The competition is aimed primarily at supporting young promising academics and researchers in the framework of the highest quality group basic research. Amongst them are now projects by the main researcher Prof Miroslav Petříček from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at CU FA and Prof Václav Cvrček from the Institute of the Czech National Corpus.
Centre “Language, Image, and Gesture: Forms of Discursivity” (Jazyk, obraz, gesto: podoby diskurzivity) led by Prof Miroslav Petříček is a joint project of philosophers, philologists, art historians, linguists, and mathematicians for whom language is not only a medium but also a distinctive object of research. ¨
Based on the collaboration of three faculties of Charles University – Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Faculty of Humanities – this research systematically focuses on the interaction of different approaches to discursivity, from the understanding of language as an empirical phenomenon to its hermeneutic conception as a medium of meaning and interpretation. Two aspects of discursivity are selected as unifying, namely the embodied and interactive forms of language (the gestural aspects) and the material forms of language (the pictorial aspects).
Project “Research on large text corpora through the prism of multilingualism and complementary methodological approaches” (Výzkum velkých textových korpusů prizmatem vícejazyčnosti a komplementárních metodologických přístupů) led by Prof Václav Cvrček aims to combine empirical linguistics and natural language processing, two approaches based on large authentic textual material in language corpora.
The project brings together teams working on usage-based approaches in cognitive linguistics (supervisor doc. Mirjam Fried from the Department of Linguistics at CU FA), corpus and quantitative linguistics (supervisor Prof Václav Cvrček) and computational linguistics and natural language processing (supervisor doc. Zdeněk Žabokrtský from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University). A key prerequisite for the implementation of the project is an existing infrastructure enabling the research of large data; in this respect, the project will benefit from CNC and LINDAT-CLARIAH, two language-oriented infrastructures that are among the world leaders in the field of language resources production.
The ambition of the project is to cover a wide range of languages and linguistic topics that can be analysed on the basis of existing language resources (incl. contrastive approaches based on parallel corpora). Furthermore, it will extend the range of language resources and empirical linguistic expertise to languages and areas that are not yet covered and which promise excellent results (e.g., research on aphasia, school communication, language acquisition, public discourse or spontaneous interaction).
