Department of Stylistics and Sociolinguistics

Contact:

Letenská 123/4
118 00 Praha 1

About the Department of Stylistics and Sociolinguistics:

What is contemporary Czech like, what functions does it fulfil and what standards does it encompass?

We examine the Czech language that people use in common communication, e.g. with their families or at work, as well as the Czech used in public, e.g. in government offices, school, radio and TV.
We are interested in communication styles used by writers, scientists, physicians, politicians, journalists, moderators, advertising creative teams, etc. We study the speech of teachers and students, older and younger people, men and women, etc.
We study how people converse with one another, how they understand (or don’t understand) one another, how they cooperate (or don’t cooperate), how they interject or take turns speaking during a conversation and the role of body language, gestures, facial expressions and glances or looks in communication.
We examine the Czech language environment. In this regard we are interested in what other languages are spoken by people in the Czech Republic, their views of these other languages and how the presence of other languages in the Czech Republic influences the Czech language.

The Department of Stylistics and Sociolinguistics maintains and supplements two collections of spoken language:

recordings and transcriptions of institutional and informal conversations: conversations in government offices, conversations between physicians and patients, communication during court proceedings, research interviews, work meetings, other meetings, press conferences, lectures, official speeches, communication at school, family conversations, conversations between friends, phone conversations, communication during social visits, conversations in retirement homes, communication between adults and children, communication in shopping interactions, communication during door-to-door sales, etc.; the original tape recordings acquired from the 1980s onwards are gradually being digitalised; new recordings are being made with digital video cameras;
recordings and transcriptions of media conversations: radio and TV shows (political debates, interviews, talk shows, etc.); the collection of recordings and transcriptions of TV talk show conversations formed the basis of the DIALOG corpus.

Our current work:

Linguistics of text and discourse, stylistics of written and spoken Czech

Project manager: Mgr. Petr Kaderka, Ph.D.

The Department of Stylistics and Sociolinguistics focuses on basic research into discourse analysis and conducts methodical analysis of written and spoken contemporary Czech forms of expression in both the private and public spheres, including media. The Department is theoretically grounded in the methodology of the Prague school of functional linguistics and stylistics and also evolves theoretical notions stemming from international science, particularly in ethnomethodology, conversational analysis and other sociolinguistics and pragmatics disciplines. The Department collects current data, creates specialised corpora and elaborates a qualified description of the current language situation, e.g. evaluation of the co-existence of various variations of the Czech language, both standard and non-standard, as well as media-related variations (e.g. online communication, etc.)

Development and public accessibility of the DIALOG corpus

Project manager: Mgr. Petr Kaderka, Ph.D.

The DIALOG corpus is a special multimedia corpus of spoken Czech developed and administered by the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in collaboration with the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University. The corpus collects expressions of public dialogue language – i.e. recordings and transcriptions of Czech television talk shows. They inform research into media communication and into publicly spoken Czech. The corpus is accessible on the Internet.

For details, click here.

Word and Literature "Slovo a slovesnost" journal editorial office
Word and Literature is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that explores language theory and cultivation issues. It was founded in 1935 by the Prague Linguistic Circle and includes original Czech and international articles about semiotics, semantics, grammar, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, text linguistics, literature theory, translation theory, etc. The journal advances the Prague functionalistic tradition of linguistics, and as such is one of the most prominent Central European linguistics and semiotics journals today.

Editor in chief: Mgr. Petr Kaderka, Ph.D.

Editor of English articles: Mgr. Tamah Sherman, Ph.D.

Executive editors: Mgr. Eva Havlová, Mgr. Jakub Kopecký, Ph.D.