Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Language Institute

We report the synthesis of extended two-dimensional organic networks on Cu(111), Ag(111), Cu(110), and Ag(110) from thiophene-based molecules. A combination of scanning tunnelling microscopy and X-ray photoemission spectroscopy yields insight into the reaction pathways from single molecules towards the formation of two-dimensional organometallic and polymeric structures via Ullmann reaction dehalogenation and C-C coupling. The thermal stability of the molecular networks is probed by annealing at elevated temperatures of up to 500 °C. On Cu(111) only organometallic structures are formed, while on Ag(111) both organometallic and covalent polymeric networks were found to coexist. The ratio between organometallic and covalent bonds could be controlled by means of the annealing temperature. The thiophene moieties start degrading at 200 °C on the copper surface, whereas on silver the degradation process becomes significant only at 400 °C. Our work reveals how the interplay of a specific surface type and temperature steers the formation of organometallic and polymeric networks and describes how these factors influence the structural integrity of two-dimensional organic networks.

Abstract This article provides an overview of the sociolinguistic situation in Belarus, the most russified of the post-Soviet countries. It summarizes language policy and legislation, and deals in more detail with language management and selected language problems in Belarusian education. It also contributes to the work on language planning by applying Jernudd's and Neustupný's Language Management Theory, particularly the concept of the language management cycle, to analysis of sociolinguistic issues in Belarus.

The article presents the results of a survey on dictionary use in Europe, focusing on general monolingual dictionaries. The survey is the broadest survey of dictionary use to date, covering close to 10,000 dictionary users (and non-users) in nearly thirty countries. Our survey covers varied user groups, going beyond the students and translators who have tended to dominate such studies thus far. The survey was delivered via an online survey platform, in language versions specific to each target country. It was completed by 9,562 respondents, over 300 respondents per country on average. The survey consisted of the general section, which was translated and presented to all participants, as well as country-specific sections for a subset of 11 countries, which were drafted by collaborators at the national level. The present report covers the general section.

In this paper we examine how participants’ multimodal conduct maps onto one of the basic organizational principles of social interaction: preference organization – and how it does so in a similar manner across five different languages (Czech, French, Hebrew, Mandarin, and Romanian). Based on interactional data from these languages, we identify a recurrent multimodal practice that respondents deploy in turn-initial position in dispreferred responses to various first actions, such as information requests, assessments, proposals, and informing. The practice involves the verbal delivery of a turn-initial expression corresponding to English ‘I don’t know’ and its variants (‘dunno’) coupled with gaze aversion from the prior speaker. We show that through this ‘multimodal assembly’ respondents preface a dispreferred response within various sequence types, and we demonstrate the cross-linguistic robustness of this practice: Through the focal multimodal assembly, respondents retrospectively mark the prior action as problematic and prospectively alert co-participants to incipient resistance to the constraints set out or to the stance conveyed by that action. By evidencing how grammar and body interface in related ways across a diverse set of languages, the findings open a window onto cross-linguistic, cross-modal, and cross-cultural consistencies in human interactional conduct.

Abstract The present paper deals with two random variables: length of words and order of words (linear sequence, linear arrangement) in clauses of a text. The question to be answered is: What can a quantitative case study on Czech data add to our present knowledge of the relationship between the length of words and their placement in the clause? Notes Supported by the grant GA ČR 405/96/K087. Address correspondence to: Ludmila Uhlírová, Academy of Sciences, Institute of the Czech Language, Letenská 4, Praha, Czech Republic.

Dialects became a traditional research subject of linguists who collect and analyse data from a linguistic perspective and a spatial perspective. Detailed research on the distribution of dialects and their specifics is an important part of preserving every nation's cultural heritage. With the gradual disappearance of dialects in society, this topic is very relevant. The presented paper briefly describes the history of dialect research and the most important outcome in recent years, the Czech Linguistic Atlas (CLA). CLA presents the data only in a very simple form from a cartographic point of view, so a new approach has been applied. A new atlas was created from this data, focusing on a specific area of dialectology – vowels shortening. This new atlas’ internal structure corresponds to the cartographic atlas theory as a system and contains both analytical and synthetic maps. Synthetic maps show areas with similar (and unique in the case of regionalisation) combinations of evaluated attributes. The concept of map synthesis is described, and further research questions are designed.

Imageability is the ability of words to elicit mental sensory images of their referents. Recent research has suggested that imageability facilitates the processing and acquisition of inflected word forms. The present study examined whether inflected word forms are acquired earlier in highly imageable words in Czech children. Parents of 317 children (mean age 28 months) were asked whether their child used specific forms of 63 nouns and 35 verbs. For nouns, the forms were nominative singular and plural; for verbs, third person singular present, second person singular present, and the past participle. Plural nouns, and second person and past participle verbs were considered the marked, inflected forms. Analyses revealed that imageability is positively related to the use of the inflected form, even when controlling for the use of the unmarked form in each child, and the inflected form frequency. Two main explanations are suggested: facilitation of form retrieval from long-term memory, or facilitation of inflected form processing, especially by supporting the representations in working memory.

