Annotations

 The dissertation will focus on the inclusiveness of administrative and legal communication between public authorities and citizens, examining the tension between the norms of administrative style and communicative effectiveness, in particular the relationship between legal precision and linguistic comprehensibility. The study will reflect the existence of power asymmetry in administrative and legal communication between authorities and citizens and will pay attention to the linguistic behaviour of the participants in this communication. The analysis will take into account administrative communication within regional public authorities as well as relevant agenda of European Union institutions. The dissertation will also reflect the shift of administrative communication into the online environment and its associated consequences, along with the broader social context of increasing demands for linguistic inclusiveness and comprehensibility under the influence of Europe-wide democratization trends.

The dissertation will focus on examining expressions located at the boundary between impoliteness and linguistic behaviour that can already be legally classified as hate speech. The analysis will centre on communicative practices in the public sphere in which criminal liability is not expressed explicitly but rather emerges through various forms of implicature or so-called coded language. The study is based on the assumption that a substantial portion of potentially hateful expressions directed at specific social groups evade legal sanction precisely because of their indirectness and interpretative ambiguity. The research will focus on expressions targeting publicly active women (such as politicians, journalists, athletes, or publicly recognised experts) and will analyse how gender-based impoliteness, devaluation, and symbolic violence intersect in these expressions with potential indicators of criminally prosecutable hate speech. The aim of the dissertation is to identify the linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms through which hatred is masked as opinion or criticism and, on this basis, to propose a framework that could serve as a point of departure for guiding public communication towards its more respectful and inclusive form. 

The dissertation focuses on researching the form, status, and functioning of cultural and codified historical varieties of the Slovak language and their spontaneous and deliberate (regulated) formation in the course of the historical development of the language and linguistic situation. The aim is to expand knowledge of the so-called external history of language by research from the perspective of standardization theory as part of language planning (considering the basic components – status, prestige, corpus, functioning, acquisition, etc. – in their interconnection), as well as research into the reflection of language as a communicative, cultural, and identification code conditioned by historical extralinguistic factors. The selection of a specific historical period will be clarified after mutual consultation with the applicant or in the first year of study. Basic research will include archival research of historical sources, official documents, and contemporary periodicals. 

The historical development of Slovak in the complex of structural-linguistic, regional, and social relations

The dissertation will focus on selected dynamic phenomena from the diachronic development of the Slovak language (or regional dialect varieties), the analysis of which will be based on field or archival research of source material and on the concept of language change as a gradual and complex process conditioned by intralinguistic relations, other language contacts, and extralinguistic factors. The methodological basis will be approaches used in historical and variation sociolinguistics. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of the processuality and complexity of language development based on the study of linguistic variation and its variability over time and in communication, with the possibility of application in the interpretation or understanding of contemporary language dynamics. The selection of specific cases of language changes, historical period or regional dialect will be specified after mutual consultation with the applicant.

The proposed research investigates vernacularization as a process whereby informal forms of language and its usage practices expand into the public sphere, occupying communicative functions traditionally associated with established functional styles (e.g., rhetorical or journalitic styles). This development is interpreted within a broader context of  democratization, understood as the increasing participation of social actors in communicative domains that were historically restricted due to the specialized linguistic competencies required for access (notably rhetoric or journalism).
The vernacularization of form and language use in these domains is substantially enabled by contemporary digital technologies, which support emergent practices such as participatory journalism and civic rhetoric. The project adopts a stylistic–discursive perspective and pursues three main objectives: (a) to describe the informal normative mechanisms governing stylistic behavior under conditions of vernacularization; (b) to identify the stylistic values associated with linguistic structures characteristic of vernacularized public discourse (including civility, colloquiality, conversationality, and simplicity); and (c) to model the differentiation of styles arising from this ongoing process. 

Etymological analysis of a selected lexical-semantic group in Slovak

The aim of this work is to provide a comprehensive etymological analysis of terms from the selected lexical-semantic group (contemporary standard, as well as historical and dialect vocabulary) in a broader Slavic and (Central) European context. This will make it possible, among other things, to develop a genetic stratification of the analyzed lexicon (identification of terms preserved from Proto-Slavic, or those that arose during the development of Slovak as an independent Slavic language, as well as words borrowed from other languages at various times) and to capture its semantic development.

The research on oikonymy in relation to the settlement history

The topic is interdisciplinary, therefore historical knowledge and orientation in Latin, Hungarian and German are welcome. Oikonymic records (including possibly extinct names) from a particular region from the earliest times to the present will be analysed and classified according to the method of small types in order to reveal the relationships between name structures, their temporal layers and areal distribution, and to reconstruct the settlement process. The origin and motivation of the names will also be explained.

The development of urbanonymy and its linguistic analysis

The aim is to describe the dynamics and evolution of street names of medium and large-sized cities. The basis will be lexico-semantic and word-formation classifications. The development of urbanonymy will be analysed in stages defined by important milestones in the development of the city and the whole society. Changes in the use of motivational categories and word-formation processes will be illustrated by diagrams. The dissertation will include a list of contemporary urbanonyms with their explanation, the time of their origin and previous names of the locality in question.

Exonyms in Slovak

The work will focus on the research on Slovak exonyms (domestic forms of foreign geographical names) regarding their historical and cultural background, current usage (especially in relation to original forms of geographical names – endonyms), and graphic (in)consistency, based on cartographic, literary, media and journalistic sources. The aim is to analyse exonyms from a functional approach, reflecting language needs and the functioning of exonyms in communication.

Reflection of language in the process of the formation of its historical cultural and standard varieties 

The dissertation focuses on researching the form, status, and functioning of cultural and codified historical varieties of the Slovak language and their spontaneous and deliberate (regulated) formation in the course of the historical development of the language and linguistic situation. The aim is to expand knowledge of the so-called external history of language by research from the perspective of standardization theory as part of language planning (considering the basic components – status, prestige, corpus, functioning, acquisition, etc. – in their interconnection), as well as research into the reflection of language as a communicative, cultural, and identification code conditioned by historical extralinguistic factors. The selection of a specific historical period will be clarified after mutual consultation with the applicant or in the first year of study. Basic research will include archival research of historical sources, official documents, and contemporary periodicals.

The historical development of Slovak in the complex of structural-linguistic, regional, and social relations

The dissertation will focus on selected dynamic phenomena from the diachronic development of the Slovak language (or regional dialect varieties), the analysis of which will be based on field or archival research of source material and on the concept of language change as a gradual and complex process conditioned by intralinguistic relations, other language contacts, and extralinguistic factors. The methodological basis will be approaches used in historical and variation sociolinguistics. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of the processuality and complexity of language development based on the study of linguistic variation and its variability over time and in communication, with the possibility of application in the interpretation or understanding of contemporary language dynamics. The selection of specific cases of language changes, historical period or regional dialect will be specified after mutual consultation with the applicant.

The development of Slovak legal terminology and pursuit of its unification after 1843

The work will be focused on the analysis of data from the 19th century legislative texts in form of a specialised corpus aiming to identify the extent of potential continuity of the use of legal terms in the second half of the 19th century in comparison with the processed legal lexicon in older lexicographic works and also in the framework of the contemporary legal context. The work will also include comparative analyses of selected semantic probes into legal terminology extracted from 19th century legislative texts with dictionaries of legal terminology published at the beginning of the 20th century.