Jana Chamonikolasová, born in Brno, Czech Republic, in 1958. Ph.D. from Masaryk University, Brno. Assistant Professor at the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University, Brno.
Visiting Grant Scholar (1 September 2002 – 30 November 2002)
The focus of my research at NIAS was the study of German intonation and the prosodic analysis of a German spoken text. I transcribed prosodically the German counterpart of the previously processed English and Czech versions of the play Protest by Václav Havel. The three texts are the basis of a book that will be published under the title, ‘Václav Havel’s Protest in three languages: Translating Speech and Culture’. I also wrote an outline for a theoretical chapter of a book dealing with the differences between English, German and Czech intonation. I completed an article entitled “Pitch patterns of English and Czech declarative and interrogative sentences” (Brno Studies in English 29, Masryk University 2003, in print), and worked on another paper ‘Accentuation of pronouns in English and Czech’ (to be completed in the spring of 2003). I also attended a speech analysis course at the Department of Phonetics of Leiden University in which I got acquainted with a Dutch speech analysis software Praat. The program proved to be an excellent tool allowing a very detailed prosodic transcription of speech.