Department of Czech Studies

Zpracování a vydání publikace bylo umožněno díky finanční podpoře, udělené roku 2009 Mini sterstvem školství, mládeže a tělovýchovy v rámci Rozvojového programu č. 7 projektu Filozofické fakulty Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci: Program na podporu talentovaných studentů a absolventů bezprostředně po ukončení studia.

Substitutional metonymy is generally considered as one of the basic conceptual processes that have the power to indirectly name the reality. The principle of the metonymy is a shift of meaning based on certain internal connections (for metonymy Kövecsses-Radden 1998; Koch, 1999; Peirsman-Geeraerts, 2006; Langacker, 2009). According to the cognitively oriented linguist Laura A. Janda, similar metonymic relationships can be identified in Czech wordformational processes (see Janda, 2010). The base of the study is an idea that between the vehicle and the target, there is a relationship which is similar to the substitutional metonymy. The aim is to apply that perspective on the specific language material. The database of linguistic material was excerpted from two fairy-tales by Karel Čapek (Čapek, 1972). The research has focused on nouns. The analyzed material consists of 193 nouns formed by suffixation, desuffixation, conversion (for conversion in Czech see Bednaříková 2009), as well as the combined processes. The crucial points are the analysis of metonymic relationships and the number of their occurrences in the database of nouns. The most often metonymic patterns for vehicle and target are also presented, as well as the most frequent suffixes. The analysis clearly indicates that they are verbs that have the strongest position in the word formation of nouns. Regarding the metonymic pattern, the most frequent target within the database are the abstraction, entity and agent. In the end of the study there is a conclusion summarizing the main findings.

Czech grammar, in particular its verbal aspect, is very difficult for foreign learners of Czech. However, cognitive linguistics offers a profound didactic potentialmainly with respect to its basic concepts and principlesthat allow us to clarify the semantic content of multiple linguistic and grammar mechanisms. These help us teach grammar in a less abstract manner, which helps students to understand it more easily. The aim of this article is to show how selected methods of cognitive linguistics and grammar can be applied to Czech language. We will focus primarily on the metaphor of cognitive linguist Laura Janda, who compares perfective verbs in Slavic languages to bounded solid objects and imperfective verbs to fluids. Based on this metaphor and specific characteristics of the given substances that are known to us from our daily empirical experience, we can further analyse more characteristic features of perfective and imperfective verbs and functional aspects of the category of verbal aspect in general. This analysis can be very helpful in teaching Czech for foreigners because language teachers often struggle to find the best way to present this objectively complicated and highly abstract grammatical feature in their classes.

The EU has a positive policy towards regional and m inority languages which is enshrined in Article 22 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. It states that “The Union respects cultural, religious and linguistic d iversity”. The European Commision has been providing several projects supporting regional a d minority languages, one of them being the NETWORK PROMOTING THE LANGUAGE DIVERSITY. It is a pan-European Network which covers regional, minority, indigenous , cross-border and smaller national languages with the task to promote linguistic diver sity in Europe. The main focus is providing information about and easy access to a large networ k of organisations that can share ideas, information and best practice regarding the promoti on of less widely used languages.

The beginning of the 21st century (especially its second decade) brought several attempts at comprehensive grammar of Czech. The long-awaited event, however, was processing the new academic Czech grammar. In 2013 the grammar Akademická gramatika spisovné češtiny (Štícha et al. 2013). The grammar, although it bears the name of "academic" is far from being an academic grammar in the above sense. On the contrary, the extensive grammar should be according to the words of the editor a practical handbook for broad public, which should provide an ordered array of information about the natural rules of Czech grammar. Almost half of the range of academic grammar is covered by the chapter The Grammar of the Word, which can be a sign of how much weight is attached to it by the authors. About 200 pages (out of 450) are devoted to word-formation. One of the key issues of currrent functionally oriented grammatical descriptions are the competence and scope of morphology. The specific sub-issue is finding the boundaries between inflection and derivation (word formation). The new academic grammar seems to be promising that this limit be successfully overcome. This expectation was not fulfilled though. The paper attempts to analyze the shortcomings of the underlying theories and faulty handling of terminology, questionable interpretations and incompatibility of the individual parts which, unfortunately, significantly reduce the value of the new academic grammar. The lack of conceptual and methodological background are demonstrated in (mis)interpretation of the illustrative case words muž and strom.

Článek je založen na případové studii, jež byla provedena u skupiny studentů češtiny v bakalářském studijním programu, kteří dosud neabsolvovali kurz morfologie a syntaxe češtiny. Metodou analýzy krátkého textu a dotazníkového šetření je sledováno jejich vnímání struktury věty, konkrétně schopnost odvodit, které formální prostředky vyplývají přímo ze struktury věty, a které naopak představují odraz skutečnosti. Podstatou výzkumných otázek není testování znalostí morfologie či syntaxe, ale právě míra vnímání struktury věty, a tím i samotných slovních druhů.

Czech grammar, in particular its verbal aspect, is very difficult for foreign learners of Czech. However, cognitive linguistics offers a profound didactic potentialmainly with respect to its basic concepts and principlesthat allow us to clarify the semantic content of multiple linguistic and grammar mechanisms. These help us teach grammar in a less abstract manner, which helps students to understand it more easily. The aim of this article is to show how selected methods of cognitive linguistics and grammar can be applied to Czech language. We will focus primarily on the metaphor of cognitive linguist Laura Janda, who compares perfective verbs in Slavic languages to bounded solid objects and imperfective verbs to fluids. Based on this metaphor and specific characteristics of the given substances that are known to us from our daily empirical experience, we can further analyse more characteristic features of perfective and imperfective verbs and functional aspects of the category of verbal aspect in general. This analysis can be very helpful in teaching Czech for foreigners because language teachers often struggle to find the best way to present this objectively complicated and highly abstract grammatical feature in their classes.

