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A report from the conference in Warwick, United Kingdom
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While persuasion seems to be present virtually in all texts across cultures, times and registers, in many ways it is primarily religious discourse that adopts persuasion as one of its key instruments to convince the audience of the veracity of the doctrine it presents. The present paper explores Czech and English scripted sermons, particularly their closing passages, in respect of the persuasive strategies employed. The main emphasis is placed on how preachers combine the three components of Aristotelian appeal and how such layering may enhance persuasion. The corpus-based analysis shows that the sophisticated structure of the closing passages of the sermons is capable of creating the desired persuasive effect, presenting the doctrine (logos), building the preacher’s credibility and authority (ethos) as well as evoking emotions (pathos). Such an intricate interplay of the Aristotelian components thus leads the audience to the desired understanding and to a more effective reception of the truth presented, and, ultimately, to persuasion. It follows that unlike the rather rigid persuasive structure of Czech sermon closings (viz. L-E-P), English closing passages exhibit a much greater diversity.
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The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly it provides a detailed overview of the canonical approach to inflection (following Corbett 2007; 2009; 2015); secondly it attempts to analyze, within this approach, a typologically interesting phenomenon of mixed perfective auxiliation systems attested in a wide array of Italo-Romance dialects. First, the paper introduces the key notions of Canonical Typology (cf. Bond 2019) applied to inflectional morphology, along with a proposed working Czech terminology of basic terms such as requirements of form etc. Second, the paper proceeds to show that mixed systems, where two auxiliary verbs (corresponding to the derivatives of the Latin verbs habere/ esse) alternate within one and the same paradigm, representing a further way in which periphrastic exponence “splits” the inflectional realization of a lexeme. These systems thus constitute yet another interesting non-canonical inflectional phenomenon worth exploring from the perspective of Canonical Typology.
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The present article is a corpus-based study of the get-passive in British English. The theoretical part focuses on the general characteristics of the get-passive, pointing out the differences between the be- and the get-passive. The empirical part analyzes 100 examples of passive constructions with get, excerpted from the Araneum Anglicum Minus corpus, from syntactic-semantic and pragmatic aspects. Our study shows that the get-passive proves to be a dynamic construction, occurring almost exclusively with dynamic verbs. Next, the subject of get-passives tends to have an agentive role, rather than the role of an affected participant. Finally, the analysis demonstrates that the get-passive occurs most frequently in situations with either an adverse or beneficial effect on the subject or person concerned. The article provides a syntactic-semantic analysis of English get-passives and aims to contribute to a more detailed description of this passive construction in contemporary British English.
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The paper aims to explore changes occurring in the Czech academic writing tradition during the past fifty years. The focus is on Linguistics research articles written by Czech scholars and published in peer-reviewed Czech linguistic journals. Czech research papers published in the 1970s adhere to writing conventions of the so-called Teutonic intellectual style (Galtung, 1981) typical of Germany and other Central and East-European countries. The influence of the Teutonic style gradually diminished during the 1980s and in the early 1990s Czech academic style began to conform to norms and conventions of the Anglophone academic writing tradition. The strongest influence of the Anglophone style is apparent in Czech articles published after 2000. This corresponds to the general tendency of minor discourse communities to adopt the Anglophone academic style since English has become the language of international academic communication.
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The aim of the paper is to analyze semantic features of the definite, indefinite and zero articles in European and Brazilian Portuguese and to attempt to clarify the criteria governing their use. Their application is determined by the semantic nature and syntactic function of the noun, but also by types of context in which the article can acquire deictic or anticipatory meaning. However, the article is also an operator of the semantic processes of determination and has several functions; it narrows the semantic breadth of the noun, restricting it to a specific meaning or, for example, to the function of countability, but, conversely, also extending it, raising its semantic meaning to a higher degree of abstraction and generality. Thus, in accordance with these functions, the article can assume referential, attributive, specific, non-specific, countable, uncountable or material meaning, and, last but not least, a generic one. The paper aims to illustrate situations where this is occurring and to outline possibilities for substitution. In respect of the latter, it aims to demonstrate that both dichotomous and synonymous relationships may exist between individual articles.
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The paper describes the principles and structure of the one-million-word DIA1900 Corpus built at the Institute of the Czech National Corpus (CNC) in Prague, focused on the language of Czech texts published in the years 1851 to 1900. The DIA1900, planned for publication by June 2020 and to be followed by the DIA1850 (a corpus built around the same principles, with the focus on the first half of the 19th century), observes both the balanced representation of the three major text types (belles lettres — journalistic texts — technical/scientific texts) and the system of morphological tagging implemented in the synchronic corpora included in the CNC project, thus facilitating the diachronic comparison of two stages in the development of Czech. A brief description is given of the structure of the morphological terminology used in the lemmatisation and tagging of the corpus, and of two tools designed to help search the 19th century texts with their fluctuating orthographic consistency combined with phonological and morphological variation characteristics of the language of the period: (1) a multiple select/suggest feature (reminding the user of the existence of non-standard orthographic and phonological variants of the lemma found in the corpus before the lemma search is started) and (2) the position attribute (informing the user of the ambiguous status of a word in the text, resulting from a misprint or misspelling, damaged page etc.).
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This paper focuses on the distinction between luxury and necessary borrowings from English (i.e. Anglicisms) and the relationship between these borrowings, the domains in which they are used and their pronunciation and orthography. I put forward a hypothesis that the ratio of luxury and necessary borrowings differs within different domains and that this has an impact on the pronunciation and orthography of the borrowings; I tested this hypothesis by analysing 500 Anglicisms. The results confirm that (1) there is a difference in the distribution of luxury or necessary Anglicisms within different domains and (2) necessary Anglicisms are more often pronounced according to their original orthography than luxury Anglicisms. However, I also detected a strong association between the period in which Anglicisms were borrowed and the manner in which they were adopted; therefore, it was not possible to identify a direct link between the type of borrowing and pronunciation, and further research is required to confirm the above hypothesis.
