Z19 - Cultural Economics: OtherReturn

The aim of the paper is to characterise the system of social insurance in France and to show the role of combined social and health care insurance companies called "mutuelles" in the framework of compulsory complementary health insurance in France. Historical roots of this non-profit organisation based on a system of solidarity, participation in expenses and management are mentioned, a wide range of coverage of health care as well as the way of reimbursement of expenses for care provided for their members are described, and its future prospects are outlined. The paper tries to point out the differences in terminology and content as there are analogical institutions with a different role or only partial content equivalence besides specific legal institutions. This relates to different social traditions in the given communities during their development. The goal is to bring operation of French institutions closer to the Czech legal system.

This study is focused on interference-related errors in economics students' written papers. These errors are caused mostly by the differently structured non-linguistic reality, which results in asymmetries of language signs. Mistakes occur particularly in polysemous words, words with different semantic ability to combine, fixed phrases, and prepositional phrases. Concerning foreign words, interference-related errors arise from their asymmetric occurrence in the mother and the target languages, and also from their different meanings in both languages. Although learning German may be facilitated by the knowledge of English, Czech students often make mistakes in German under the influence of English. Homographs in particular tempt students to identify German words written in the same or a similar way, but are semantically different, with English words and their meanings.The reason for these errors may be confusing similar-sounding words in the two languages, or possibly their semantic similarities.

In German, compounding is a very productive type of word formation used for creating names of product properties. Circa 500 compound adjectives are divided into five structural groups. The frequency of both constituents of compound adjectives is examined, and their semantic relationships are characterized. The individual structural types are assigned Czech equivalents, in which compound adjectives are relatively rare. The most frequent counterparts are phrases whose core - an adjective - is determined by an adverb, a noun or a prepositional phrases in apposition.

The strike is one of the clichés associated with France. Compared with other European countries, the strikes there are more numerous, more violent and more spectacular. We can evoke as such the existence of a real culture of strike in France. This situation explains the existence of a very rich vocabulary which we suggest studying in this article. The term "grève" itself came into use relatively late, at the beginning of the 19th century, replacing other expressions such as "tric" or "coalition".

Passive constructions are a typical morphological feature of business German. At the same time, this phenomenon is significantly affected by interlingual interference. Its occurrence is frequent even in the Czech language of economics but in fact also other, corresponding means of expression may be used in Czech: active constructions, reflexive passive voice, or modal expressions. This paper looks into the occurrence of different tenses in the passive voice; examines using agents in both the languages; shows the reasons for preferring passive constructions in German and for using various equivalents of these in Czech. Finally, attention is paid to continuous and state passive verb forms in German and to difficulties in choosing correct Czech equivalents.

Czech infinitive phrases, usually introduced by interrogatives, are equivalent to interrogative clauses. In economy-oriented press, they appear mostly in headlines. In German, they correspond to direct or indirect clauses including modal verbs, infinitive phrases with "zu", passive verbs, or the indefinite subject "man".

Metaphors play an important role not only in the literature or in colloquial speech, but also in language for specific purposes, business language in this case. They have a terminology-creating and stylistic function, especially in business newspapers. On the other hand, they have a pragmatic function in political rhetoric: they should disguise the facts and influence the recipients of information. There are favoured areas in business language, from which the majority of metaphors come, and favoured imagery. The issue of how much German and Czech metaphors in the business language differ from each other is being investigated.

Verbs expressing economic growth and decline are an important part of business language. The rules for their semantic connectability are hard to determine, even for native speakers. Partial rules for the use of some of them are formulated in this article. A lot of the metaphorically used verbs are not to be found in our dictionaries. They appear in the business language, especially for stylistic reasons.