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The research in linguistic aphasiology has been dominated by structuralist, rule-based approaches to the study of langauge. However, recent work has shown that analyses based in constructivist, usage-based frameworks can provide explanations to patterns of language processing in aphasia that are difficult to accommodate in structuralist models. The present work follows up on these findings and aims to provide additional evidence for the benefits of the usage-based model by using data from Czech speakers with aphasia, an understudied language in this context. The aims of the study were threefold: to create a collection of samples of aphasic connected speech available to other researchers, to provide a description of the patterns of aphasic discourse production in Czech, and, most importantly, to show potential benefits of usage-based construction grammar for aphasia research. A corpus of the speech of eleven persons with fluent and non-fluent aphasia of varying degrees of severity was created. The corpus consist of more than 23000 word position produced by speakers with aphasia in tasks used to elicit conversational, narrative, descriptive, and procedural discourse. The corpus is lemmatized and morphologically tagged and the transcripts are aligned with audio recordings. A smaller sample of three,...

Experimental items

This thesis is concerned with structural iconicity and its effects on possessive classification. The Iconicity-of-distance hypothesis argues that the linguistic distance between a possessor and a possessum reflects the conceptual distance, and is therefore smaller in inalienable possession. The role of distance iconicity in language processing was tested using the artificial language learning paradigm. An experiment was designed to investigate whether speakers of Czech will learn an iconically structured grammar better. The experiment conducted with 40 participants did not show significant differences between the two experimental groups. However, the evidence is inconlusive and the data suggest that structural iconicity could influence processing. The results also suggest that speaker of Czech are able to use alienability as a category of language.

AbstractAbstractAbstract The presented work is focused on the Prague school of typology, an approach formulated by Vladimír Skalička and pursued later by Petr Sgall or Jaroslav Popela. In the centre of the approach stands the formulation of 5 idealised language types or clusters of linguistic features. The combinatorial possibilities of these types are to be observed in the languages of the world. Prague school of typology has been a target of critique mainly as a holistic approach and due to its problematic work with typological data. The work is concerned with the possibilities of testing the validity of some of the proposals of the approach in question by means of the methods of modern typology. The possible correlation of morphological exponence and NP agreement was tested on a representative sample of 47 languages. The index of exponence and agreement was obtained for each language in the sample. No significant correlation between the indices was found. Both the symmetrical "favourability" of cumulation and agreement and "dis-favourability" of separation and agreement was ruled out. There was not sufficient data to prove or rule out the asymmetrical relationship between cumulation and agreement. KeywordsKeywordsKeywordsKeywords agreement - morphological exponence - Prague School of Typology -...

Thesis is dedicated to the manifestation of the Turkish language reform using the methods od corpus linguistics. Aim of the thesis is to find out for the selected pairs of original Ottoman words and their Turkish equivalents to what extent are both variant sused in contemporary Turkish texts and to assess if any of the pairs was not functionally differentiated and if the choice was influenced by any contextual factors. In the thesis, we examine the frequency of adjectives, whether one of the variants is more or less used; Ottoman variants are used more often. In the case of pairs, we examine the frequency and preference of variants in types of text, in most cases one variant is preferred in all types of text, but some of them were differentiated. In the case of the pair siyasal and siyasi, on 500 randomly generated sentences, we examine possessors and adjective suffixes in the sentence bound to the possessor, as well as adjectives with the suffix -sel and -i, which are not bound to it and are in the sentence. In the first case, in most cases, the suffixes are matching, in the second case, there suffixes are matching with the word siyasal, but not with the word siyasi. Key words Turkish language reform, corpus linguistics, adjective suffix -sel, adjective suffix -i, language purism

This thesis is devoted to the concept of linguistic iconicity and especially to the iconicity of sequence, which suggests that the order of individual forms in language should correspond to the actual order of experience they describe. In particular, I focused on temporal iconicity in complex sentences describing two consecutive events. The most crucial part of this work consists of an experiment based on artificial language learning. During the experiment, participants were presented a language allowing both iconic and non-iconic clause order in complex sentences, and then, based on the knowledge they had gained, produced their own complex sentences describing events they were shown illustrations of. I then examined what the prevalent sentence order in the answers was, which were the most common errors and in which situations they occurred. The results show a slight tendency towards the use of sentence orders which are in accord with the iconicity of sequence hypothesis. Key words: artificial language learning, iconicity, temporal sequence

This bachelor thesis deals with the influence of argument semantics and relative frequency of passive voice on the understanding of Czech passive construction in people with aphasia. The aim of the work is to design an experiment that will examine the factors connected with the agrammatic understanding in Czech, and test it on a group of neurotypic speakers. Theoretical chapters of this thesis are devoted to a general description of aphasia, linguistic aphasiology and manifestations of aphasic syndromes in Czech. They also present the basic results of previous research which examined the understanding of semantically reversible passive sentences in patients with aphasia. In the final theoretical chapter, findings from foreign aphasiological literature, which highlighted the relationship between the level of understanding of complex syntactic structures and their frequency, are discussed. The experimental part of the text focuses on the design of the actual experiment. Based on a corpus analysis, a total of 24 verbs with high and low relative frequency of passive forms were selected, each verb was used in four sentences with different combinations of voice, relative frequency of passive and (in)animacy of patient. To verify comprehension, the self-paced reading method was chosen along with...

