Antonymy across registers: A comparative study of discourse functions in academic and news texts

• Thesis title in Czech: Antonymie napříč registry: Komparativní studie diskurzních funkcí v akademických a novinářských textech
• Thesis title in English: Antonymy across registers: A comparative study of discourse functions in academic and news texts
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2023/2024
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of the English Language and ELT Methodology (21-UAJD)
• Supervisor: Mgr. Kateřina Vašků, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 28.02.2024
• Date of assignment: 28.02.2024
• Administrator's approval: approved
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 28.02.2024
• Submitted/finalized: no

Guidelines

This thesis investigates the discourse functions of English co-occurring antonyms and contrasts how they are utilised in the academic and the news register. Past studies on antonym co-occurrence have proposed nine classes of antonymy based on discourse function and quantified how they are represented in written texts (Jones 2002, Jones & Murphy 2005). This thesis builds on previous research by comparing two varieties of written English, namely the news register and the academic register. Its primary aim is to examine whether, potentially how, the linguistic differences of the two registers, such as the relatively higher idiomaticity of journalistic texts, affect the distribution of the various discourse functions of co-occurring antonyms.
The theoretical part will provide an overview of past and current theoretical and research work relevant to the topic of antonym co-occurrence. The practical part will consist of analysing instances of co-occurring antonym pairs excerpted from the Directory of Open Access Journals, a corpus of academic English, and the JSI Newsfeed Corpus. The instances will be categorized according to the functional classes of antonymy, and the results for the two registers will then be compared.
Práce bude vypracována v anglickém jazyce.

References

Biber, D., et al. (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Charles, W., Miller, G. A. (1989) “Contexts of Antonymous Adjectives.” Applied Psycholinguistics 10, 357-375.
Cruse, D. A. (1986) Lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fellbaum, C. (1995) “Co-occurrence and antonymy.” International Journal of Lexicography, 8, 281–303.
Jones, S. (2002) Antonymy: a corpus-based perspective. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-26374-3.
Jones, S., et al. (2012) Antonyms in English: construals, constructions and canonicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, S., & Murphy, M. L. (2005). “Using corpora to investigate antonym acquisition.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 10(3), 401–422.
Kotzor, S. (2021) Antonyms in mind and brain: a cross-linguistic investigation of antonym canonicity. Abingdon: Routledge.
Murphy, M. L. (2003) Semantic Relations and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Storjohann, P. (2010) Lexical-Semantic Relations: Theoretical and practical perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.