PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTIONS OF LINGUISTIC BOOKS: COMPARISON OF CZECH AND ENGLISH DISCOURSE STRATEGIES

Aleš Klégr

doi:10.5817/DI2014-2-21

PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTIONS OF LINGUISTIC BOOKS: COMPARISON OF CZECH AND ENGLISH DISCOURSE STRATEGIES

Vol.7,No.2(2014)

Aleš Klégr

https://doi.org/10.5817/DI2014-2-21

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Abstract

The paper investigates a specific type of genre, descriptions of linguistic books in Internet catalogues of three Czech and three Anglophone publishers. It strives to capture their structural organization and some other characteristics that could bring into relief differences between the Czech and the English discourse strategies of their composition. Using a two-level analytical framework to identify the structural parts of the descriptions and the meaning components that realize them, the study finds certain tendencies that to some extent distinguish between them. Still, the English descriptions and even less so the Czech ones are far from homogeneous and striking dissimilarities can be found both between and within the Anglophone and the Czech publishers.

Keywords:
English-Czech; book descriptions; on-line catalogues; discourse structure; contrastive study

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