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Discourse irony has recently served as a useful tool for studying the socio-cognitive and socio-communicative underpinnings of communication. Yet, the abundance of its usage across cultures makes the study of its occurrence in everyday discourse a worthwhile undertaking in its own right. The present study examines how Czech speakers (N=54) perceive irony in its different forms and identifies some...
The present contribution deals with the grammatical category of number in Czech nouns. On the basis of empirical investigation, we propose the introduction of a new semantic distinction within the forms of nouns, namely the distinction of a simple quantitative meaning versus a pair/group meaning. There are nouns in Czech that typically refer to a pair or to a (commonly encountered) group of entities,...
This article, a review of Václav Cvrček’s book on language regulation and the Concept of Minimal Intervention (2008), focuses on four main issues. (1) For the most part, Cvrček deals with linguists’ intervention into language. He pays little attention to the intervention of individuals in real interactions. (2) In Cvrček’s opinion, linguists should not present the public with prescriptive codifications,...
This article deals with the construction “Karla_Gotta_nemusím” [I don’t have to have Karel Gott] which has recently developed in the Czech and Slovak youth language variety and began spreading to other registers. The contribution is based on a questionnaire carried out among students in Prague, Brno and Trnava. The linguistic analysis is inspired by Construction Grammar. In this specific constructional...
The idea of the Czech Academic Corpus (CAC) came to life in 1971 thanks to the Department of Mathematical Linguistics within the Czech Language Institute. By the mid 1980s, a total of 540,000 words were morphologically and syntactically annotated manually. After the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) – the largest annotated treebank of Czech written texts – was built, the conversion from CAC to PDT...
This article traces the development of the Modern Czech Lexical Archive over the last one hundred years. All Czech monolingual dictionaries and some specialized dictionaries have been created on the basis of this archive. The archive consists of two parts: the older card section (which is of cultural-historical value even today) and the newly-built electronic section (in the form of individual databases)...
The aim of this paper is to thoroughly investigate the morphological marking of comparative and superlative synthetic forms of Czech adjectives and to show the role of frequency in explaining their structure. Based on functional usage-based approaches (the role of frequency effects and the relationship between frequency asymmetries and universal morphosyntactic asymmetries) and on natural written...
The article deals with specific features pertaining to the verbal categories of person, mood (partially voice), tense and aspect in illocutionary verbs arising from the occurrence of mentioned verbs in performatively used utterances (in the basic form of the 1st person singular indicative, present tense imperfective). The notion of performativity is explained as a pragmatic value of an utterance,...
The present article deals with a number of issues relevant to neurolinguistics and, to a certain extent, also to psycholinguistics. First, it describes the development of neurolingustics from primarily clinically oriented studies in aphasiology to a new discipline focusing on language production and comprehension in healthy subjects, and locates neurolinguistics within contemporary cognitive science...
Since the publication of the Concept of Minimal Intervention (Cvrček 2008a, Cvrček 2008b), three critical reactions have been published (Adam 2009, Beneš & Prošek 2011, Homoláč & Mrázková 2011) defending the current language policy (based on the Theory of Language Cultivation). This paper discusses the most important points of their criticism: axiology in the concepts of language regulation,...
This article, drawing upon Juraj Dolník’s book on the theory of standard language with regard to standard Slovak (2010), concentrates on the question of the sources of standard variety and the problem of objectivity of scientific knowledge. Reconsidering Dolník’s concept of norm critically, it places emphasis on the fact that linguistic norms, as a part of social norms, are constituted in interactions,...
The concept of the complex sentence element (clause) is anchored in the formalsemantic level description. This description follows up on the classical approach, from form to meaning, but is based on K. Svoboda’s original concept of the complex sentence, among others. The concept of the complex sentence element on the level of complex sentence elements corresponds to the concept of the verbal clause...
The article is concerned with the critical analysis of some aspects of the methodology and language theory on which Mluvnice současné češtiny [Grammar of Contemporary Czech] (Cvrček et al. 2010) is based. First, the statement by the authors of Mluvnice současné češtiny concerning the character of the description of language and its relationship to reality is criticized. Specifically, it is argued...
The paper is a critical hermeneutics of space during the period of Stalinism in Poland (1949–1953). It utilizes qualitative research to analyze spatial relations in Stalinist-era press propaganda through a paradigm based on Michel Foucault’s oeuvre on space and power, as well as Marcel Danesi’s work on the ontology of metaphor. The analysis traces the manipulation of space by Stalinist propaganda,...
The first part of the article presents various approaches to the functions of proper names in literature and lists those which are most commonly encountered in literary onomastics. The primary theoretical point of departure is based on German (K. Gutschmidt, V. Birus, D. Lamping, F. Debus), Polish (A. Wilkoń) and Czech (M. Knappová, S. Pastyřík) scholarly works. The second, analytical, part of the...
The investigation of intertextuality in the Czech scholarly milieu is traditionally demarcated by the Bakhtinian-Kristevan “broad” approach on the one hand, and by the Nitra School’s “technical” approach on the other. Nevertheless, it seems that one of the few Czech contributions to the topic, embodied in Lubomír Doležel’s conception of fictional worlds, namely in the notion of transduction, remains...
This paper demonstrates the mutual relations between the various “voices” in Czech folk songs and the way in which these voices can be identified. The introductory section characterizes the specific features of the songs: the concision and condensation of their structure, as well as their emotionality of expression. The second section is devoted to the analysis of a selected corpus of folk songs from...
The article analyzes ironic interpretation in extracts from news interviews on British and Israeli television, specifically ironic criticism addressed to breaches of interactional conventions. In doing so, it elaborates on the notion of echoic mention of a prior utterance, thought or norm (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 1981, Wilson & Sperber 1992), and highlights the intrinsic relations it maintains...
The author discusses the problem of the semantic value of verse structure and its importance for the interpretation of poetry. Various metrical forms acquire their stylistic distinctness and profile, and become elements of the semiotic system of a given culture. Intertextual allusions to these metrical forms are to be treated as vehicles of meaning and are very important for the interpretation of...
The paper deals with attributes of parody as a textual phenomenon, the features of which are substantially determined by the intertextual relationship to the object of parody (pretext). Definitions of parody, though they have a common core (work that imitates pretext and at the same time transforms it to make the final effect humorous or critical and polemical), allow for great variability of conceptions...
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