Seminář ÚL

In the 1640s and 1650s English society was turned upside down by civil war and the beheading of King Charles I in 1649: ‘It was a hinge in the world’s history. God was about to do something new’ (Ryrie 2017: 118). In 1647, the victorious Parliamentary army had debated, at Putney near London, radical views on government, expressed by 'Levellers' such as Thomas Rainsborough (d.1648): 'For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he ...' The war also ‘released women into the public world of contention, and into speech and writing’ (Hobby 2001: 174), including figures such as the ‘Fifth Monarchist’ millenarian Anna Trapnel (fl. 1642-1660), or the Quaker Mary Howgill (c.1620-?1666), who denounced the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell – to his face – as ‘a stinking dunghill in the sight of God’.

All these groups developed distinctive linguistic codes to express their various ideologies. In this paper, curated electronic corpora of prophetic women’s and Leveller writings are examined; specialised lexicons thus identified are then contextualised, contributing to the developing field of theolinguistics (see e.g. Crystal 2018). The paper argues – in line with another linguistic paradigm, viz. historical pragmatics – that to understand the delicate shifts of meaning that individual lexemes undergo, when deployed by differing communities of religious practice, demands considerable interdisciplinary sensitivity to the complex cultural contexts of those communities. The paper is part of a larger project on the English religious lexicon’s historical evolution, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (see Smith, forthcoming).

Crystal, David 2018. ‘Whatever happened to theolinguistics?’, in Paul Chilton and Monika Kopytowska (eds), Religion, Language, and the Human Mind (Oxford: University Press), 3-18

Hobby, Elaine 2001. ‘Prophecy, enthusiasm and female pamphleteers’, in Neil Keeble (ed), The Cambridge

Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: University Press), 162-178

Ryrie, Alec 2017. Protestants (London: HarperCollins)

Smith, Jeremy J. forthcoming. Lexicons of English Religion 1380-1850 (Cambridge: University Press)

This talk presents an ongoing corpus-based study that approaches omissibility not simply as a diagnostic criterion but as an empirical phenomenon in its own right. Omissibility is a context-dependent property of a linguistic unit, established when its deletion does not affect grammatical well-formedness or the propositional content of the sentence in which it occurs. It is operationalized through a controlled deletion procedure implemented in an automated analysis pipeline applied to datasets drawn from a 160M-token Reddit corpus annotated with UDPipe 2, in which candidate units are evaluated for omissibility by GPT-OSS-120B under explicitly defined criteria. At the current stage of the project, the study examines which linguistic units are classified as omissible by the pipeline and analyses properties such as their syntactic behaviour, immediate co-text, and degree of structural embedding, thereby generating distributional profiles that support systematic comparison across linguistic units, including multifunctional items.

I am looking into phraseological sequences in AI-produced language from a cross-linguistic perspective, while also comparing them to human-produced texts. Differences between AI- and human-produced language on the phraseological level are subtle, yet they may contribute substantially to the perceived "otherness" of AI language. Mastering phraseological sequences is known to pose a challenge to foreign language learners; LLMs may thus face similar difficulties, particularly in Czech, an inflectional language with little representation in LLM training data. The basic premise is that LLMs process prompts in English internally before generating output in the target language (Zhao et al. 2024; Zhong et al. 2024; Schut, Gal, and Farquhar 2025). The study seeks to clarify whether and how this affects Czech output: Do English lexical bundles transpire into Czech AI texts? If so, what discourse functions do they fulfil, and how are they distributed across registers? To answer these questions, I compare frequent n-grams between two human language corpora: Koditex (Czech) and BE21 (English); and two AI corpora: AI Koditex and AI Brown.