Department of Stylistics and Sociolinguistics
Address:
Letenská 123/4
118 00 Praha 1
Scope of research:
What is contemporary Czech language like? What functions does it serve and what norms govern it?
- We study how people speak and write in different communication situations, both traditional and emerging; we are interested in the style of traditional letters as well as emails, text messages, tweets...
- We investigate the Czech language that people use in everyday communication, e.g. with their family or co-workers, as well as the language that they use in public, e.g. in government offices, at school, on the radio, on television...
- We are interested in communication styles used by writers and by scientists, doctors, politicians, journalists, television moderators and advertising companies... We study how teachers and students speak, how people of different ages speak, how men and women speak...
- We study how people talk to each other, how they understand or do not understand each other, how they cooperate or do not cooperate when communicating, how they take turns in speaking and the role that posture, gesture, facial expression, and gaze play in conversation...
- We conduct research into Czech linguistics and we are interested in what other languages people in the Czech Republic use, their attitudes towards these other other languages and how the presence of other languages in the Czech Republic affects the Czech language itself.
The Department of Stylistics and Sociolinguistics maintains and supplements two collections of spoken discourse data:
- recordings and transcripts of institutional and informal conversations: government office conversations, doctor-patient conversations, communication during court hearings, research interviews, work meetings, staff meetings, press conferences, lectures, ceremonial speeches, school communications, family conversations, conversations between friends, telephone conversations, communications during visits, conversations in nursing homes, adult-child communications, communications during shopping, door-to-door sales, etc.; original tape recordings made since the 1980s are gradually being digitised; new recordings are captured using digital videocameras;
- recordings and transcripts of media interviews: radio and television programmes (political debates, interviews, talk shows, etc.); the collection of recordings and transcripts of television discussion programmes serves as the basis for the DIALOG corpus.
Current projects:
Linguistics of text and discourse, stylistics of written and spoken Czech
Principal investigator: Mgr. Mgr. Petr Kaderka, Ph.D.
The Department of Stylistics and Sociolinguistics focuses on basic research on discourse analysis and systematically analyses contemporary Czech written and spoken discourse, both private and public, including media discourse. The theoretical framework draws on the methodology of Prague functional linguistics and stylistics while also advancing new theoretical inputs from international scholarship, especially in ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and other sociolinguistically and pragmatically oriented disciplines. The department focuses on the collection of up-to-date data, creation of specialised corpora and qualified descriptions of contemporary linguistics, e.g. assessment of the coexistence of different varieties of Czech, both standard and non-standard, in various traditional and new media settings (e.g. online).
Development, publication and updating of the DIALOG corpus
Principal investigator: Mgr. Petr Kaderka, Ph.D.
The DIALOG corpus is a special multimedia corpus of spoken Czech, developed and maintained by the Czech Language Institute in cooperation with the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University. It compiles publicly accessible language data from dialogues – recordings and transcripts of Czech television discussion programmes. It is used in research on communication in the media and research on public forms of spoken Czech. The corpus is available on the Internet.
Slovo a slovesnost journal editorial office
Slovo a slovesnost is a peer-reviewed scientific journal devoted to the theory of language and language cultivation. It was first published in 1935 as a periodical of the Prague Linguistic Circle. It publishes original papers from Czech and foreign authors dealing with grammar, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, text linguistics, discourse analysis, literary theory, translation theory, semiotics, etc. Owing to the development of the Prague functionalist tradition, it is one of the most important Central European linguistic and semiotic journals today.
Editor-in-Chief: Mgr. Petr Kaderka, Ph.D.
English Language Editor: Mgr. Tamah Sherman, Ph.D.
Editorial Assistants: Mgr. Eva Havlová, Mgr. Jakub Kopecký, Ph.D.
Staff members:
Mgr. Petr Kaderka, Ph.D.
head of the department