Showing papers on "Czech published in 2003"

Language Management in the Czech Republic

Abstract: This monograph, based on the Language Management model, provides information on both the simple (discourse-based) and organised modes of attention to language problems in the Czech Republic This includes but is not limited to the language policy of the State This approach does not satisfy itself with discussing problems of language varieties but tries also to attend to issues pertaining to situations, functions, and other aspects of communication While Part I deals with theoretical prerequisites of the study, Part II surveys ethnic communities which are resident in the territory of the Czech Republic, and Part III, the most extensive in the study, provides a description of the current state of the major varieties spoken in the country It is suggested that a weak form of diglossia (Standard vs Common Czech) is one of the major areas of problems within the Czech language Among the other communities the Roma community presents most distinctly interactional as well as narrowly communicative problems Al

Demographic Shifts in the Czech Republic after 1989: A Second Demographic Transition View

Abstract: A dramatic change in fertility,family formation and living arrangements tookplace in the Czech Republic over the 1990s. Theestablishment of democracy, profound socialtransformation and transition to the marketeconomy affected the values and demographicbehaviour of the young Czech generation. Thispaper examines whether these demographic shiftscan be interpreted within the framework of thesecond demographic transition. The theoreticalpart discusses the idea of the transition,outlining three distinctive conceptualisations.Two of them – the view of the transition as aprogression of characteristic interrelateddemographic changes and a broader viewstressing the importance of underlyingideational factors – fit the Czech situationvery well. A comparison with the Netherlandsreveals that the onset of the transition in theCzech Republic may be clearly located in thefirst half of the 1990s, lagging two decadesbehind the Netherlands.

The five‐factor personality inventory: cross‐cultural generalizability across 13 countries

Abstract: In the present study, we investigated the structural invariance of the Five-Factor Personality Inventory (FFPI) across a variety of cultures. Self-report data sets from ten European and three non-European countries were available, representing the Germanic (Belgium, England, Germany, the Netherlands, USA), Romance (Italy, Spain), and Slavic branches (Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovakia) of the Indo-European languages, as well as

BOOK REVIEW: Buchar J. & Ruzicka V.: Catalogue of Spiders of the Czech Republic.

Abstract: This huge publication is a catalogue of Czech spiders, which summarises more than two centuries of arachnological work in the Czech Republic. In more detail: The book starts with an introduction, which is in English and Czech, and printed in two columns (pp. 7-24). The preface (pp. 7-10) deals with Czech arachnology from an historical, institutional and a personal point of view. That is, the historical development since 1791, the arachnological teachers (most important are Miller and Buchar), arachnological organi­ sations and meetings, and finally the arachnological interests of recent Czech arachnologists (most important: Miller, Kratochvil and the two authors). Many citations are included. The national nature reserves in the Czech Republic are introduced briefly (pp. 11-13): 30 landscapes (4 national parks, 26 protected land­ scape areas) to help non-Czech readers understand the variety of Czech landscapes. This is followed by an overview of the sources of the 115,619 data sets included in the catalogue. Pp. 15-24 contain the explanation of the catalogue: 830 species in 37 spider families (about 35% are Linyphiidae). Nomenclature used is in the 2002-version of Platnick’s Internet-catalogue*. Especially for this catalogue the authors revised the material of recently split species (like the Pardosa lugubris-group) as well as difficult genera (like Porrhomma). The catalogue (pp. 25-189) is arranged following Platnick’s system, i.e. families in taxonomic order and genera and species alphabetically. The information presented for each species includes (in separate folder): Full systematic name, with authors, first year of description and some synonym and references. Distribution (very differentiated rather astonishingly “Middle Europe” includes the Balkans, Urals and Caucasus). Nature of habitat (climax, semi-natural, disturbed, artificial very helpful for nature reserve purposes). Phytogeographic districts in CZ (Thermo-, Meso-, Oreophyticum). Stratum (subterranean up to canopy level, the higher the less data available). Humidity (five categories from very dry to very humid). Light (five categories from open to dark). Vulnerability (Red Data List). No. of squares each species is known from (the most abundant eight species are recorded from more than 30% of the total number of squares, Pardosa amentata is most widely distributed: recorded from 258 out of 677 squares = 38%). No. of map (see below). Most interesting is the distribution of those species restricted to Middle Europe (94 of 830 species, more than 50% of which are Linyphiidae), and of which I know 58 are not known from Germany. As far as I know, three species are known only from the Czech Republic: Entelecara obscura, Porrhomma omissa and Haplodrassus bohemicus, and a few more have ranges only extending into adjacent areas. Unfortunately this kind of sum­ marising or focussing on interesting species is not done in this catalogue. Some imported and misidentified species are catalogued sepa­ rately (pp. 190-201). The maps are an important part of the book (pp. 204-307), and are based on the Czech national grid system (squares 12 x 11.2 km = 10' longitude and 6' latitude based on the 1 : 25,000 maps, as in Germany and Slovakia). 8 maps are printed per page and there are different signs for records prior to and after 1950. The final parts of the book consist of the references (pp. 309-336) and index (pp. 341-349). I hope the detailed data on each species (this is only supplied for species with 1-4 records) will be made available in the future (the internet provides this possibility see for example www.spiderling.de.vu). This information may be supplied by the authors, both of whom are very helpful. For any arachnologist interested in the central European spider fauna this book is well worth buying.

The EU as a Regional Actor: The Case of the Czech Republic

Abstract: This article examines the impact of EU enlargement on regionalization in the Czech Republic. It asks whether pre-accession preparations for EU regional policy have promoted regionalization and governmental decentralization in the Czech Republic, a question prompted by the debate about EU regional policy and regionalization in the current Member States. After reviewing Czech preparations for EU regional policy and the administration of pre-accession structural aid programmes, it concludes that the EU's impact on regionalization in the Czech Republic has been both limited and highly ambivalent. The article thus confirms the findings of previous research on EU enlargement and regionalization in the candidate countries.

Indefinite reflexive clitics in slavic: polish and slovenian

Abstract: In this paper, we argue that certain Slavic reflexive cliticsshould be analyzed asindefinite defective pronouns in both syntax and semantics,and we go on to identify syntactic and semantic parametric variation among reflexiveclitics in Slavic.Reflexive clitics that correspond to people representnominative indefinite pronounsin Polish and Slovenian, and accusative indefinite pronounsin all the Slavic languages, so there is syntactic variation among suchindefinites. In syntax, indefinite clitics stand for explicit arguments that are defectivebecause they contain a human feature and no gender, number, or person, and move torepair deficiency. In semantics, they contain human variables and quantifiersreminiscent of some, which can be deleted by existential disclosure. When quantifiersare deleted and adverbs bind indefinite clitics, such clitics may resemble everyone,many people, and few people. In constructions with datives, Slavic cliticsdisplay a complex web of semantic and syntactic variation due to dative existentialdisclosure in logical form. Dative existential disclosure combines quantifier deletionwith one of two operations binding datives to disclosed variables. In Polish and Slovenian,constructions with indefinite clitics and datives have the same syntax but differ intruth conditions because quantifiers are deleted, and datives bind disclosedvariables in one way in Polish and another way in Slovenian. In Czech and Bulgarian,dative existential disclosure affects reflexive clitics standing for implicitarguments with different syntactic properties. Thus, there is syntactic variation,with Polish and Slovenian forming one syntactic group and Bulgarian and Czech another.Variation extends to semantics, because the meaning of constructions with reflexiveclitics and datives is the same in Bulgarian and Slovenian, while Czech belongs tothe same semantic group as Polish.

Transition to University under Communism and after Its Demise. The Role of Socio-Economic Background in the Transition between Secondary and Tertiary Education in the Czech Republic 1948-1998

Abstract: The aim of this study is to assess the most recent trend in inequality in access to tertiary education in the Czech Republic. The authors put forward the hypothesis claiming that the period of stable inequalities in the years 1948–89 was followed by a period of growing inequalities during the post-communist transformation (1989–1999). The study focuses primarily on the cultural and socio-economic (class) dimensions of social origin and gender and their net effect on success in the transition between secondary and tertiary education. Theoretically the paper draws primarily on the work of Raftery and Hout [1996], Hanley and McKeever [1997], who claim that the chances of attaining higher education among individuals from families with a low social status can only increase on the condition that the demand for the given level of education has first of all been satiated among all the strata disposing of social and cultural capital. Another important theory they build on is the theory of rational action proposed by John Goldthorpe and Richard Breen [Goldthorpe 1996, Breen and Goldthorpe 1997]. The principal hypothesis (inequality has grown) is tested using log-linear analysis applied on the data from various surveys carried out between 1998–2000, merged into one data set. The authors construct several models of the influence of social origin on the chances of making a successful transition between secondary and tertiary education in the years between 1948 and 1999. The initial hypothesis of the growing effect of class origin on this transition in the period after 1989 has been confirmed. One of the strongest explanations for this trend is the insufficient expansion of the tertiary sector of education, which is incapable of satisfying the continually growing aspiration and corresponding demand for higher education in circumstances where socio-economic inequalities are on the rise. Sociologický casopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2003, Vol. 39, No. 3: 301–324 301 *** The core institutional support for this research was provided by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (Grant # 403/03/30: Economic, Social and Cultural Sources of the Reproduction of Educational Inequality and Success on the Labour Market). *** The participation of Petr Matějů in this research was also supported by the grant from the CERGE-EI Foundation under a programme of the Global Development Network. All opinions expressed are those of the author(s), and have not been endorsed by CERGE-EI, WIIW, or the GDN. *** Direct all correspondence to: Doc. PhDr. Petr Matějů, PhD., Institute of Sociology, Jilska 1, 100 00 Prague 1, Czech Republic, e-mail: mateju @soc.cas.cz © Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague 2003 ARTICLES

