Jenny Cheshire, current editor in chief of Language in Society, stated that there is a bias of masculine terms and referents in the English language (1985, p. 22). This poses a problem, both linguistically and socially, and conscious language reforms need to be imposed in order for the bias to drastically be countered (1985, p. 22). In the past decades, gender-neutral terms, such as chairperson has been gaining ground in English, particularly in business discourse, and are contributing to create a more gender-neutral language. According to Cheshire (2008), media discourse is enormously influential (p.9) in the way we communicate, and this study investigates patterns in the use of chairperson and salesperson, as well as historically male professions priest and manager and female professions nurse and secretary. The data for this study is taken from the TIME Magazine Corpus. The results of this study show that masculine gender collocates appear commonly with the historically female professions and conversely for the historically male professions which appear more often with feminine collocates. Furthermore, through analysis of 1,000 instances of the terms in the corpus, it is noted that there are differences as to how the professions are connected with other words as well. Sexuality, nationality and physicality are ways in which the collocates of the terms differ. It is noted that, over time, there have been both increases and decreases in how gender collocates appear with the terms and that the frequency in usage of the feminine, masculine and gender-neutral terms have all been noted to vary in usage over the past century in the selected discourse.

This thesis presents a contrastive analysis of the English pragmatic markers now and well and their Czech translation equivalents. The overall material is based on 200+12 occurrences that were excerpted from the electronic parallel corpus InterCorp, with all the instances appearing in fictional dialogues. The contrastive study focuses on the role of translation as a means to understand better the nature of the two pragmatic markers. It analyzes specific marker-collocate sequences and the respective Czech translation equivalents. It demonstrates that certain marker-collocate sequences have a tendency to be translated by specific Czech translation equivalents and that the role of other factors, such as position in discourse structure, prosody, and broader context, play in this respect an important role as well. All this and the finding that both now and well share certain Czech translation equivalents add to the multifunctionality of both now and well and prove that a combination of other factors is needed to comprehend the use of the two pragmatic markers in English. The comparison of the Czech translation equivalents in this thesis to the Czech translation equivalents in the Czech-English dictionary Lingea attempted to provide an example of how a contrastive analysis can be useful in Lexicography.

<p>For many non-native speakers of English it can be difficult to distinguish semantic differences between near-synonyms. In order to create idiomatically correct sentences in a language it is important to know which word to use in a specific context. This study deals with the emotion adjectives <em>terrified, petrified </em>and <em>horrified, </em>which all refer to an emotion of fear of something that can or will happen. The present research aims at exploring the meanings of these adjectives, in American English and British English, and to discover which words these adjectives tend to collocate with. To obtain data a British Corpus and an American corpus were used with fiction and newspaper as subcorpora. A quantitative method was used where the frequencies of <em>terrified, petrified</em> and <em>horrified</em> were counted. Secondly, the most frequent left- and right-hand collocates were studied. Due to the variety of collocations found, it was discovered that the meanings between the adjectives differ somewhat. The literal meaning of <em>petrified</em> is to be hard as a stone while the non-literal meaning is to be extremely afraid. The literal meanings of <em>terrified</em> and <em>horrified </em>are to be very afraid, but unlike <em>terrified,</em> <em>horrified</em> also seems to refer to being shocked. It can be stated that in accordance with how vague the adjective is in its meaning the more frequently it is used, i.e. <em>terrified</em> is the most frequent adjective in all subcorpora and in both varieties of English most frequently used while <em>petrified</em> is least frequently used.</p>

For many non-native speakers of English it can be difficult to distinguish semantic differences between near-synonyms. In order to create idiomatically correct sentences in a language it is important to know which word to use in a specific context. This study deals with the emotion adjectives terrified, petrified and horrified, which all refer to an emotion of fear of something that can or will happen. The present research aims at exploring the meanings of these adjectives, in American English and British English, and to discover which words these adjectives tend to collocate with. To obtain data a British Corpus and an American corpus were used with fiction and newspaper as subcorpora. A quantitative method was used where the frequencies of terrified, petrified and horrified were counted. Secondly, the most frequent left- and right-hand collocates were studied. Due to the variety of collocations found, it was discovered that the meanings between the adjectives differ somewhat. The literal meaning of petrified is to be hard as a stone while the non-literal meaning is to be extremely afraid. The literal meanings of terrified and horrified are to be very afraid, but unlike terrified, horrified also seems to refer to being shocked. It can be stated that in accordance with how vague the adjective is in its meaning the more frequently it is used, i.e. terrified is the most frequent adjective in all subcorpora and in both varieties of English most frequently used while petrified is least frequently used.