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General consensus in linguistics is that language context (or “co-text”) plays crucial role in describing linguistic properties of language items. Isolated units are, as a corollary to this statement, inherently ambiguous (polysemous and/or polyfunctional). In this paper we describe the most influential forces leading to disambiguation of language units, specifically the role of n-gram length on its ambiguity.
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This paper compares the state of Czech legal order before and after the reform of the Private law. The analysis is based on the linguistic investigation of corpora containing legal texts. We analyze two corpora of Czech legal texts and show the relation between the changes (amendments and modifications) in the wording of law acts and their transparency. Our work explores changes on the level of words, collocations and legal terms. The tools used in this research are the corpus manager Manatee/Bonito with integrated Word Sketch Engine and Czech morphological analyzer Majka. Our results thus obtained lead us to conclude that the functionality of the Czech legal system is under threat from its own opacity and obfuscation.
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The study presents some corpus-based results about dispositional reflexive constructions in Czech. One type of Czech dispositional reflexives expresses the evaluation of a mental state with regard to an event associated with the predicate (Snad se mu žije lehčeji.). The evaluation of experiencing an underlying event in a particular way is usually encoded lexically by an adverbial phrase, the licensing conditions of which have not yet been investigated both within Western formal approaches (“manner adverb”, “some adverbial modification”) and within the Slavic grammatical tradition. Based on the analysis of corpus data, the formal (lexical, syntactic and prosodic) properties of this (explicit or implicit) adverbial argument will be examined. Then the frequency distribution of the adverbial argument (initial, preverbal, postverbal, final) within the clause will be established. Attention will also be given to the frequency of specific adverbs in both affirmative and negative clauses. Furthermore, an explanatory account of the adverbial selection in dispositional reflexives will be developed. When a reflexive verbal form is combined with an adverb (θ-identification), different main types of manner adverbs need to be distinguished, according to the semantic feature of ‘activation’ of the adverb [eval] and the θ-grid (<θ-Exp>, <θ- x>): obligatory evaluative (nerado ‘unwillingly‘), facultative evaluative (výborně ‘excellently‘) pragmatically evaluative (přirozeně ‘naturally‘) and non-evaluative adverbs (rozhořčeně ‘indignantly‘, rychle ‘quickly‘). Within the class of evaluative adverbs, one can further differentiate between primary evaluative adverbs (dobře ‘well‘) and secondary evaluative adverbs (vesele ‘cheerfully‘), according to their semantic structure. The behaviour of adverbs that do not define their pole as either positive or negative (normálně ‘normally‘, nějak ‘somehow‘), or those that can be tied contextually to both poles (zvláštně ‘oddly‘) will be outlined briefly. Finally, the proposed paper will discuss three distinct functions of the modifier sám, -a, -o (‘alone‘) in syntactic reflexives: autocausative, autoagentive and – last but not least – dispositional.
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This paper discusses the possibilities of the research of translated Czech as well as so-called translation universals in Czech. It introduces a monolingual comparable corpus Jerome specifically designed at the Institute of the Czech National Corpus to meet the requirements of translation studies researchers. The case study of simplification presents the results of examining this translation universal in translated Czech and shows the advantages as well as disadvantages of the quantitative approach.
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Review of Svobodová, Jindřiška – Bláha, Ondřej – Dobrotová, Ivana – Warzecha, Adam (2020): The Power of Speech. A Critical Reading of Media and Political Texts. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.
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The paper uses various corpora to scrutinize the uses of lomeno 'slash' in Czech. The word lomeno is sometimes used when the name of the slash sign is spelled out explicitly, and it is used in mathematical operations. The word has, however, two more uses not registered in Czech linguistic literature: it can function as a coordinator, typically (but not necessarily) with the meaning of 'or'; it can also be used similarly to the English slash when conjoining two coreferential words or phrases (i.e., as an "adordinator" or apposition marker).
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The famous Czech printer Daniel Adam of Veleslavín (1546–1599), as well as most of his fellow typographers, not only published previously unreleased works, but also prepared a number of re-editons. Our research is focused on the changes made by Veleslavín in his re-edition of Martin Kuthen’s Chronicle of the Founding of the Czech Lands. The paper concludes by arguing that Kuthen’s original text from 1539 was reprinted by Veleslavín in 1585 rather precisely, and changes were made in an attempt to systematically treat phenomena that vary at random in the first edition. This resulted, for example, in a quantitative reduction of minuscule digraphs, in the declining occurrence of the prothetic consonant v- before the phoneme /o/, as well as in a diminished usage of the auxiliary verb to be in the third person of the past tense. Nevertheless, a few features (e.g., an increasing usage of the letters combination «uo» instead of the more progressive letter «ů» to spell the vowel /u:/ from Old Czech /o:/) were employed by Veleslavín most probably to keep the archaic aura of Kuthen’s Chronicle, otherwise modernized by him in several aspects.
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The paper introduces current trends in speaker identification using phonetic methods. After providing a short historical background, it describes various attempts which have been made at more objective listening analysis in forensic contexts. One of the main aims of the paper is to propose a protocol for listening analysis in the Czech forensic context, called PRIM. The PRIM protocol combines the advantages, and mitigates the drawbacks, of existing approaches to analytical listening and, most importantly, includes all speech and voice dimensions relevant for the auditory comparison of speakers in Czech. Audio examples of some of the described voice qualities are featured on an accompanying webpage. The role of acoustic analyses in speaker comparison is also discussed, and the main parameters used for such comparisons are briefly introduced. These include various uses of vowel formants and spectral characteristics of noise in obstruent sounds at the segmental level, as well as melodic and temporal characteristics and acoustic correlates of various voice quality settings at the suprasegmental level. Automatic approaches to speaker identification are also briefly mentioned. Finally, the paper relates the current situation in forensic phonetics to the ongoing paradigm shift in forensic science generally, and in the Czech Republic specifically.
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The fundamental frequency (f0) is considered a salient feature in the acoustic structure of the speech signal. The objective of our study was to investigate the f0 characteristics of speakers when reciting poetry. We recorded 24 speakers, who prepared and read out two poems by the same author but of a different character both in form and in content. The central research question was whether we could find any stable characteristics of the speakers that would be present in both texts. A complementary question of equal importance concerns the identification of features that consistently differ in the two texts. We wanted to know to what extent the differences in the structure and mood of the two poems alter the f0 parameters produced by individual speakers. Sixteen analyses were carried out, of which seven can be considered standard, while nine are less commonly used and, therefore, worth exploring. The results suggest that various methods of inquiry have their merits, and a combination of approaches is commendable. The best performing variables in our sample were the f0 baseline, the declination trendline and the proportion of continuation melodemes used by a speaker. These three characteristics are presented in a 3D display.
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The study investigates the possible identity of Vladimír Vašek (= Petr Bezruč), author of Silesian Songs and The Blue Underwing, and Pavel Hrzánský, who authored Poems: Opus no. 5, a book of verse bearing some similarities to the future development of Vašek’s poetic self. The research is carried out via a novel authorship attribution method based on the investigation of numbers and numerals. This new investigation is complemented by the standardly employed MFC and MFW analyses. All the inquiries corroborate that Vašek’s authorship of Hrzánský’s poems is implausible. If the Hrzánský−Bezruč link is to be maintained in literary scholarship, we need to admit an extreme stylistic transformation between the two personae.
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From the linguistic point of view, anonymous letters represent valuable textual material. Nevertheless, they are mostly unavailable to the majority of linguists due to their strict confidentiality. This article attempts to illustrate the specific character of such a linguistic analysis – authorʼs identification – with an older case: a series of defamatory and threatening letters concerning one family.
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