The thesis focuses on the processing of morphologically complex words in Czech. It follows up on the previous research in the field of inflectional morphology, in which Czech is minimally represented. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part describes the main theoretical approaches, which are connectionism and dualism. The second part describes an experiment, which was carried out following the previous research and aimed at comparing the claims of the two main approaches. The experiment was conducted on 37 native speakers of Czech aged from eight to eleven. The participants' task was to say as quickly as possible the genitive form of a noun that appeared on the screen of an electronic device in nominative form. The results of the research do not support the dualistic thoughts, but rather support the connectionist view. However, further empirical research is needed for a clear conclusion. Key words speeded production; inflected word form; frequency; language acquisition; inflection

The goal of this thesis is to design an experiment that researches how frequency of use and grammatical structure affect sentence comprehension in speakers with aphasia. An additional objective is to verify this design in an experiment on healthy speakers. Introduction to the topic of aphasia is pro- vided from a linguistic perspective, followed by a description of usage-based approach to aphasiology, which will be utilised in the practical part of this the- sis. The practical part of the thesis consists of a corpus-based research on the use of reflexive constructions in Czech, followed by an experiment that tests comprehension of such sentences in healthy speakers. Using corpus data, a set of experimental items that can be used to test the comprehension of reflexive sentences was created. The experiment verified that the healthy participants evaluate the grammaticality of these sentences as expected in the vast majority of cases. The results of the experiment show a weak effect of sentence struc- ture and no effect of frequency of use and verb lemma on comprehension. This indicates that healthy speakers find these sentences easy to process and that the design is valid. Based on these results, a design of an experiment that tests reflexive sentence comprehension in Czech speakers with aphasia is proposed. 1

Unrestricted Abstract (in English): Subject of the proposed work is the analysis of means for expressing language attitudes in the corporate environment, the research specifically focuses on Turkish department of one of the international companies based in Prague. In addition to native speakers of Turkish, speakers of Azeri also work in this department. As both of these Turkic languages are to some extent intelligible, the contact of these languages occurs regularly both in work related and in regular communication between the employees of both nationalities. However, Turkish dominates both in terms of the number of speakers in the group and its prestige. The thesis examines language attitudes in this selected group, with emphasis on language phenomena that indicate dominance of one language over another. The work also evaluates the issue of data collection using so-called participatory observation. The work is based on ethnographic premises, during the research data were obtained using recordings and questionnaires, at the same time the research is based on available scientific literature.

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to identify the degree of differentiation between the comitative and instrumental constructions in collocation with specific verbs in contemporary Swedish. Swedish marks both meanings syn cretically using the preposition med ("with"). There is a tendency to reinforce the comitative reading by adding the adverb tillsammans mea-ning "together", resulting in the construction tillsammans med ("together with"). The method of Distinctive Collexeme Analysis will be applied to a set of 200 verbs that collocate with both variants of the prepositional phrase, having them either as their arguments or as adjuncts. For each combination of a verb and a preposition, 50 complements of the preposi-tion with the highest tf-idf score (term frequency-inverse document frequency) will be selected and marked for animacy. The data comes from 146 Swedish corpora of various genres within Språkbanken. Relevant factors will be both the semantics of the verb and the animacy of the no-minal complement of med. It is assumed that some verbs with particular semantic features tend to prefer one prepositional phrase over the other. Should the tendency for the comitative meaning to be reinforced by ad-ding tillsammans be strong, that would point to a proces of grammaticali-zation in progress. Powered by...

Diplomová práce zjišťuje možnosti využití textových materiálů, zejména učebnic, pro výuku češtiny jako cizího jazyka pro práci terapeutů pacientů s Vycházíme ze zkušeností některých terapeutů, kteří pomocí materiálů pro výuku češtiny jako cizího jazyka kompenzují nedostatek afaziologických materiálů. Teoretická část práce přináší vybraná specifika češtiny jako cizího jazyka a terapie afázií a ukazuje shodné rysy jazykového projevu těchto dvou typů mluvčích. Součástí je také analýza projevu afatickéh připravovaného korpusu českých afatiků a analýza projevu nerodilého mluvčího češtiny. Oba rozbory se opírají o analýzy afatických projevů, které zpracovali lingvističtí odborníci. Praktickou část tvoří kvalitativní výzkum formou polostrukturov českými klinickými logopedy, jehož hlavním cílem bylo zjistit, zda tito terapeuti učebnice češtiny pro cizince používají, zda jsou podle jejich názoru pro terapii afázií vhodné a co by se na takových materiálech mohlo případně upravit, ab afázií užitečné. Zjistili jsme, že užívání učebnic češtiny pro cizince není mezi dotazovanými klinickými logopedy rozšířené. Po určitých úpravách si ale dokáží představit, že by je ve své praxi využili. Ti, kteří s takovými učebnicemi zkušenost v využívají především pro pacienty v chronické fázi nebo pacienty, kteří trpí pouze

The diploma thesis is a part of a good enough sentence processing research. In the theoretical part, I describe the origin of this approach and main research areas - garden- path sentences and noncanonical sentences. The practical part of the thesis introduces three experiments which partially replicate experiments of F. Ferreira (2003), results of these experiments, interpretation and comparation to the results of experiments in English. The Czech results show that Czech speakers unlike English speakers tend to use only heuristic of plausibility and do not use the NVN strategy.

The goal of the submitted paper is analysis of Turkish verbal morpheme -ecek/acak. This morpheme is described and classified by different scholars in various ways (as tense, aspect, or modality), language usage being used scarcely in the description. The presented thesis proposes to perform a corpus study on empirical data, that are interpreted by qualitative methods, and on this basis the author will propose new ways to describe the morpheme. From the methodological perspective will be used the analytical potential of Construction Grammar. The main goal of this paper is to summarize existing literature about this morpheme, evaluate the descriptive adequacy of the traditional description, and eventually suggest description, that would reflect its langauge usage. Secondary aim of this paper is discussion about grammaticography, and the status of descriptive categories vs. comparative concepts in linguistic practice. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)