Particles in spoken languages

The goal of this thesis is to map a theme, which has not been systematically explored enough by Czech linguists so far. It deals with the material of the Prague Spoken Corpus (PSC), which contains a series of records of authentic spoken language. The thesis presents primarily a comprehensive description of particles, which can be found in the PSC, their semantic classes based on their real occurrence in the natural speech context. It further describes their collocability and syntagmatic relations, including their valency, thus more adequately explains their function in the commonly spoken language. Attention is also paid to their frequency and preferred use within the scope of particular combinations of sociolinguistic parameters, i.e. four variables (sex, age, education and type of discourse) which determined the selection of speakers on recordings to make their combinations as balanced as possible. Some particles are homonymous with other parts of speech - the extent of homonymy and its context dependency just as the processes of particulization are described in the contextual usage of particles and adverbs. The results in terms of the frequency of usage were compared with the frequency of occurrence in the written corpus SYN2005. The presentation of particles in dictionaries of Czech language was..