Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2008. / Advisers: Stephen Sivo, Keith Folse. Includes bibliographical references (p. 172-182).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, Dec., 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2008. / Reproduction of unpublish thesis typescript. Advisers: Stephen Sivo, Keith Folse. Also available as a PDF on the World Wide Web. Includes bibliographical references (p. 172-182).

No description available.

This thesis analyses expletive usage of Czech word to (it). The aim is to contribute to the current description of Czech expletive to in the subject position and to compare it with English expletive subject it. Theoretical part of this thesis is dedicated to definition of the term reference, and other terms associated with it, and referential, modifying and non- referential functions of to in Czech academic literature. Important part of the theoretical background is definition of semantic criteria for identification of the Czech expletive to by Ivana Kolářová. In Czech academic literature, the term expletive is not widely described, therefore this thesis also gives a brief overview of description of English expletive it. For the purposes of comparison of the Czech and English expletives, this thesis is partly dedicated to a description of partial pro-drop languages and to an explanation how it is connected to the Czech language. There are two types of Czech expletive to defined as a basis for a qualitative analysis: formal expletive subject to in raising constructions and inferential expletive subject to. The analysis is based on 300 manually excerpted examples of constructions with expletive subject to from spoken corpora ORAL2013 and ORTOFON. Both types of expletives are described separately on...

(in English): Focal point of presented thesis is concurence of certain lexico-semantic alternations, more specifically of the locative ones. Opening chapters deal with their definition and conception in theoretical frames of FGP and CxG. Following passages concentrate on specification of alternating contructions, their concurence and semantical restriction of alternating verbs. The second, core chapter of the thesis presents a corpus-based, quantitative and qualitative study of several Czech alternating verbs (cpát, balit, nakládat, napouštět, nalévat and plnit). It deals mainly with the question of distrubition of each construction and alternation capacity of aforementioned verbs. It verificates some hypotheses concerning pronominality, number and grammatical complexity of arguments. At the same time it aspires to bring a few new points and perspectives into Czech locative alternation discourse.