Language biographies and the analysis of language situations: on the life of the German community in the Czech Republic

Abstract: The article analyses the linguistic, social, and political situation that has developed on the territory of the Czech Republic in the course of the twentieth century. The materials used are biographical accounts provided by people of German origin who live in the Czech Republic. A language biography is a biographical account in which the narrator makes the language, or rather languages, the topic of his or her narrative - in particular the issue of how the language was acquired and how it was used. The biographical method is discussed below as a sociolinguistic method that provides a means of understanding language situations. I deal with the problem of constructing individual language biographies as well as with the typical language biography. I propose a tentative typical language biography of Czech Germans, arguing that the narrative genre of language biography should be included reflexively in the description of language situations.

Immigration and the Czech Republic (with a Special Focus on the Foreign Labor Force)1

Abstract: This article presents an overview of international migration in the Czech Republic, with a special focus on labor immigration. Currently, the Czech Republic is an immigration and transit country. T...

The Rise and Fall of Czech Capitalism: Economic Development in the Czech Republic Since 1989

Abstract: Contents: 1. Introduction 2. Towards Economic Reform 3. The Transformation Depression 4. The Golden Age and After 5. Money and the Central Bank 6. Politicians and the Central Bank 7. Voucher Privatisation and After 8. Banks and the Czech Road 9. Transforming Industrial Enterprises 10. Government and Industry 11. Skoda-Plzen 12. Chemicals - A Failure for Privatisation 13. Inward Investment and Competitiveness 14. Conclusion References Index

Job Growth in Early Transition: Comparing Two Paths

Abstract: Small start-up firms are the engine of job creation in early transition. We ask about differences in their growth across two different transition economies: Estonia, which experienced rapid destruction of pre-existing firms, and the Czech Republic, which reduced the old sector gradually. We find that the majority of job growth corresponds to within-industry reallocation. The within-industry growth of small start-up firms is similar in the two countries, in line with the convergence to Western industry firm-size distributions. We also find similar patterns in the evolution of wage differentials between start-ups and old firms and small differences in the extent of low-wage employment in start-ups across the two transition paths.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Abstract: Origin. On 4 April 1949 the foreign ministers of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK and the USA signed the North Atlantic Treaty, establishing the North Atlantic Alliance. In 1952 Greece and Turkey acceded to the Treaty; in 1955 the Federal Republic of Germany; in 1982 Spain; in 1999 the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland; in 2004 Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia; and in 2009 Albania and Croatia, bringing the total to 28 member countries.

The Political Economy of Slovak and Czech Health Policy: 1989-2000

Abstract: After 1989, the Czech and Slovak health-care systems followed dissimilar policies. Change was faster, more profound and more experimental in the Czech Republic. But after 10 years there are clear similarities in their health status achievements and systemic problems. By showing how a common past and a similar insurance-based finance model interact with commitments to universal access, the common outcomes and problems are explained. It is argued that greater spending, rather than privatization, has improved health-care outcomes since transition began. It is also argued that most of the key problems with the two systems are finance related.

The Czech EU Accession Referendum of 13-14 June 2003

Abstract: The Czech Republic's 13–14 June 2003 referendum on accession to the European Union was the seventh of nine held in candidate states due to join the EU on 1 May 2004. Despite the presence of two strong Eurosceptic parties and the perceived Euroscepticism of Czech public opinion, the pro-accession camp scored a convincing victory. This account analyses the historical, political and institutional context of the referendum and the campaign. It concludes that despite high elite contention over the EU and the overwhelming resources advantage of the ‘Yes’ camp, Czech voters were minimally influenced by the campaign. Rather, they took their cue from longstanding positive linkages of ‘Europe’ with democracy, market reform and Czech identity.

