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Zum Teufel and Fujtajfl! The devil in Czech and German - a comparison

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2013

Abstract

The paper deals with various expressions addressing the embodiment of evil, the devil (Teufel in German and čert in Czech), coming from the same geo-cultural area of central Europe. The question is whether these expressions resemble each other in both languages as to the utilized structures, semantics and distribution.

The analysis is based on a sample of one thousand concordances taken from three Czech and German corpora and compares the level of free (literal, non-idiomatic) versus bound use of the čert/Teufel expressions. The results are classified according to their semantics and text-type distribution.