using smartphones without any Internet connectivity for ASR data collection for under–resourced languages. It introduces a semireal– time quality control philosophy which increases the amount of usable ASR data collected from speakers. Woefzela was developed for the Android Operating System, and is freely available for use on Android smartphones, with its source code also being made available. A total of more than 790 hours of ASR data for the eleven official languages of South Africa have been successfully collected with Woefzela. As part of this study a benchmark for the performance of a new National Centre for Human Language Technology (NCHLT) English corpus was established. / Thesis (M.Ing. (Electrical Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.