The MULTEXT-East Morphosyntactic Specification for Slavic Languages

Abstract: Word-level morphosyntactic descriptions, such as "Ncmsn" designating a common masculine singular noun in the nominative, have been developed for all Slavic languages, yet there have been few attempts to arrive at a proposal that would be harmonised across the languages. Standardisation adds to the interchange potential of the resources, making it easier to develop multilingual applications or to evaluate language technology tools across several languages. The process of the harmonisation of morphosyntactic categories, esp. for morphologically rich Slavic languages is also interesting from a language-typological perspective. The EU Multext-East project developed corpora, lexica and tools for seven languages, with the focus being on morphosyntactic data, including formal, EAGLES-based specifications for lexical morphosyntactic descriptions. The specifications were later extended, so that they currently cover nine languages, five from the Slavic family: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Serbian and Slovene. The paper presents these morphosyntactic specifications, giving their background and structure, including the encoding of the tables as TEI feature structures. The five Slavic language specifications are discussed in more depth.

The road to the European Union

Abstract: Introduction - enlargement and the study of European integration, Jan Zielonka joining Europe together or separately? - the implications of the Czecho-Slovak divorce for EU enlargement, Jacques Rupnik Slovakia's democratic awakening, Martin Butora, Zora Butorova and Grigorij Meseznikov the Czech road towards a consolidated democracy, Steven Saxonberg the Czech Republic as an EU candidate - strengths and weaknesses, Michael Leigh EU policies towards Slovakia - carrots and sticks of political conditionality, Darina Malova and Marek Rybar the economic criteria for EU accession - lessons from the Czech and Slovak Republics, Susan Senior-Nello who is in, who is out? - citizenship, nationhood, democracy, and European integration in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Tibor Papp return to Europe? - patterns of euroscepticism among the Czech and Slovak political parties, Petr Kopecky and Peter Ucen Czech perceptions of the perspective of EU membership - Havel vs Klaus, Peter Bugge local political elite's perception of EU, Catherine Perron Germany and the enlargement of the European Union to the Czech Republic, Anne Bazin cross-border co-operation between Germany and the Czech Republic, Emil J. Kirchner chronology of the Slovak Republic's accession to the EU chronology of the Czech Republic's accession to the EU.

Large vocabulary ASR for spontaneous Czech in the MALACH project

Abstract: This paper describes LVCSR research into the automatic transcription of spontaneous Czech speech in the MALACH (Multilingual Access to Large Spoken Archives) project. This project attempts to provide improved access to the large multilingual spoken archives collected by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (VHF) (www.vhf.org) by advancing the state of the art in automated speech recognition. We describe a baseline ASR system and discuss the problems in language modeling that arise from the nature of Czech as a highly inflectional language that also exhibits diglossia between its written and spontaneous forms. The difficulties of this task are compounded by heavily accented, emotional and disfluent speech along with frequent switching between languages. To overcome the limited amount of relevant language model data we use statistical techniques for selecting an appropriate training corpus from a large unstructured text collection resulting in significant reductions in word error rate.

Japanese students in Prague. Problems of communication and interaction

Abstract: Participants in inter cultural contact situations experience communication and interaction problems. They also derive gratification as a result of positive evaluations. This paper presents a survey of ten Japanese students of the Czech language who stayed in Prague and at various other locations in the Czech Republic over the summer vacation. The method used in this paper was the interaction interview and concentrated on actual behavior of the students, as opposed to reports based on questionnaires or traditional interviews, on a single day of their stay. The study shows that problems as well as gratifications actually occur and offers a number of observations on the processes involved. The author's ultimate concern is with policies but the paper also attends to a number of more general theoretical and methodological issues.

