LINGUIST List 30.2360
Thu Jun 06 2019
All:
Obituary: Petr Sgall (1926-2019)
Editor for this issue: Sarah Robinson <srobinsonlinguistlist.org>
Date: 05-Jun-2019
From: Barbara Partee <partee
linguist.umass.edu>
Subject: Obituary: Petr Sgall
(1926-2019)
E-mail this message to a friend 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
Page Updated: 06-Jun-2019