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Although 'literary language', i.e. standard language or 'spisovna cestina', was the central notion of the Prague Linguistic Circle's Theory of the Cultivation of Language, it has never been defined. This article deals with the problem of definition of 'literariness', a concept which forms the base for the codification criterion of 'correspondence with the literary norm'. Several attempts to define...
The popularity of dependency-based syntax has grown in the last thirty years, in spite of the fact that phrase-structure-based descriptions have prevailed in so-called mainstream linguistics. Two factors are important here: (i) a growing interest in semantics, which results in the penetration of dependency-based notions into the original phrase-structure-based grammars, (ii) dependency offers a more...
In Czech, as in many other languages, second person plural forms are used as a means of formal address. As in French, and unlike in Russian, a finite verb predicated of the pronoun 'vy' in this usage agrees with its subject in plural, as expected, while participles and predicative adjectives are singular. It is argued that this pattern of hybrid agreement, present both within analytical verb forms...
Slovak logician Pavel Cmorej has recently opened up the question of the nature of logical analysis of natural language in a new way. He shows, for example, that attributing meaning to some meaningful language expression is an a priori and analytic statement, if a language is examined as a given. This is because a meaningful expression is best conceived as a pair consisting of a semi-expression and...
This article deals with the concept of standard variety based on the idea that each variety reflects the relationships between the relevant social forces in a language community. The author presents and analyzes Ammon's model of social forces determining what is standard in a language. Four forces are identified: the norm authorities, who manage language production, the codifiers, who produce grammars...
This article presents an interpretation and critical assessment of Jan Korensky's recent collection of fifteen theoretical interdisciplinary essays (2004). The essays deal with linguistic as well as epistemological, communicative, semiotic and environmentally ethical questions integrated into a unifying philosophical paradigm. An essential component of this philosophical framework is a linguistic...
This article deals with the history of Lithuanian stylistics. In the first part, old Lithuanian literature is presented from the stylistic point of view. Three main styles from the period prior to the 19th century can be identified: the ecclesiastic, the official and the belles-lettres style. The ecclesiastic style holds the dominant position and includes the oldest Lithuanian texts from the 16th...
This article deals with intercultural contact in branches of multinational companies or corporations founded in the Czech Republic by German, Austrian or Swiss owners. Multinational businesses (large ones in particular) are trying to regulate the communication within the company. This is achieved predominantly by introducing an official corporate language in the company, employing people fluent in...
Valency of lexical units (i.e. the sets of their obligatory and optional dependents) constitutes the main link between lexicon and grammar. As handled up to now by J. Panevova and others in the Functional Generative Description, valency provides a very good starting point for the testing of this approach in the Prague Dependency Treebank. The morphemic and especially syntactic annotation of large...
We support Cermak, Sgall and Vybiral's (2005) call for discussion on standard Czech. Based on the empirical data summarized in this paper, we argue that the non-literary varieties of Czech, at least as far as they are used in unofficial public and semi-public discourse, should be considered a part of the colloquial standard Czech rather than 'substandard' (inter)dialects. We emphasize two basic assumptions:...
The great success of Marrism in the Soviet Union during more than 20 years (from 1925-1930 to 1950) cannot be explained on a merely political basis. The life and work of O. M. Freidenberg, a philologist, specialist in the culture of the antiquity, professor at Leningrad University and cousin of B. Pasternak, permit us to propose another explanation: in 1920-1930, Marrist linguistics corresponded to...
The Czech Academic Corpus was created during the 1970s and 1980s at the Czech Language Institute under the supervision of Marie Tesitelova. The main motivation to build it (a total of 540 thousand word tokens) was to obtain the quantitative characteristics of contemporary Czech. The corpus is structurally annotated on two levels - the morphological level and the syntactical-analytical level. The original...
Admitting that certain mistakes in their paper (Cermak, Sgall and Vybiral 2005) have to be corrected, the authors claim that one of the main issues relevant to the present discussion concerns the difference between a book and a short paper which necessarily includes quotations from other writings; these should not be ignored, and the results of the research conducted up until now should be reflected...
The empirical basis of this article is a part of extensive psychosemantic research involving more than 3000 speakers. The first section attempts to objectivize the relationship between a word's communicative dynamism and its acoustic accentuation. Using psychosemantic methods, it is shown that a word which is communicatively dynamic is always additionally perceived by the subjects as accentuated acoustically...
The use of Common Czech in the media is continually growing, and it is quite natural that issues of the standard norm are discussed in Czech linguistic journals. Since the time of Vilem Mathesius, linguists have been aware that the norm of Standard Czech or its codification has moved unduly far from everyday usage. This makes it urgently necessary to pay systematic attention to colloquial usage and...
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