http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/96290 Volume 2016 Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:37:27 GMT 2026-04-12T12:37:27Z http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/97493 Dominant Discourses and Language Socialization in the Literacy Practices of a Spanish-Speaking Church; ; ; Over the years, research has investigated language in communities, schools and homes, community programs and to a lesser degree research investigates language use in religious communities. In particular, there is a lack of research on religious language and literacy practices in Hispanic communities, especially those in the United States, although incipient work has revealed the importance of religious literacy among women Mexican immigrants (Farr, 2000) and for the socialization of children into a Mexican identity (Baquedano-López, 1997). Given the hostile local sociopolitical environment of Spanish in the state of Arizona in the Southwestern United States, the church is one of the few contexts in which Hispanic communities maintain Spanish, especially Spanish literacy. The present study investigates a Spanish-speaking church in the Southwest of the United States through ethnographic and participant observation methods. Observations, field notes and transcribed audio-recordings of literacy practices in this context over the course of one year were analyzed based on dominant Discourses (Gee, 2008) and language socialization. The analysis demonstrates how a dominant Discourse of “holiness” is produced and reproduced within the community adherence to authoritative texts and socialization into specific community literacy practices such as scripture reading, directing worship services and interpretation of Biblical stories. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/97493 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/97161 Baterie sémantických rysů: data získaná od dětí z třetích tříd základních škol — zpráva z pilotního sběru dat; The Semantic Features Bank: Data Collected from Children Attending Their Third Year of Primary School — A Report Compiled from the Pilot Data Collection ; ; The present text is focused on the pilot data collection which is the first part of the research on language acquisition in children. This acquisition research is aimed especially at semantic feature production and the acquisition of depth of meaning. The goal of the research is to collect a substantial amount of data to create a battery of semantic features in children. This battery is to become a tool for examining children’s vocabulary. The test group consists of children aged eight to nine. In a pilot data collection, children’s preferences for linear or nonlinear record of semantic features were tested. The second form (which is nonlinear and requires children to write semantic features in columns) is widely used in both Czech and foreign research environments. Three approaches to the data collection were tested. For the purpose of our research, some specific code rules were devised and designed to register the semantic information obtained. Some statistical calculations were made as well, which allows to create a notion about feature representations and also about relations between features and concepts. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/97161 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/97116 Vowel-Related Glottalization in Czech Read Speech: Russian vs. Native Speaker; ; ; Glottalization as a significant irregularity of glottal pulsing fulfils a number of linguistic functions and can occur in various contexts. It can also contribute to a foreign accent. This paper examines the rate of vowel-related glottalization in the speech of Russian speakers who are beginning learners of Czech, comparing their reading of Czech with that of native speakers. In Czech, there is a relatively high frequency of glottalization and, according to research from the last decade, glottalization in Russian is more common than is usually assumed, especially at the boundaries of intonational phrases. The purpose of this study is to determine the similarities and differences in the distribution of glottalization among native and non-native speakers of Czech, and to examine the factors that may influence it. The subjects read a short text containing 14 potential positions where glottalization can occur in the standard pronunciation of native speakers. The resulting 322 tokens were then analysed and rated for glottalization. The analysis was primarily based on perception and covered two main categories of glottalization: the glottal stop and creaky voice. The rate of glottalization in individual speakers ranged from 71.4 to 100.0% (native group) and from 25.0 to 72.7% (non-native group). The differences between native and non-native speakers are significant at the level p 0.05, while the differences between males and females (both within and across the groups) are not significant. Three different positions (the intonational phrase boundary, the position after a non-syllabic preposition, and the word-internal boundary) are discussed in detail. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/97116 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/97033 Báze nejsou písmena; The Bases Are Not the Letters ; ; In this paper we show some interpretation of the genetic code design. We proceed from the discovery of DNA structure to current stage of the molecular biology. Generally we introduce the basic semiotic assumptions of molecular biology in the description of the structure of DNA, proteins and genetic code. We focus on interpretations of Francis Crick, another molecular biologists, biosemioticians and linguists. For the aims of the paper we describe some fundaments of molecular biology. Core of our text is quantitative analysis (n-gram structure, Zipf ’s law) of mRNA strings and natural language text. We take into consideration representative quantitative analysis of DNA, RNA and proteins too. Our analysis of mRNA confirms the assumption that the design of the genetic code cannot analogize DNA bases and letters. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11956/97033 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z