Professor Emeritus Petr Sgall, professor of Indo-European, Czech studies, and general linguistics at Charles University in Prague, 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.
Here’s a good photo that was included in the obituary posted by his colleagues in Prague, from which I've freely borrowed in what I've written here.
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) 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.
I remember 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. The mutual dedication
and devotion of the members of Sgall's group to one another and to
their research was remarkable to see and feel, and was what attracted
me most to pursue further collaboration with them.
With the help of a post-communist period US-Czech
research grant that let us have multiple visits in both directions over
the several years together with some graduate students and junior
colleagues, Petr, Eva Hajičová, and I published a book together,
Topic-Focus Articulation, Tripartite Structures, and Semantic Content
(Kluwer, 1998).) Writing that book was a challenging and rewarding adventure;
our theoretical approaches were too divergent for a totally convergent
work, so we wrote part of the book as a dialogue, to elucidate and
analyze the aspects of topic-focus structure and quantification that we
could make progress on jointly and the aspects that presented
unbridgable differences.
Here's a photo taken in Amherst by Christine Bartels in 1993 when Petr, Eva and I were working on our book.
In the post-Communist era starting in 1990,
Professor Sgall's 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 our collaboration mentioned above, a long-term 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 mentees 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 by colleagues around
the world for his own major contributions to typological studies and to
theoretical and mathematical linguistics.