České ekvivalenty anglického předmětu v beletrii a odborném textu

• Authors: Lenka Slunečková

Title variants

EN

CZECH COUNTERPARTS OF THE ENGLISH OBJECT IN FICTION AND ACADEMIC PROSE

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The article focuses on syntactic divergence of the direct object between English and Czech in fiction and academic prose. The degree of divergence was found to be very similar in both styles, reaching approximately 12 %. However, there are significant differences as regards the incidence of individual clause elements functioning as a counterpart of the English object in Czech. In fiction, the most frequent types of divergence are the inclusion of the object into the meaning of the Czech verb, the Czech adverbial (mostly locative) as counterpart, and the Czech subject (mostly in active clauses) as counterpart. The divergence is clearly motivated by typological differences between the two languages, particularly stronger analytical and nominal tendencies of English as opposed to more verbal expression in Czech and a closer correspondence of semantic and syntactic funtions of elements found in Czech, which seems to be connected with its free word order. In academic prose, it is the subject which is the most frequent counterpart of¨the English object, found predominantly in instances with an original English adverbial subject and/or agentive object. The periphrastic passive may be used in Czech. The inclusion into the meaning of the verb occurs less frequently than in fiction. The third most frequent counterpart is the modifier; in this type of divergence, the English verb is dissociated in Czech. These results are due to typical stylistic characteristics of Czech academic writing, including its strong emphasis on nominal elements of the clause.

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, Czech Republic
• Journal: Časopis pro moderní filologii (Journal for Modern Philology)
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 90
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 65-74

Contributors

author

Lenka Slunečková

• Časopis pro moderní filologii, redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v. v. i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic