Abstract (eng)
The submitted dissertation thesis titled, Competition and cooperation of language components in German and Slovak, is devoted particularly to morphology, while simultaneously addressing the issue of its interaction with the field of phonology and pragmatics.
The research focus centers on theoretical contrastive linguistics, where the methodology is frequently corpus- and computational linguistics, based on the theory of Natural Morphology.
The thesis is divided into two main parts, where contrastive linguistic research is performed within the language pair, German and Slovak 1. (especially in the Slovak language) a completely innovative area of morphotactics, 2. the area of plural and inflective doublets.
The first part of the dissertation incorporates the latest computational linguistic research from the Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology at Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna (hereinafter ICLTT), and enriches research results in the field of morphotactics, by including the Slovak language with the additional focus on the contrastive comparison within the above mentioned languages. Slovak, as an inflectional language, largely in comparison to German, is deemed richer in groups of consonants and the variations there of. This section is not only devoted to the area of morphotactics, but also builds on the research done by the Polish professor Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, and her phonotactic model of Beats-and-Binding. The relative similarity of the Polish and Slovak language can lead to the other contrastive research in the area of morphotactics in the future.
The second part of the dissertation investigates plural doublets that possess both a tendency to develop the semantic or pragmatic differentiation, and those doublets without this tendency, which, given the theory of overabundance (cf. Thornton 2011), are known as dimorphic abundant, which are redundant. In addition, this part of thesis closely analyses the Corbett Canonical typology, indicating the multiples examples of violations of the so-called „canonical ideal“, specifically in the Slovak language. In fact, the Slovak language is one of the first Slavic languages to be studied using these recent scientific concepts. Secondly, attention is paid to the numerous inflected doublets in Slovak, which in German exist only in limited quantities. The theory of Natural Morphology and Theory of Overabundance play a very important role in the research of the inflectional doublets.