Paragraph as a Cognitive Unit of Non-Literary Texts

The present thesis analyses the paragraph structuring of non-literary texts in Czech and Spanish and in translations from Spanish into Czech. Paragraph has been defined as a textual and cognitive unit, which is characterized by a unity of topic and inner coherence and plays an important role in text production and interpretation. The central part of the thesis presents the results of an empirical analysis of three groups of non-literary texts consisting in a three-stage comparison of comparable and parallel texts. The first aim of the analysis is to detect whether there are any culture-bound differences in paragraph length and thematic structure between comparable Spanish and Czech texts. The quantitative analysis was also focused on average length of sentences. The second aim is to describe the translators' approach by comparing the translations with their respective originals. Subsequently, the translations were compared with comparable original Czech texts. Based on this comparison it has been determined to what extent the translations are oriented towards the pole of adequacy (reflecting the values of the source language), or on the contrary, towards the pole of acceptability (reflecting the values of the target language). A translation analysis attempts to describe the factors influencing the..