The paper uses two novels by the contemporary Czech female writer Anna Bolavá for the research of authorial production of proper names. First it describes the novels and its „landscape of proper names“; then it presents an interview with the authoress on proper names used in the novels. The paper tries to show that this method can yield new relevant knowledge on the production of literary proper names as well as on the writer’s poetics; besides, it is useful as a corrective of mis- and overinterpretation.
The article deals with text changes made by Czech realist writer K. V. Rais (1859–1926) in three of his short stories in the 1920s. Following the standard principles of Czech textology, it tries to distinguish individual style-motivated changes from those of purely linguistic (language-culture) nature. It argues that the latter, conforming to the linguistic ideals of his age, are not contrary to the author’s creative intentions.
Karel V. Rais is an exemplary representative of realism not only in poetics but also in selection and use of proper names. The action in his short stories takes place in an authentic landscape, the setting itself having either the authentic or a realistic name. The characters, as well as the individuals mentioned in the characters’ speech, bear common names and realistic, often even regionally typical surnames. In the characters’ speech, and to a large extent in the narrator’s part, they are referred to by hypocorisms and unofficial surname forms.
This is a critical assessment of the claims and arguments given in the article by Čermák, Sgall, and Vybíral (2006). Examining individual statements in this article, the present paper finds, among others, that 1) there is not enough evidence in the article for what is said about the history and the present state of language management in the Czech Republic as well as about the treatment of the Czech language in schools; 2) existing norms of language communication are ignored, as are the social and cultural roles of literary Czech; and 3) the article fails to clearly explain its central concept of “standard” language.
The paper, after tidying up the terminology concerning graphic and oral communication, summarizes the main theses of Josef Vachek’s theory of written (as opposed to spoken) language. This theory is then criticized for the following aspects: the lack of distinction between norm and system, the presupposition of a universal norm and a universal function of all written as opposed to all spoken utterances, and empirical inadequacy. In this last point, the critique is supported by the results of psycholinguistic research on reading as presented in the literature, with special attention devoted to the role of phonological coding.
The article discusses the formation, collocations, meanings, and spelling of ordinal numbers derived from numbers which are rational but not whole, namely from n a půl (n and a half). The analysis is based primarily on corpus data and partly on internet research.
The paper describes and analyzes (using data from the written corpus SYN v7) sentences in which the relators krom(ě) and mimo express the meanings of extension and exclusion and at the same time do not assign case to the following noun. It does not aim for the word-class classification of the mentioned relators or their insertion into a ready-made syntactic model, but rather observes in particular the form of non-standard constructions with krom(ě) and mimo as well as their semantic role, their position in relation to the second and controlling nodes, and the identity/non-identity of their form and semantic role with the form and semantic role of the second node. The paper attempts to summarize the basic properties of non-standard krom(ě)/mimo constructions with the meanings of extension and exclusion, using the apparatus of construction grammar.