The beginning of the 21st century (especially its second decade) brought several attempts at comprehensive grammar of Czech. The long-awaited event, however, was processing the new academic Czech grammar. In 2013 the grammar Akademická gramatika spisovné češtiny (Štícha et al. 2013). The grammar, although it bears the name of "academic" is far from being an academic grammar in the above sense. On the contrary, the extensive grammar should be according to the words of the editor a practical handbook for broad public, which should provide an ordered array of information about the natural rules of Czech grammar. Almost half of the range of academic grammar is covered by the chapter The Grammar of the Word, which can be a sign of how much weight is attached to it by the authors. About 200 pages (out of 450) are devoted to word-formation. One of the key issues of currrent functionally oriented grammatical descriptions are the competence and scope of morphology. The specific sub-issue is finding the boundaries between inflection and derivation (word formation). The new academic grammar seems to be promising that this limit be successfully overcome. This expectation was not fulfilled though. The paper attempts to analyze the shortcomings of the underlying theories and faulty handling of terminology, questionable interpretations and incompatibility of the individual parts which, unfortunately, significantly reduce the value of the new academic grammar. The lack of conceptual and methodological background are demonstrated in (mis)interpretation of the illustrative case words muž and strom.

Článek je založen na případové studii, jež byla provedena u skupiny studentů češtiny v bakalářském studijním programu, kteří dosud neabsolvovali kurz morfologie a syntaxe češtiny. Metodou analýzy krátkého textu a dotazníkového šetření je sledováno jejich vnímání struktury věty, konkrétně schopnost odvodit, které formální prostředky vyplývají přímo ze struktury věty, a které naopak představují odraz skutečnosti. Podstatou výzkumných otázek není testování znalostí morfologie či syntaxe, ale právě míra vnímání struktury věty, a tím i samotných slovních druhů.

Shakespeare wrote his works in an environment with a strong interest in sleeping and dreaming. Drawing from a long cultural and literary tradition, the motifs of sleep and dreams pervade the dramatist’s entire canon, regardless of the specific genre or his creative period. The topoi often enter the dramatic works not merely for ornamental purposes, but as effective technical devices. A typical example is the correlation between the quality of sleep and the character of the sleeper, as seen in Richard III, 2 Henry IV or Macbeth. Dream prophecies, through their ability to convey information to the audience and hide it from the dreamer at the same time, were usually a rich source of dramatic suspense and irony, for instance in Titus Andronicus, 2 Henry VI or Julius Caesar. Throughout Shakespeare’s plays, we might also find traces of popular humanistic beliefs concerning sleeping and dreaming, for instance the functioning of the human soul in the daytime and at night (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) or the closeness between sleep and death (Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet).

The afterword to the first Czech edition of Philip K. Dick's 1976 novel Deus Irae discusses the complicated eleven-year-long genesis of the text and places it in the context of Dick's works of the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, the afterword examines the main motifs of the novel in the light of the author's religious experiences and beliefs, expressed in interviews, correspondence and, later, his metaphysical writings. Finally, a theological analysis of the spiritual aspects of the work is conducted, offering a Christian and anti-gnostic reading of Deus Irae and advocating the crucial position of this rather neglected novel in the Dick canon.

The Bohemian dreambook written at the turn of the fifteenth century by Laurentius de Březová (c. 1370 – c. 1437) is an example of a medieval vernacular translation of one of the most important European oneiromantic manuals, the so-called Oneirocrition of Achmet, originally written in Greek in the tenth century by an anonymous author and translated into Latin in the late twelfth century by Leo Tuscus.
Compared to other known vernacular renditions of the work, Laurentius’s version seems to follow its model relatively faithfully and the majority of the changes in the Czech text can be explained by the translator’s ambition to improve the original work rather than alter it. Apart from Leo Tuscus’s dedication of the translation to his brother Hugo Eterianus and a handful of chapters from the dream manual itself, the Czech version contains all the sections of the Latin text. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the Bohemian author is his own lengthy introduction to the work, advocating oneiromancy in the late-medieval moral-theological context.
The Czech translation, surviving in two fifteenth-century manuscripts (one deposited at the Moravian Library in Brno, call sig. MK 14, the other at the Moravian Archive in Brno, collection sig. G 10, MS no. 412), seems to be based on a fourteenth-century Latin manuscript deposited at the Library of St. Vitus Metropolitan Chapter House in Prague (call sig. L 61). A definite judgement concerning the relationship of the two works will, however, only be established after a minute comparison of the Latin and Czech texts. The quality of the execution of the Prague Latin MS, suggesting a rich patron, and the background of the translator, who was affiliated with the Bohemian court of the time, might be of great significance for establishing the manner in which the Oneirocriticon was transmitted and received in medieval Europe and determining its original reading audience. A possibility remains open that the Czech translation was dedicated to the Bohemian and Roman King Wenceslaus IV (1378–1419, 1376–1400 respectively).
The present study conducts a preliminary historical and textual analysis of the Czech translation, designed as a first step towards a critical edition of the text.