Non-projectivity in English and Czech

This thesis analyzes non-projective constructions in English and Czech. It is based on the functional generative description of language and the analysis of material drawn from the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank, the Prague Dependency Treebank, and the British National Corpus. The theoretical part provides a brief characterization of phrase structure grammar and dependency grammar together with the definition of the fundamentals of the functional generative description, and the definition of non-projectivity. The analytical section presents a detailed comparative classification of non-projective structures in both languages. Individual types are studied from the perspective of differences between the surface structure and the underlying structure, demonstrating how the substitution of a non-projective clause for a projective one influences the topic-focus articulation and the meaning of the clause. The main objective is to define factors motivating non-projectivity in English and Czech, to compare them, and to determine whether it is marked or neutral type of discontinuity that prevails in each of the two languages