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The thesis explores an area of vague language, specifically a set of linguistic elements called 'general extenders' (e.g., or something (like that), and stuff (like that)). While early research claimed that these forms have primarily referential functions (category implication and list construction) and that they typically occur at clause- and utterance-final positions ('utterance final tags' (Aijmer 1985)), more recent studies stress that, above all, general extenders perform interpersonal functions in communication (e.g., marking an attitude towards a preceding utterance, politeness strategies, expressing different levels of certainty). Furthermore, due to the ongoing process of grammaticalisation (phonological reduction and decategorisation), general extenders acquire new discourse functions and occur more freely within a sentence. The thesis aims to investigate the behaviour of general extenders in terms of both syntax (sentence types and clause positions) and their communicative functions. To that end, the Research part is divided into two subchapters: quantitative and qualitative. Whereas syntactic behaviour can be objectively quantified, an analysis of communicative functions of every pragmatic marker is necessarily subject to a certain degree of subjective interpretation. The shared...

The subject of this thesis consists in comparing means of request expression in French and Czech language in pursuit of scaling them by their politeness level, taking into account the socio-pragmatic environment of both languages. Apart from that, a syntactic realisation of request is analysed in both languages as well as morphological, lexical and stylistic instruments that either increase or decrease the degree of politeness and the effect of performed request. Attention is primarily focused on indirect requests in both French and Czech in order to identify an appropriate translation equivalent expressing the same degree of politeness. The fundamental source for the contrastive analysis lies in InterCorp parallel corpus data. This research is further extended with survey that verifies the previous findings.

This thesis deals with politeness and its realization in a classroom discourse. The theoretical part describes the most influential politeness theories and also the findings on the topic of teaching pragmatics and linguistic politeness. The research in the thesis focuses on analysis of teachers' verbal realizations of politeness as found in the recordings of four English lessons. The research was designed to verify the two hypotheses: (1) teachers are basically polite in a classroom of English as a second language and (2) politeness strategies of Czech teachers of English differ from those of native speaking teachers. The analytical part adopts the viewpoint of Brown and Levinson's positive and negative politeness. The last part of the thesis aims at summarizing the implications that this thesis, its theoretical summary and its research, have for teaching English as a second language.

V článku jsou popsány zdvořilostní strategie, které volí autoři posudků závěrečných vysokoškolských prací, aby zmírnili ohrožení tváře adresáta – autora závěrečné práce. Analyzováno bylo 120 závěrečných vysokoškolských prací (diplomových a bakalářských), obhajovaných na katedře českého jazyka Pedagogické fakulty Univerzity Karlovy v Praze v letech 2009 – 2011. Nejčastěji autoři posudků užívají formy kondicionálu a otázky místo imperativu, vyhýbají se přímému oslovení adresáta a užívají modifikujících adverbií ke zmírnění negativního hodnocení. Kladně hodnotící adjektiva vyjadřují menší míru pozitivní expresivity. Pokud je vyjadřováno negativní hodnocení, bývá zasazeno do kontextu vedle výpovědi pozitivně hodnotící, aby byl zmírněn negativní perlokuční efekt. In the article there are described the ways the authors of assessment of the diploma thesis choose politeness strategies to save the addressee´s face. The research was carried at Faculty of Education, Charles University, Prague, where 120 diploma and bachelor thesis assessments were analysed. The most frequent linguistic means that were used by the authors of the assessment were conditional and questions instead of imperative, indirect forms of addressing and using modifying adverbs.