The works of fiction written in Czech by Věra Linhartová (b. 1938) in 1957–65 and published in 1964–68 – namely, Rozprava o zdviži (1965), a short novella, and Prostor k rozlišení (1964), Meziprůzkum nejblíž uplynulého (1964), Přestořeč (1966), and Dům daleko (1968), four collec- tions of short stories – place extraordinary emphasis on the ontological dimension of utterance. With this writing Linhartová communicates the idea that every fact, by virtue of being named, is ‘summoned to life’ and becomes understandable for the persona; the world manifests itself to humankind in words. Thus, if one succeeds in expressing one’s conception in speech – or, to be more precise, one’s conception of what is being communicated – one becomes conscious of one’s Self, of one’s existence. If one is to express in words one’s immediate conception, one’s speech must be transformed together with one’s Self. The speaking persona thus also becomes conscious of its identity in its plurality in speech, reflecting itself in its various forms and metamorphoses. It is precisely this distinctive function, this differentiation, which is the condition for sovereign selfhood.
The paper presents a methodology for constructing an image of someone or something in phraseology. This methodology is then applied to Czech phrasemes from the thematic unit “designations of fairytale creatures”. The main aim of the contribution is to show that any topics seeking to capture the picture of the world in phraseology require a specified semantic-functional way of analyzing and classifying excerpts, because other criteria for classifying phrasemes and analyzing them would have practically no informational value for such research.
This contribution focuses on phrasemes with an intensification function. The emphasis is laid on phrasemes with the so-called base word čert ‘devil’, král ‘king’, and drak ‘dragon’. We will attempt to show that the bearer of an intensification function is in some phrasemes the base word itself and in other cases the whole proposition. On several illustrative examples we will prove different formal types of phraseological units which perform an intensification function with the given base words. Furthermore, we will attempt to show that an identical or similar form of phraseological units differing only in the base word (although from one thematic unit) need not have an identical or similar semantic-functional structure.
While exploring the motivationality of Czech phraseological units, this article focuses undivided attention on ‘the motivation of word collocations’ induced by the relation between individual components and the phraseological whole, paying no regard to motivation inspired by phonetics, word formation, or semasiology/onomasiology. It is generally acknowledged that, in most cases, phraseological units are not directly and measurably motivated by their components. Our aim is to evidence that direct motivation can be traced in some phraseological groupings performing the denominating function and in phrasemes comprising a particular formal structure which will be described and supported by examples.
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