Inflation Targeting as a Stabilisation Tool: Its Design and Performance in the Czech Republic

Abstract: This year marks not only ten years of independent monetary policy of the Czech National Bank (CNB), but also five years of the Inflation Targeting (IT) framework in the Czech Republic. This is a good opportunity to look back and analyse how the regime has evolved and what overall results it has brought. Accordingly, the goal of this paper is twofold. First, we discuss why the policy framework evolved the way it did in different time periods. Second, we ask if the evolution of the policy framework is mirrored in the performance of monetary policy, we discuss how the performance could be evaluated and offer some results. The paper is divided into three chapters. The first chapter examines the evolution of the regime design. After briefly reviewing the starting conditions, we ask why the inflation targets were defined in the specific way and why the given target horizon was chosen. We then shortly describe the challenges of targeting inflation in a small open economy and show what tools may be available to efficiently manage them. The second chapter analyses whether the regime changes translated into the performance of Czech monetary policy in the past years. We first concentrate on different approaches that are available to evaluate the performance of monetary policy. Following this discussion we consequently offer three different ways of evaluating the performance of the IT period of the CNB. In the last chapter we briefly summarise our findings and offer a glimpse into the future of IT in the Czech Republic. 1. The Evolution of the Regime Design In this chapter we discuss the key issues that have determined the design of the IT regime in the last few years in the Czech Republic. The is

Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Slavic Sibilant Fricatives

Abstract: In this artiele I reanalyze sibilant inventories of Slavic languages by taking into consideration acoustic. perceptive and phonological evidence. The main goal of this study is to show that perception is an important factor which determines the shape of sibilant inventories. The improvement of perceptual contrast essentially contributes to creating new sibilant inventories by (i) changing the place of articulation of the existing phonemes (ii) merging sibilants that are perceptually very elose or (iii) deleting them. It has also been shown that the symbol s traditionally used in Slavic linguistics corresponds to two sounds in the IP A system: it stands for a postalveolar sibilant (f) in some Slavic languages, as e.g. Bulagarian, Czech, Slovak, some Serbian and Croatian dialects, whereas in others like Polish, Russian, Lower Sorbian it functions as a retroflex (~). This discrepancy is motivated by the fact that S is not optimal in terms of maintaining sufficient perceptual contrast to other sibilants such as s and ~. If S occurs together with s (and si) there is a considerable perceptual distance between them but if it occurs with ~ in an inventory, the distance is much smaller. Therefore, the strategy most languages follow is the change from a postalveolar to a retroflex sibilant.

The Czech republic before the new millennium : politics,parties and gender

Abstract: Steven Saxonberg focuses on three main issues in Czech politics: the development of the Czech party system, the "Klaus phenomenon," and gender issues. Recurring themes throughout the book are the role and limits of formal political institutions, the importance of social psychological elements and the lack of influence which ideology has on party politics and voting during the transitional period.

The Rise and Fall of Czech Capitalism

Abstract: This book offers a detailed, critical account of the economic transformation of the Czech Republic since 1989. It follows the development and implementation of a reform strategy based on ‘shock’ therapy and rapid privatisation, set against the background of turbulent political change and conflict.

Women in the Czech Republic: Feminism, Czech Style

Abstract: Many years after the Velvet Revolution, feminism remains close to a dirty word in the Czech Republic, even among women who share the views of “Western feminists.” Surprisingly, this may in part hark back to the negative views of “bourgeois feminism” propounded by the Communists. Equally surprising is the very high proportion of women who are employed, almost all of them full-time, although they continue to do the lion's share of homemaking. This strategy enables Czech women to have a high sense of personal efficacy and independence. This paper emphasizes the historical roots of women's position in Czech society, and the importance of the cultural and social context for the emergence of what we term “Feminism, Czech Style.”

Estimating the FEER for the Czech Economy

Abstract: When currency turbulences hit the Czech crown in May 1997, the research presented in this paper had been nearly finished. It tried to contribute to the discussion of sustainability of external development of the Czech economy by comparing signals given by a set of indicators to signals implied by the estimates of fundamental equilibrium exchange rate for the Czech crown. Interestingly, the method of indicators did not give an unambiguous answer. Specifically, when applied on the Czech data, debt as well as solvency indicators did not imply a danger of external crisis. Financial indicators with a shorter-time horizon did send some warning signals. Indicators of competitiveness watched by large international investors considered the Czech crown to be overvalued since 1995. In order to gain more decisive conclusion on the danger of external crisis, the structural approach was employed. The model simulations of the FEER indicated that the Czech crown became overvalued in 1996 with respect to the central parity of the exchange-rate band. This conclusion was quite robust taking into account behavior of both the real economy as well as decisive external financial flows. The Czech experience with currency turbulences provided an unintentional measure on how good the warning indicators were. The FEER methodology was able to conclude that there was a need for a policy shift in the end of 1996 although it did not give the clear warning that the exchange-rate regime itself was not sustainable.