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The present study focuses on strategies which speakers employ when gesturing in a shared articulatory space. Using data from English and Czech multimodal corpora of spontaneous business meetings, we conducted a qualitative analysis of gestural patterns based on two strategies: alignment and elaboration of gestures representing abstract/conceptual objects. We show that speakers make use of both strategies in the context of co-operative meaning formation (with various pragmatic functions) and that the notions of alignment and elaboration provide useful analytic and descriptive tools for the study of human interaction from a multimodal perspective.
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The article presents a corpus-based study of potential discourse functions of the French adverb actuellement similar to those of the English adverb actually. Despite their common etymological origins nowadays these two adverbs have different meanings. While the available literature assigns only the functions of a temporal adverbial to the French actuellement, the English actually has developed functions of an adversative or elaborative discourse marker in addition to those of a disjunct and subjunct. Nonetheless, some of the occurrences of actuellement attested in synchronic monolingual corpora (Lextutor-Parlé and Araneum Francogallicum Minus) suggest that the French adverb may also perform contrastive discourse functions, in particular in connection with the conjunction mais. Actuellement may also serve to introduce a new topic, even though this discourse-organizing function is represented only marginally in the corpora.
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This study deals with issues of determiners in different types of nominal anaphora in Spanish andCzech. It analyzes the choice between demonstratives and the definite article in Spanish. As thereis no definite article in Czech, speakers choose between demonstratives and the noun without anydeterminer. Our goal is to identify the factors that influence the choice of determiners in both languages and the similarities and differences between them. The results show that the situation in bothlanguages is complex and that the definite article in Spanish sometimes corresponds to the null-determiner in Czech and sometimes to a demonstrative.
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The paper addresses most of the current problems in phraseology. General observations on the universal character of idioms and the major aspects of the topic are followed by critical analysis ofa prototypical statement about the essential nature of idioms. Much of the analysis centres aroundthe notions of analogy and anomaly. The paper considers the form of the idiom, its analysability,modifiability and metaphoric character, and then challenges the current views on these. Next, thediscussion of the idiom and its meaning returns to metaphor and hypothetical decomposition andbriefly summarises some of the semantic features of idioms. It suggests that the function of idioms,and the issues of their form and meaning, are best revealed through the character and type of theirtextual anomalies. The author then presents his views on idioms and their study, referring to analogyand anomaly, regular and irregular language and especially language combinatorics. His approachwas tested on data collected for a comprehensive four-volume dictionary of Czech idioms. The paper describes types of combinations and the crucial notions of collocational and virtual paradigms.It offers and exemplifies definitions of idioms and a test for the identification of idioms in text, anda desideratum for further testing of the proposed theory.
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A Fala is a language spoken in three villages on the border of Spain and Portugal. The three villages respectively attest the three varieties of the language: Valverdeñu in Valverde del Fresno, Lagarteiru in Eljas, and Mañegu in San Martín de Trevejo. This article describes the legal status of the language, its exclusion from the public education system, and the sociolinguistic situation in the three villages. The main objective is to discuss issues regarding the orthographic standardization of A Fala. The subtopics include the scope of the standard, the authority to create the standard, and two approaches to standardization: the standard as a model and the standard as general usage. Since there is no prestigious variety of A Fala which could serve as a model, the latter approach to standardization seems to be more feasible than the former. Endeavours to standardize the language should also take into account that A Fala is an independent language and not a dialect of one of the Romance languages.
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The paper examines English translation counterparts of Czech sentences containing the particles copak and jestlipak. These two particles share the expressive and intensifying postfix -pak. They are elements of the ‘third syntactical plan’ (or level) which consists of “components which place the content of the sentence in relation to the individual and his special ability to perceive, judge and assess” (Poldauf 1964: 242). The third syntactical plan is fully developed in Czech but to a much lesser degree in English. The aim of this paper is to identify and describe specific English means which correspond to these Czech particles in terms of their function. English counterparts of Czech sentences with copak/jestlipak are excerpted from the fiction component of the InterCorp parallel corpus. As opposed to the lexical means in Czech, the third syntactical plan in English is shown to rely on syntactic constructions, above all on different types of interrogative sentences. The English counterparts are used, at the same time, as markers of the functions of the Czech sentences containing copak and jestlipak, thereby further specifying the functional description of the two Czech particles. Apart from their expressivity and emotionally evaluative nature, the particles are shown to have two main functions: establishing contact and serving as means of epistemic modality.
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Among linguists there is a lively interest in phraseology, which is still a relatively young branch oflinguistics. However, its basic descriptive application, phraseography, whose task is to collect anddescribe phraseological expressions of a given language, is still a rather neglected area, at least interms of integrating theory into practice. The paper reports on two relatively modern phraseologicaldictionaries of German and takes up the question of their user-friendliness. It examines the notionof phraseme in these dictionaries against the background of František Čermák’s conception ofphraseology. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that both dictionaries are in need of substantial improvementsif they are to become really effective tools for resolving language problems, which is the essentialfunction of every dictionary. Nonetheless, some of the special features of Deutsche Idiomatik by HansSchemann deserve recognition and make the dictionary exceptional. For this reason, the papervoices the need for a discussion of Schemann’s phraseographical works in Czech linguistics, or, moreprecisely, in Czech phraseography. In addition, the paper comments on DUDEN 11: Redewendungen.Wörterbuch der deutschen Idiomatik which is probably the most popular German dictionary of this type.
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