Contrastive Comparison Of Verbal Structures:Time Range Expressions In Chinese And Czech

The Czech language is the author’s mother tongue. It belongs to the Indo-European language family and it is so called "inflecting" or "fusional" language, which is a type of "synthetic" language. In contrast, Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and it is an "isolating", as well as an "analytic language". This is the reason why the differences between Chinese and Czech grammar are so obvious. The thesis tries to make a simple comparison between time range expression in both languages. The author uses a contrastive method to achieve his goal, so besides providing basic theory information concerning the language, there are plenty of sentence examples followed by necessary explanations in order to make the comparison more understandable. Because tense formation in Czech language is basically based on verb conjugation, the author emphasizes this part of speech and its grammatical function and classification in both of the languages.The first four chapters of this thesis provide the reader with the necessary language theory of the Chinese and Czech languages. Using practical illustration, the other chapters then explain verb tense formation in both languages. The second chapter illustrates how verb conjugation works in the Czech language. This means, this chapter is basically concerned with the morphology of the author’s native language. It can be said that other parts of the thesis are more concentrated on syntax analysis, but actually, they often touch on Czech verb analysis as well when explaining the grammar."Co-operation" between syntax and morphology when analyzing verb tense is pivotal for the reader to understand and grasp the differences between the time range expression in both languages. While in Chinese grammatical tense is expressed in whole sentences, in Czech language it is mainly expressed by verbal change. This is because Chinese verbs need to be connected with some other grammatical elements when forming tense, but Czech verbs are quite independent in this way. That is why we need to pay more attention to verb inflection when analyzing tense formation in the Czech language.