Petr Sgall

Timeline

1. 1926–1958

   Docent in Indo-European linguistics

   He is born in České Budějovice in 1926, and his high school expels him in 1942/43 because of his Jewish father. At Charles University he earns a PhDr from the Faculty of Philosophy in 1949, then spends a year of postgraduate study in Cracow with J. Kuryłowicz and habilitates as docent of general and Indo-European linguistics in 1958.

2. 1959–1960

   Founding mathematical linguistics

   In 1959, he founds a small subdepartment of mathematical linguistics and machine translation theory at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, and in 1960 a computational linguistics group follows at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. His team also tries machine translation from English into Czech on the SAPO computer.

3. 1960s

   Functional Generative Description

   At the beginning of the 1960s, he is one of the first European scholars to become acquainted with Chomskyan generative grammar. In 1964, he founds the Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics, a university periodical. His 1967 book presents Functional Generative Description, a framework built on dependency syntax, information structure and the distinction between linguistic meaning and cognitive content.

4. 1968–1972

   Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics

   In 1968, his two groups merge under his leadership into the Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts. He faces forced dismissal from the university for political reasons in 1972, and the staff move to the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, where the group becomes the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics. Kept from teaching and from travel to the West, he resumes some activities gradually in the 1980s.

5. 1990–1995

   Professor of general linguistics

   He becomes professor of general linguistics at Charles University's Faculty of Philosophy in 1990. He becomes Professor Emeritus in 1995 and for many years continues to teach and supervise PhD students.

6. 1992–2002

   Humboldt Prize and honorary degrees

   He receives the International Research Prize of Alexander von Humboldt in 1992 and is elected to Academia Europaea in 1993. Honorary doctorates follow from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris in 1995 and from Hamburg University in 1998, and the Linguistic Society of America names him an honorary member in 2002.

7. 2001

   Prague Dependency Treebank 1.0

   He is one of five authors of Prague Dependency Treebank 1.0, published through the Linguistic Data Consortium in 2001. He takes part in conceiving and constructing this syntactically annotated subset of the Czech National Corpus, whose annotation uses his Functional Generative Description.

8. 2019

   Death in Prague

   He dies in Prague in 2019. The Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University remembers him as a long-term member of its School of Computer Science and the founder of the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics.