This thesis uses language corpora to analyze Czech translations of a linguistically asymmetric phenomenon of German privatives ending in -frei and -los from three perspectives: translation typology (micro-stylistics and macro-stylistics), Popovič's stylistic adequacy (shifts of expression: intensification of expression, attenuation of expression, correspondence of expression) and potentially intrinsic feature of German privatives to perceive the fact of absence ("privation") as positive or negative. Privatives are adjectives that express the absence of substance or quality that is represented in their first (left) component; in the context of this work they are limited to adjectives ending in -frei, -los, -arm and -leer. In the Introduction the current state of research is outlined and its time and local limitations are explained. It is emphasized that corpus is here used not just for translation as such but also for theory of translation. The hypothesis starts from the assumption that German privatives as phenomena of grammar have no equivalent on this level in Czech; therefore a direct translation equivalent is often missing. For this reason it is also probable that the translator will have to decide for such Czech translation of one German privative that comprises more words or even a whole...

The thesis aims to describe and theoretically explain the range of complex nominal word structures and phrases that evolved in all Slavic languages with staggering productivity during the last decades. In particular, it focuses on the so called analytical adjectives, i.e. formally invariant lexical units mostly of foreign origin that manifest their attributive syntactic role (and the word class they belong to) not through a morpheme but through fixed word order position. The thesis rejects the view that analytical adjectives are first parts of compound words and explores several transitional cases. In more general terms, the thesis explores phenomena that test the boundary between words and phrases, morphology and syntax. It concludes that in Bulgarian there already exists a well established word subclass of analytical adjectives. They have resulted from an originally lexical innovation that has been grammatcalized due to intensive borrowings of words and phrase models mainly from English and their replication. The comparative study of present-day Bulgarian and Czech provides evidence of the strategies that the two genetically related languages use to achieve their nomination goals. The search for an explanation of the similarities and differences between both languages offers insights into their...

The work attempts to contribute to mapping of the lexical field of HOLINESS in Old English prosaic texts. The lexical field in this work is represented by four adjectives (halig, gebletsod, gesælig, gehalgod) which are chosen from the Thesaurus of Old English. The mapping is conducted in the York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose by identifying morphological and syntactical categories of each adjective (predicative, attributive, postpositive functions, comparative and superlative forms; modification by adverbs) as well as the collocational sets (conceptual fields). The results then show the way in which the given adjectives differ in named categories.

The dissertation deals with semantic relations between adjectives and deadjectival verbs in Czech. It focuses on the question how the property scale conveyed by adjectives is encoded in the semantics of deadjectival verbs. After the first chapter which presents the topic of the dissertation, in the second chapter, I describe the theoretical and methodological context of contemporary linguistics from a broader perspective in order to relate the theoretical and methodological procedures present in this paper to the current linguistic development. The third chapter pursues the semantics of adjectives in Czech and various approaches to their classification. It presents a scalar classification of adjectives according to which adjectives denote a scale of some property, i.e. an ordered set of degrees along a dimension. With support of empirical research (based on a questionnaire survey and corpus data) I show that it is possible to implement the scalar model into the description of Czech adjectives. This approach states that adjectives are one of many means in language that serve to express measurement (and attribute it to objects and individuals). At the end of the chapter, I propose a classification of Czech adjectives and generalize prototypical semantics of adjectival classes by vector constructions...

CHARLES UNIVERSITY - FACULTY OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND ELT METHODOLOGY Relationships between the borrowed Old Norse adjectives in English and their Old English counterparts MA THESIS Supervisor: prof. PhDr. Jan Čermák, CSc. Author: Světlana Müllerová Abstract: The aim of this MA thesis is to examine the relationship between six word pairs, each comprising an Old Norse adjectival borrowing in Middle English and its Old English counterpart along with its Middle English reflex for further reference. The inquiry into their relationship involves an analysis of: their (i) formal aspects, (ii) syntactic properties, (iii) semantic fields and (iv) external factors possibly contributing to their obsolescence or survival, such as the restriction to certain text types or geographic localization, as suggested by the individual linguistic profiles in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English and Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. The description of individual semantic fields of the given words is based on their semantic classification within the Historical Thesaurus of English. This analysis is based on the occurrences of the individual words as taken from the dictionaries Middle English Dictionary and Dictionary of Old English, and related corpora Dictionary of Old English Corpus and...