Language: Cognition and Structure

Research and formal description of the syntactic, morphological, phonological,and semantic structure of the Czech language from a typological perspective

Centre for formal linguistics

Thanks to the recent activities of the Department of Czech Language in cooperation with the Department of Linguistics and Baltic Languages, the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University has become a major Central European centre for formal linguistics. The research focuses primarily on nanosyntax, government phonology, and the formal semantics of natural language.

International cooperation

Both departments closely cooperate with similarly oriented foreign institutions, particularly with universities in Tromsø, Nova Gorica, Nice, Vienna, and Budapest, and with Humboldt University in Berlin. These international cooperations have resulted in common publications as well as in lecture series of foreign experts for master’s and doctoral studies students; these series are organized on a regular basis as international conferences on formal linguistics (e.g. Formal Description of Slavic Languages – FDSL 8.5, FDSL 10.5, The Ninth Conference on Syntax, Phonology, and Language Analysis – SinFonIJA 9) and as summer courses in generative grammar (Eastern Generative Grammar – EGG).

New Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Czech

The long-established involvement of Brno Czech linguistic studies in international cooperation has a broad thematic dimension. The most significant work is a New Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Czech, which reflects the current knowledge of Czech and language in general in 1600 entries. More than 190 linguists from 13 countries participated in its completion and the entire process was overseen by the Department of Czech Languageat the Faculty of Arts MU. The print version of the dictionary was published in 2016, and since February 2017 it has been freely accessible online at www.czechency.org.