30.2360, All: Obituary: Petr Sgall (1926-2019)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-30-2360. Thu Jun 06 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.2360, All:  Obituary: Petr Sgall (1926-2019)

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Date: Thu, 06 Jun 2019 13:32:38
From: Barbara Partee [partee at linguist.umass.edu]
Subject: Obituary: Petr Sgall (1926-2019)

 
Professor Emeritus Petr Sgall, professor of Indo-European, Czech studies, and
general linguistics at Charles University in Prague, and an Honorary Member of
the LSA since 2002, passed away on May 28, 2019 in Prague, the day after his
93rd birthday. 

Over a lifetime of distinguished work in theoretical, mathematical and
computational linguistics, he did more than any other single person to keep
the Prague School linguistic tradition alive and dynamically flourishing. He
was the founder of mathematical and computational linguistics in the Czech
Republic, and the principal developer of the Praguian theory of Functional
Generative Description as a framework for the formal description of language,
which has been applied primarily to Czech, but also to English and in
typological studies of a range of languages. 

Petr Sgall was born in in České Budějovice in southern Bohemia, but spent
most of his childhood in the small town Ústí nad Orlicí in eastern Bohemia and
lived in Prague from the time of his university studies. 

He studied typology under Rudolf Skalička, with a PhD dissertation on the
development of inflection in Indo- European languages. His habilitation thesis
in 1958 was based on his postdoctoral study in Cracow on the infinitive in Old
Indian; it earned him a position as docent (associate professor) of general
and Indoeuropean linguistics at Charles University.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Sgall was one of the first European scholars
who became familiar with the newly emerging Chomskyan generative grammar. He
immediately understood the importance of an explicit description of language,
but at the same time, he was concerned that the early generative approach
lacked a full appreciation of the functions of language (see his analysis of
Prague School functionalism in his paper in the renewed series Prague
Linguistic Circle Papers, the Travaux linguistiques de Prague Vol. I (1964)).
Based on the Praguian tenets, Sgall formulated and developed an original
framework of generative description of language, the so-called Functional
Generative Description (FGD). His papers in the early sixties and his book
presenting FGD (Sgall 1967)
(http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/~sgall/doc/sgall-bibl.pdf) were the foundation stones
of an original school of theoretical and computational linguistics that has
been alive and flourishing in Prague since then. Sgall’s innovative approach
builds on three main pillars: (i) dependency syntax, (ii) information
structure as an integral part of the underlying linguistic structure, and
(iii) attention to the distinction between linguistic meaning and cognitive
content. 

The linguistics group that was established under his leadership in 1959
flourished in an interdisciplinary environment that included both the
Philosophical Faculty of Charles University and the Faculty of Mathematics and
Physics until political difficulties under the Communist regime led to his
removal from his post as head of the Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics, and
nearly led to his expulsion from the University and the dissolution of the
linguistics group. The Laboratory was disbanded, but courageous colleagues in
the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics enabled the transfer of the staff of
the Laboratory to that Faculty, where it thrived and became the Institute of
Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL). Throughout the difficult years from
1972 until the fall of Communism in 1989 (with gradual improvements starting
in the early 1980s), Sgall helped the group maintain ties with many
international colleagues and continue to develop their productive work in
formal and functional linguistics and pioneering computational applications.
(The author remembers from visits in 1981, 1985, and a semester in 1989 how
weekly seminars were held at 5pm so that talented young colleagues who were
barred from university participation could attend after finishing their work
days in factories and technical institutes.) 

In the post-Communist era starting in 1990, the group was able to maintain
UFAL, finally with permission to teach and to have their own graduate
students, and they were also able to establish the Institute of Theoretical
and Computational Linguistics back in the Philosophical Faculty. They could
then regularize their ties with many colleagues and programs abroad, including
a cooperative computational linguistics program with Johns Hopkins University
and a collaboration between the Prague Dependency Treebank and the Penn
Treebank. 

Also in the post-Communist era after 1989, Professor Sgall was able to travel
freely, hold guest professorships at foreign universities and a fellowship
semester at NIAS, and to receive some of the public recognition he long
deserved. He was elected a member of Academia Europea, awarded an Alexander
von Humboldt Research Prize, and received Honorary Doctorates from the
Institut National des Langues Orientales in Paris and from Hamburg University.
He was named an Honorary Member of the Linguistic Society of America in 2002.

Petr Sgall will be remembered with admiration, respect, and gratitude by
generations of students and colleagues for his untiring and successful
personal and intellectual leadership of the development of Prague School
linguistics, helping it to maintain a valued place in the contemporary
international linguistics world, and for his own major contributions to
typological studies and to theoretical and mathematical linguistics. 

An obituary written by his Prague colleagues, from which the photograph above
and some parts of this text were taken, can be found at
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/obituary-petr-sgall .

-Barbara Partee
 


Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable



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