In this paper, I would like to introduce some classifications of proper names in literature that are currently used in the Czech onomastic research. They are based on the typology of M. Knappov as well as German or Polish onomastics. I would also like to summarize some of my observations of the literary onymic function. Onymic functions are only one aspect which plays a role in the choice of the literary name. The others are literary genre, culture tradition, the author's poetics or contemporary poetics as well as formal linguistic and semantic aspects, etc. In my opinion, literary onymic functions should be understood in this wider framework, in their mutual relations, as they are intertwined, complementing each other and working together. One name can have multiple functions and all literary names must be analysed in the framework of the concrete literary text.

Agreement attraction (i.e. facilitatory interference manifested by sped-up reading times) observed in establishing subject-verb number agreement by comprehenders when reading ungrammatical sentences with number-matching attractor nouns, has been long-established and cross-linguistically validated. For languages with rich inflectional morphology, case syncretism has been suggested to play a role in the phenomenon. In the present self-paced reading study on Czech, we show that unlike in other languages, facilitatory interference is not observed and that not even case syncretism is sufficient for its appearance. We put forward several possible explanations for this anomaly exhibited by Czech compared to other languages. We propose that the lack of semantic agreement in the language could be one of these. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for the models of long-distance dependency resolution in comprehension.

Against the backdrop of the current popularity of the concept of narrative in the social sciences the authors analyse the uses of narrative analysis in empirical social research and provide a unifying frame based on Paul Ricoeur's notion of narrative mimesis. To begin they situate 'narrative' in the context of the social research tradition. Using both a simple and an elaborated definition of narrative they outline the main approaches to narrative analysis relevant to sociology and categorize them as structuralist, hermeneutic, or interactionist. The crux of the article is a discussion of Ricoeur's integrative model of narrative as threefold mimesis and its proposed methodological application in sociological narrative research. The authors argue that Ricoeur's model obviates undesirable analytical simplifications and encourages research that captures all the substantial aspects of narrative, including the producer (the narrator) and the recipient (the listener or reader).

Speech rhythm is considered one of the first windows into the native language, and the taxonomy of rhythm classes is commonly used to explain early language discrimination. Relying on formal rhythm classification is problematic for two reasons. First, it is not known to which extent infants' sensitivity to language variation is attributable to rhythm alone, and second, it is not known how infants discriminate languages not classified in any of the putative rhythm classes. Employing a central-fixation preference paradigm with natural stimuli, this study tested whether infants differentially attend to native versus nonnative varieties that differ only in temporal rhythm cues, and both of which are rhythmically unclassified. An analysis of total looking time did not detect any rhythm preferences at any age. First-look duration, arguably more closely reflecting infants' underlying perceptual sensitivities, indicated age-specific preferences for native versus non-native rhythm: 4-month-olds seemed to prefer the native-, and 6-month-olds the non-native language-variety. These findings suggest that infants indeed acquire native rhythm cues rather early, by the 4th month, supporting the theory that rhythm can bootstrap further language development. Our data on infants' processing of rhythmically unclassified languages suggest that formal rhythm classification does not determine infants' ability to discriminate language varieties.

Various studies within the Good-Enough Approach observe that people often make errors in answering comprehension questions after reading garden-path sentences such as While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib. Recently, it has been claimed that readers form a full syntactic analysis of these sentences, but they do not completely prune the original misanalysis. This article presents evidence that these findings do not hold for all garden-path sentences. The main finding of the Good-Enough Approach—that the comprehension questions targeting the initial misanalysis yield significantly higher rates of incorrect answers after garden-path sentences, in comparison with after control sentences—was replicated here in three self-paced reading experiments on Czech. However, these experiments show a similar pattern of results for other comprehension questions, such as questions targeting an analysis that is not syntactically licensed at any point of processing. These results point out that certain garden-path structures may be very hard to process and that the process of garden-path repair might not be successful at all. Based on these results and the results of previous studies, the idea of a range of difficulty levels for garden-path structures is proposed.

Abstract Literacy research and practice are invigorated by evidence that stories enhance empathy and concentration. Both benefits are associated with attending to inner sensory states afforded by stories. Yet children are rarely asked about how stories, steeped as they are in characters' bodily actions, affect them in bodily terms. We have conducted a qualitative study inviting 9‐ to 12‐year‐olds ( N = 19) to share their embodied story experiences. To this end, we developed a toolkit of story excerpts and activities supported with bespoke props that can be adopted in research but also in classrooms and other practice. The toolkit was tested in school‐based focus groups (accompanied by in‐class observations) and home‐based individual interviews. We introduce the toolkit and discuss some of the key prerequisites of its use. Further, we present three main types of embodiment statements provided by our participants: what‐statements about the trigger of one's embodied experience, how‐statements about the sensory or motor quality of the experience and what‐and‐how statements combining both aspects. We consider the distinct potentials of these statement types for fostering children's embodied self‐awareness and story awareness in educational settings and beyond.

Trace amounts of samarium greatly improve materials used in sonar and ultrasound imaging

The thematically oriented biographical interview (TOBI) is a research tool used frequently in contemporary qualitative research. Compared to other interviewing techniques, its main advantage is its combination of a thematic focus and sensitivity to the perspective of the interviewee. The authors demonstrate that TOBI is made up of several constituents: first, it is a speech infrastructure (comprising a conversational and a narrative component), and second, it encompasses three kinds of relevance (biographical relevance, identity relevance and specific thematic relevance). The main part of the article is devoted to an analysis of the types and forms of relevance that occur in the corpus of oral history biographical interviews. The analysis shows that, contrary to the common effort of researchers to increase the significance of a respondent's testimony by emphasising the specific thematic relevance, the biographical and identity relevances are equally important for successfully capturing the actor's perspective and smoothly conducting a TOBI. In their explication of relevance and its forms the authors draw on the theory of relevance developed by Alfred SchĂźtz.

The aim of the article is to present the Academic Dictionary of Contemporary Czech (Akademický slovník současné češtiny). It is a new monolingual dictionary of contemporary Czech work on which has been in progress since 2012 at the Institute of the Czech Language of the Academy of Sciences of the CR. The Academic Dictionary of Contemporary Czech is a medium-sized dictionary with an anticipated total of 120,000–150,000 lexical units. Its objective is to document the widespread vocabulary of contemporary Czech. The article deals with dictionary-making principles concerning both its macrostructure and microstructure.

Author(s): Pilshchikov, I | Abstract: This essay compares the evolution of the “Prague doctrine” described in Ondřej Sladek’s The Metamorphoses of Prague School Structural Poetics (2015) with similar developments in literary theory in Eastern Europe (from Russian formalism to the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics). The author proposes a transnational approach to the study of the typology and history of literary theories and outlines, in partial agreement with Sladek, several cross-cultural transfers of theoretical concepts and research tools from linguistics to literary theory and structural anthropology and further to semiotics and cultural studies. As an addition to Sladek’s overview of the evolution of structural poetics, this essay points to facts that serve as evidence for a parallel, sometimes interrelated, development of structural poetics and cultural semiotics in the former Czechoslovakia and the former Soviet Union. The author also addresses the issue of the (inter)national character of academic work and the ontological status of terms such as the “French”, “Russian”, “Estonian” and “Czech theories”.

1.Introduction 2.Gender in Czech 2.1Grammatical gender 2.2Lexical gender 2.3Epicene nouns 2.3.1Masculine epicenes 2.3.2Feminine epicenes 2.3.3Neuter epicenes 2.4Double gender nouns 2.5Nominalised adjectives 2.5.1Nominalised adjectives of the type dospívající (m/f) ‘adolescent’ 2.5.2Nominalised adjectives of the type dospělý/dospělá (m/f) ‘adult’ 2.6Word-formation 2.6.1The derivation of feminine personal nouns 2.6.2Compounding 3.Asymmetries and lexical gaps 4.Masculine generics 5.Achieving female visibility in Czech 6.Variability, language critique and language politics 7.Conclusion Notes References

Abstract When studying word length in texts, it is possible either to take all length classes together, or to analyze each length class separately. Both the former and the latter approach lead to reasonable generalizations, modelled in a mathematically exact way by a general type of statistical distribution ‐ in the former case it is the binomial distribution, in the latter case it is the Zipf‐Mandelbrot distribution; if presented graphically, parameters a and b of Zipf‐Mandelbrot's distribution show a similar shape in all texts. The language under study is Czech.

Abstract The topic of this paper belongs to the domain of the sociology of language. It deals with the language behaviour of language users in a specific sociological role ‐ in the role of questioners, or correspondents, of the Language Service, The Czech Language Institute, Prague. I shall attempt to model some features of their behaviour, using methods of mathematical statistics and probability theory, and to find motives and reasons for their behaviour. The subject to be discussed belongs to applied linguistics rather than to theoretical linguistics, but it is a topic of current concern in linguistics, as is language treatment, language management, or language education.